Summary Of Some Close Encounters Of A Mental Kind By Stephen Jay Gould

Stephen Jay Gould, in his essay “Some Close Encounters of a Mental Kind,” convinces us that memory can be a blessing however, can also be a danger. Gould gives an example of when he visited Devils Tower, Wyoming both when he was fifteen years old and when he was older. When he was fifteen he was told by his father that he could see the Devils Tower from miles away in which he was sure he saw. When he went back he was older and realized you can not see the Devils tower from afar because it is covered by mountains. He was sure it was the Devils Tower, however he soon realized what he had seen was Scotts Bluff, Nebraska. “ I [Gould] see it as clearly and as surely as ever, although I now know that the memory is false” (Gould 47). Therefore, Gould

She states that there are three levels of error in vision: misperception, meaning to misunderstand; retention, meaning to store in your memory; and retrieval, going back to what you know (Gould 46). There was an experiment that showed 40 students the same 3-minute video with 8 demonstrators. Loftus asked half one question and the other a different question. She asked how many demonstrators they saw enter the classroom and changed the number in the question to 12 and 4 demonstrators. The students answered their question based on the power of the question instead of their own actual observation (Gould 46-47). The experiment showed how our memory can be easily mislead even if we saw it with our own eyes. I believe Gould’s essay is indeed convincing when it comes to whether or not to doubt what people believe they remember is actually

As we arrived at the bus stop two men tried talking to both of us. From the beginning we both had a feeling that something bad might happen. Although we tried ignoring the men, they would not leave my friend and I alone. As time went by while waiting for the bus one of them said they had got out of jail. We kept getting further away from them but they would not stop walking towards us. Soon after this, one of the men talked on the phone with someone telling them he will let them know were to pick both of them up. As he said that he kept asking my friend and I what city we lived in and where we were going to get off. I looked at my friend as she looked at me; we both knew they were trying to do something to