Sisters make peace with dark memories through art, science and each other

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Two sisters found they had different recollections of a traumatic childhood experience and learned that human memory is a lot less reliable than we tend to think.

Sisters Sofie Elliott and Simone Elliott say that reconciling their memories felt especially important as they waded into one particular period of their childhood — a darker chapter that they still hadn't fully explored but that they felt ready to confront together.

These talks became a regular pastime —"kind of like a habit," says Sofie, 33."We would go out and have dinner or a cocktail, and we would just get into, how did we get here?" The sisters still get animated as they recount the memory, as if they were watching it play out in their minds. As they worked through their memories, the sisters were filling in missing pieces for each other and, occasionally, as in the case of the ski trip, agreeing to disagree. It felt satisfying, they say, like they were getting a clearer picture of their own origin story.

As adults in Germany, the sisters say, they discovered that they remembered the abuse in different ways. Sofie says they were frank with each other, in that way siblings can be."Sometimes Simone would be like, 'Well, why do you think you're doing that?' And I would say, 'Well, you know, I don't know. Wait — no, I know.' And then we'd talk about it."

What he calls"sins" are the ways that memory tends to go sideways — things like suggestibility, where a memory is skewed by later, outside influences. There's also transience , bias — and all the shortcuts and workarounds the human brain uses to retrieve memories.

 

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