The science behind Brian Williams’s mortifying memory flub
The science behind Brian Williams’s mortifying memory flub
When we tell stories about our lives, most of us never have our memories questioned. NBC's Brian Williams, like other high-profile people in the past, is finding out what happens when questions arise.
Williams's faux pas – retelling a story of his helicopter coming under fire in Iraq a dozen years ago when it was actually the helicopter flying ahead of him – was much like Hillary Rodham Clinton's during the 2008 presidential campaign. Her story was about coming under fire during a visit to an airfield in Bosnia 12 years earlier. George W. Bush also misremembered when, on several occasions, he told audiences that on 9/11 he watched the first plane fly into the north tower of the World Trade Center on TV, just before entering that classroom in Florida to read a book to school kids. In each case, these were highly emotional moments. Williams's helicopter made an emergency landing in the desert behind the aircraft that was hit; Clinton was made to don a flak jacket and was told her airplane might not be able to land at the airport in Bosnia because of sniper fire in the area; and Bush was told by an aide about the first crash into World Trade Center just before entering the classroom.
That each of those memories was false created huge public relations headaches for Clinton and Williams. But the fact is that false memories are not that uncommon, especially when they involve highly emotional events.
Scientists have been telling us for years that memory of autobiographical events, also known as episodic memory, is pliable and even unreliable. The consensus from neuroimaging studies and laboratory experiments is that episodic memory is not like replaying a film but more like reconstructing an event from bits and pieces of information. Memories are stored in clusters of neurons called engrams, and the proteins responsible for storing those memories, scientists say, are modified and changed just by the reconstruction process of remembering.
These findings are just one reason that last year, the U.S. National Research Council recommended that the criminal justice system exert tighter control over the use of eyewitness testimony in court and come up with a more scientific approach to the identification of suspects in police lineups.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/02/05/the-science-behind-brian-williams-mortifying-memory-flub/
= new reply since forum marked as read
and more self-aggrandizing every time he told them.
yeah, that's the ticket!
