A timely read, published earlier this week, from the New Yorker‘s science reporter Maria Konnikova, on “why we remember so many things wrong“:
… The day following the explosion of the Challenger, in January, 1986, Neisser, then a professor of cognitive psychology at Emory, and his assistant, Nicole Harsch, handed out a questionnaire about the event to the hundred and six students in their ten o’clock psychology 101 class, “Personality Development.” Where were the students when they heard the news? Whom were they with? What were they doing? The professor and his assistant carefully filed the responses away.
In the fall of 1988, two and a half years later, the questionnaire was given a second time to the same students. It was then that R. T. recalled, with absolute confidence, her dorm-room experience. But when Neisser and Harsch compared the two sets of answers, they found barely any similarities. According to R. T.’s first recounting, she’d been in her religion class when she heard some students begin to talk about an explosion. She didn’t know any details of what had happened, “except that it had exploded and the schoolteacher’s students had all been watching, which I thought was sad.” After class, she went to her room, where she watched the news on TV, by herself, and learned more about the tragedy.
R. T. was far from alone in her misplaced confidence. When the psychologists rated the accuracy of the students’ recollections for things like where they were and what they were doing, the average student scored less than three on a scale of seven. A quarter scored zero. But when the students were asked about their confidence levels, with five being the highest, they averaged 4.17. Their memories were vivid, clear—and wrong. There was no relationship at all between confidence and accuracy…
…[I]f memory for events is strengthened at emotional times, why does everyone forget what they were doing when the Challenger exploded? While the memory of the event itself is enhanced, Phelps explains, the vividness of the memory of the central event tends to come at the expense of the details. We experience a sort of tunnel vision, discarding all the details that seem incidental to the central event…
Much more background at the link. I’ve got to agree with Cole — if you’re surprised that Brian Williams didn’t accurately recollect what happened when that helicopter convoy came under fire, it’s only because you haven’t had enough “what actually happened when the dorm fire broke out / at our wedding / that holiday when your uncle’s Glenn-Beck-fueled rants led to actual fisticuffs” exchanges with your closest companions… yet.
raven
I was on the second floor of the Tate Student Center on my way the play hoops at Stegman Hall. I walked through the TV lounge, stopped to watch it and it blew.
raven
On the other hand my dad sometimes talked about landing on Iwo Jima. In the 90’s we started looking at the history of his ship and it turned out he was involved in the retaking of Corregidor the same day as the assault on Iwo. He was AT Iwo but not for the landings.
greennotGreen
I was in seventh grade when JFK was assassinated, but I remember being in my sixth grade cafeteria when our elementary school principal made the announcement. Brian Williams may have been wrong, but I don’t think that means he’s a liar – just human.
JPL
Anyone else change the endings of books and tv shows.
Baud
I remember when I made sweet love to Natalie Portman.
Cacti
Eyewitness testimony is the runaway #1 cause for wrongful criminal convictions.
In 72% of the cases where a guilty verdict was overturned by DNA evidence, the accused was convicted on the strength of eyewitness testimony.
The problem isn’t usually dishonesty either. It’s people honestly and sincerely remembering a version of events that didn’t actually occur.
Tree With Water
“When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened”.
Mark Twain’s Autobiography
raven
@greennotGreen: Sophomore in HS, Mr Hollister’s English Class. he broke down in tears “where do we go from here”? Some of us smart asses snickered.
mclaren
Anybody notice the takeaway?
The important point?
Yet in business and politics and sex, everyone is irresistibly attracted to…what?
Confidence.
Whenever someone asserts something with boundless confidence, I immediately conclude that the person is an incompetent clown.
Everyone needs to learn how to deeply distrust confidence.
SiubhanDuinne
I have had dreams, repeatedly, that are so realistic that I have subsequently gone about for days thinking they were true.
(Specifically, not that it matters to the general point, I used to dream all the time that I had taken up smoking again — IRL I quit on March 14, 1993 — and it would literally (I mean that literally) take several days to persuade myself that I actually no longer smoked.
Which I don’t, and haven’t since March 14, 1993. But something about the persistence of memory….
greennotGreen
@raven: Yeah, I was the daughter of a Republican precinct chair. I thought at the time, “What’s the big deal? He was a Democrat – we’re better off without him.”
My, how times – and I – have changed.
Gvg
I was at work which was delivering pizza. I found out gradually from snippets on people’s tv’ s and on the radio. I know I am not clear exactly when I heard what. I also heard that NASA soon determined they were dead before they hit the water and my dad the former NASA employee told me they were lying based on the fact they did it when he worked at the cape when the Apollo burned up on the pad. He explained a lot of things that I hadn’t heard before and after a few weeks it turned out he was right. they were alive and conscious all the way down and NASA knew it was most likely but we’re unable to just tell the truth.
Several years later I went back to college and business school had an exercise about getting a car ready to race with pressure for success. after the teams blew up the cars they were told they had replicated the challenger disaster. turned out a lot of business schools taught that, I went and read up more on it.
I also learned about the 911 towers falling at work, bits of it all day on the Internet and can’t say when I actually knew. It came over a couple of hours. I also knew we were going to war even though we didn’t know with who yet. Not that I wanted to, it’s just that it seemed obvious the country would react like that.
funny, It seems like I have always known my memory of events wasn’t all that clear after awhile. many other people have always seemed more confident. If it was years ago I know it’s not clear and if it was routine I just don’t care. My sister thinks she can remember where she put something down months ago and gets mad when I can’t.
Lee Rudolph
As to the Challenger explosion, that I’m fairly sure of (largely because I never watched any of it on TV, ever): I was in a window seat on a bus coming back from Puebla to Mexico City (where I had a two-month gig at UNAM, from which I had taken a brief vacation), just far enough into the city that we were stopped at a light where newsboys were hawking papers on the median strip, and there was a photo of a loop of (what I soon decided must be) rocket exhaust, the shape of a proofreader’s “delete” glyph, taking up the exposed part of the front page.
Likewise I know just where I was when the second plane was (being reported as) hitting the WTC: getting to the on-ramp of the interstate to Providence, where I was going to pick up a Japanese mathematician, and listening to my car radio, which had been reporting the first plane as (okay, here maybe I’m embroidering) as a presumable horrible accident. We had been early adopters of cell-phone technology; ours was a black box, the size of a small (hardcover) book, with a hand-set attached. I phoned home, said that “all hell is breaking loose”, and turned around. I picked up my friend the next day, and he stayed with us (instead of in the motel in Providence) until it was possible for him to get back to *his* temporary gig at the University of Toronto, several days longer than he had expected to stay in the US. (We made a lot of progress on our joint research.)
Again, with the brief exception of the footage in Bowling for Columbine, and one horrible few seconds in a doctor’s waiting room with the TV on several years later, I never saw the plane(s) hit, and that contributes to my (sense of, which of course *may* be delusive) clear and correct memory.
Neither my Mexican colleagues nor my Japanese colleague talked to me about either event in the days after it, and I was just as glad not to talk to them, either.
raven
@greennotGreen: Ha, me too but my grandfather was DuPage County Republican precinct chair! He once told me Joe McCarthy died of a broken heart!
greennotGreen
@SiubhanDuinne: Yeah, have you ever dreamed a friend did something bad and you were mad at them the rest of the day even though it was a dream? Or I once dreamed a friend died by falling down an elevator shaft and I was so relieved when I saw him that morning at work, I almost cried.
aimai
I know this isn’t an open thread but Jesus Christ (sic) Tennessee has just decided against the medicaid expansion even though its own hospitals were going to take up the slack because otherwise their hospitals are going to go broke. This quote from an article two days ago from a concerned Tenn woman explains all you need to know:
greennotGreen
@raven: We can only hope.
SiubhanDuinne
@greennotGreen:
Yes! Some of the nicest people IRL are terrible betrayers in dreams!
SiubhanDuinne
@SiubhanDuinne:
Apologies for the unclosed parenthesis. That’s going to make me purely crazy now.
greennotGreen
@aimai: I live in Tennessee and I rely on one of those very hospitals whose finances are being strained to the breaking point to keep me alive.
Those assholes who are fighting Obamacare when they don’t even know WTF it is can go to hell. I’d even give them a federal supplement to help them pay for the ticket.
Mike in NC
Ronald Reagan infamously claimed to have been present at the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, when in fact he spent all of WW2 in Hollywood. But the media always gave the Gipper a pass on his fantasies.
Had Mitt Romney said in 2012 that he’d been awarded the Medal of Honor for valor in Vietnam, they wouldn’t have blinked.
greennotGreen
@SiubhanDuinne: Not just in dreams! That same friend who I was so happy hadn’t fallen down an elevator shaft looks like a blue-eyed Lawrence Fishburn. The day after I saw “What’s Love Got to Do with It” (story of Tina Turned including her abuse by Ike, played by Fishburn) I was so pissed at him! Luckily, I do have a rational side that can temper the emotional self overly affected by dreams and movies.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
I have a pretty high confidence (ahem) in my memories of both the Challenger disaster and 9/11 because they’re so mundane. For Challenger, I was in study hall in high school and the principal made an announcement over the loudspeaker. For 9/11, I slept in because I was in grad school and didn’t have class until 1:00 and heard aftermath reports on the radio that jerked me out of bed to turn on the TV. Missed the whole thing, basically.
Culture of Truth
Interesting that they chose that story, since I know someone who I am convinced confabluated watching the Challenger explosion live rather than later. I don’t believe that person was watching live since they were otherwise occupied, and they wren’t the type to care about a shuttle launch.
As I wrote in another thread, I can understand that Williams might genuinely mis-remember the event, but reporting facts is his profession, plus if you watch that Leterman interview he seems to revel in the whole thing way too much.
Lee Rudolph
@aimai: Well, since you’ve opened the thread up against its will, I may as well paste here what I just cut.
There is just no bottom, is there?
Pogonip
There’s a detailed account of the Challenger study in Making Monsters, by Richard Ofshe, an account of the recovered-memory era in psychiatry. It’s probably out of print, but worth reading if you can find it.
jl
Williams is still a jackass. As a commenter pointed out in thread below, he is a journalist and it his job to get things straight, especially things that happened to him on his reporting job. And at least one soldier claims Williams was BSing about the incident shortly afterward and was forcefully set straight about the facts.
So, maybe no proof Williams was consciously lying and maybe that BS artist will not lose his job.
But more evidence that Williams deserves the epithet, ‘Brian Williams, crap reporter’.He is a serial BS artist is what he is.
VoiceOfUnreason
Challenger – stopped in a bookstore on the way back to school from the dentist’s office, and got the news there. The book I “remember” wasn’t published until 8 years later.
9/11 is much easier, since I got the news from the internet and stayed there all day trying to figure out what was really going on.
Pogonip
@SiubhanDuinne: I’ve had that happen too! Creepy, isn’t it?
greennotGreen
@Lee Rudolph: This is not a bug; this is a feature. The more ignorant the masses, the easier they are to lead to the slaughter.
Roger Moore
@raven:
My grandfather actually sent out a retraction/correction for a section of his (self-published) WWII memoirs because he had misremembered something in a way that was unfair to a KIA comrade. OTOH, that involved some things that he didn’t witness personally and was relying on a mix of hazy memories and second-hand information.
Tree With Water
I remember my grade school teachers congregating in the hallway after the principal announced over the intercom system that JFK had been shot and killed. I was 8 years old and remember a lot about that weekend. Number one, I remember being annoyed there were no cartoons to be found on TV beginning that Friday night.
mclaren
I have zero memories of the Challenger explosion because I was in college classes at the time. I only found out about the Challenger disaster when I got back to my apartment in the evening and my roommate told me.
SiubhanDuinne
@Pogonip:
Yes, extremely disconcerting.
Just Some Fuckhead
I think Brian Williams was trying to embellish his experience.
raven
@Roger Moore: Good stuff. I posted a situation on the previous thread about an incident in Korea where I had the situation right but was way off on when it happened. Tricky stuff this brain thing,
SiubhanDuinne
@greennotGreen:
You had me at “blue-eyed Lawrnce Fishburne.”
Roger Moore
@aimai:
That pretty well sums up opposition to Obamacare, doesn’t it. There’s so much dissonance there it’s hard to see how there can be any cognition.
Culture of Truth
I’m pretty confident with both events, but who knows?
I have had arguments with family members about certain other happenings, to the point where I began to question my own memory for what took place.
mclaren
@Culture of Truth:
I’ve had firm memories in which I’m confident that were utterly contradicted by photographic or 8mm home movie records, so I know firsthand that at least some of my memories were artifacts.
low-tech cyclist
From Catch-22:
Seemed apropos.
Pogonip
I do not remember where I was when the Challenger exploded, I think because one expects occasional tragedies in a hazardous endeavor like space exploration. I do very clearly remember the bin Laden attack and Elvis Presley’s death at a relatively young age, I think because I was NOT expecting those things. I was expecting that ridiculously tall tower to be hit by a plane someday, but by accident rather than malice.
Woodrowfan
@Lee Rudolph:
Nope, it’s jackasses all the way down…
raven
@Pogonip: I was drinking a Red Stripe and eating conch chowder in a joint on the beach in Negril when the news about Elvis came.
Deecarda
Challenger – I was a psych aid in the day room of an inpatient mental health unit with a roomful of depressed patients.
Gin & Tonic
Challenger is easy. I was at work, my wife was home, and she called me as soon as it happened, so we wheeled a TV into a conference room and a bunch of us watched the coverage from in there. Pretty somber mood.
Tommy
@VoiceOfUnreason: At the time my class went to the gym to see us go to space. We wanted to see us go to space. We were all there. The entire school. And then it happened.
I recall coming out of a gymnastics class as a kid and my mom yell “no, no” when Lennon died.
Seeing the Challenger go down was kind of hard. My Kennedy moment, a second frozen in time I can tell you exactly where I was.]
I was in a gym with a few hundred people and we all cried ….
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Pogonip:
IIRC, two of the biggest ways you got false abuse accusations were adults inadvertently encouraging children to embellish their stories and adults getting hypnotized and being told that it was “recovered memory” and not fantasy/confabulation.
Pogonip
Does anyone else NOT remember how much the baby weighed at birth, right down to the ounce? I’ve had people older than I am tell me Tom weighed X pounds X ounces, Dick weighed X pounds X ounces, and Harry weighed X pounds X ounces, and Tom and Dick are also older than I am and Harry’s about my age, so we’re looking at over half a century of remembering the exact weight of the prize trout–er, the baby.
How much, you ask, did Bigfoot weigh at birth? Around 8 pounds.
low-tech cyclist
@mclaren:
Similarly here. For instance, in a recent discussion about music, I mentioned how CCR’s “Proud Mary” had been all over the airwaves where I lived in the late summer of 1968. I could remember hearing it often on the ride back from summer cross-country practice that August, could remember being in the back of my teammate’s Kharmann Ghia, hearing that song again, yep, it was part of the soundtrack of that summer.
The only problem is, the song wasn’t released until early in 1969. Memory is a funny thing indeed.
I hope to live long enough to see eyewitness testimony treated by our legal system as being only slightly more reliable than lie-detector tests. Because between our ability to grasp fast-moving events wrongly as they happen, and our tendency to recall things even more wrongly over time, that’s about where they belong.
JPL
O’Reilly should have been fired for stalking an aide and calling her while satisfying himself. Williams was scared while in a copter that was being shot at. A decade later he embellished facts. The two are not similar but only one should have been fired.
raven
@low-tech cyclist: God I hate that song.
JPL
The day after the last episode of Chuck, I mentioned to a son how I loved the ending, especially when Chuck and Sarah walked hand and hand off the beach. Son who watched the episode said mom, watch the ending again. Dreams are amazing things.
Gin & Tonic
@low-tech cyclist: remember being in the back of my teammate’s Kharmann Ghia
Not much of a “back” to be in. I had one of those for a while.
Roger Moore
@Pogonip:
But that’s not quite the same thing. The number was probably written down, so you can reinforce your memory with an accurate contemporaneous record. When there isn’t one, like when you’re remembering an event like the Challenger explosion, you can wind up reinforcing your memory with all kinds of junk- other people’s stories, more memorable versions of the event, the exaggerated story you told, etc.
Pogonip
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): You must have read that book too!
Recovered-memory seemed like a particularly vicious scam–rich girl goes to shrink, shrink persuades her Dad raped her, she demands money from Dad to pay for still more therapy, Dad caves in because he’s a Prominent Person In The Community and can’t have the accusations go public. I’m no fan of 1%ers, but as a parent myself I can sympathize with them in that case.
Tommy
@Pogonip: Nope I don’t know that. I spent the first month of my life in a hospital. I do not recall what I weighted, but it wasn’t much.
Gin & Tonic
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Like the odious Martha Coakley in the Amirault case?
Pogonip
@raven: Now THAT’S a good memory!
Mike E
I was on the sleeper sofa when the phone rang, which was pretty loud in a stripped out row house that I was helping my brother rehab…my high school buddy was telling me to switch on the TV, that the shuttle was lost.
I was just waking up in my friend’s living room when I saw the 2nd plane hit the towers on live TV. Seems I usually wake up to shitty news, my mom got me out of bed with news of John Lennon’s murder. Also.
raven
@Pogonip: And the next night I damn near went to jail! Do NOT smoke da erb on da beach mon. . .
raven
Sparknotes
The Things They Carried, http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/thingscarried/section6.rhtml
Shana
OT but man, the opening segment on Rachel Maddow was all about Oregon tonight and parts of it were hysterical. Especially the end bit.
Mike E
@Pogonip: I was in the maternity ward watching the morning news of Jerry Garcia’s passing…Miss E entered the building later that evening, 7 lbs 14 ounces. She was The Babe! Literally, matching Ruth’s HR total. Heh, I can never forget that number!
nfh
Er, how did we get from a case study with a population of 106 to everyone?
I remember perfectly well where I was: In school, watching it live on TV, like probably millions of other students, given who was on board that particular launch.
Mike J
@Mike E: I thought you were going to connect 714 with Jerry Garcia, like Lemmon 714.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@Gin & Tonic:
I’m on the West Coast, so I don’t know anything about it. The infamous California one was the McMartin preschool case, where most of the “victims” have recanted and said they were pressured into making accusations by overzealous parents, police, and prosecutors.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Much more common are eyewitnesses misidentifying a doer. Sometimes due to inadvertent (or not) biasing photo arrays and sometimes because witnesses contemopraneously report the wrong person, and then later gain confidence in what/who they (thought) they saw.
Hell, I’m semi-infamous for describing a witness who needed to talk to a specific prosecutor in a busy preliminary hearing room He’d approached me, and I told him I’d send Mr. Fitz over. I sent Mr. Fitz to a man with black hair graying at the temples,a mustache, about 5’8″ 45-55 wearing a red sweater and jeans. Wrong guy. When we paged the right gut by name, he was a man with black hair graying at the temples, a mustache, about 5’8″ 45-55 wearing an orange sweater and jeans. I apologized and told Fitz it was an understandable mistake, since they looked so similar. His response was, but Bella, one was black and one was white.
OGLiberal
Actually, the Challenger and 9/11 are the two most vivid memories I have. When the Challenger went down, I was at lunch in high school. No TVs in cafeteria then so no way for us to know. Was in a German class at the time – was half before, half after lunch. When we returned from lunch our German-Czech teacher, in typical Eastern European attitude and who did have a TV in the teachers’lounge came back and said, “Terrible…all dead.”
9/11 was at my desk near the Seaport in Manhattan when my future and now wife came in, covered with paper bits, and said, “I think a plane hit the Trade Center”. Hour or so later the ground shook and through my office window I saw the side streets filled with smoke and people running from the fast moving clouds…thought a bomb went off at the Fulton Street station. Was Tower 2 going down. The second rumble was just as uncomfortable but not as scary because we knew what it was. Later watched the exodus of dust covered folks walking on the FDR Drive and across the Brooklyn Bridge back home – or at least, not there. After making sure my future wife got a boat home to NJ, I walked to Union Square, had a few beers, and amazingly found a cab back to my apartment in Midtown. A surreal day and subsequent several weeks during my little time (two years, not even) as a Manhattan resident. Not amazingly, once my future wife was on the boat back to NJ (where she lived at the time..and where we live now), I was not scared, not on that day, not a few days later, not now. Horrified, yes, but not scared. Yet people hundreds, thousands of miles away where stuff like this would never happen shit the bed and allowed Bush to do what he did.
Gin & Tonic
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini): From what I know, the Amirault case (see here) and the McMartin case were fairly similar at the start. But the McMartin case resulted in no convictions, while the Amirault case did, with “Tooky” Amirault spending 18 years in prison. When the parole board recommended he be released, Martha Coakley (successfully) lobbied then-Governor Jane Swift to deny parole. He was eventually released several years later.
smintheus
I remember exactly where I was when I first learned of the Challenger explosion. The only doubt I have is about the precise time and number of people in the room watching the TV.
And Williams was exaggerating his (apparently non-existent) role in the chopper attack within days of the event. His exaggerations just became more extreme and more finely worded over the years. Even his retraction is worded in a way to suggest more involvement than he actually had, according to several soldiers who were there. The guy is just a phoney through and through.
Mike E
@Mike J: I missed out on the Honda Quaalude, sadly.
Suzanne
@mclaren: Don’t worry, I learned long ago to distrust your boundless confidence and certainty in your rightness.
browser
Seems like there’s a difference between misremembering where you were when Challenger went down and actually being on Challenger.
Chris T.
I have no idea where I was (other than a very general sense, ie, “at that time I lived in such-and-such location”) and what I was doing on various momentous occasions.
And I’m quite certain of that! :-)
opiejeanne
@raven: 8th grade, in Mr Gutierrez’s history class. It came over the intercom, on the radio. About half of the kids were in tears. I didn’t cry until the funeral.
I was already pretty numb on the day JFK was murdered because my mom was in the hospital having a biopsy for breast cancer that day. She was either going to come home that afternoon and be ok, or she was going to come home in a week or two and missing some parts. She was fine but I didn’t find out until nearly 5om.
opiejeanne
@low-tech cyclist: I know where I was when Challenger came down, but I have a false memory of coming in from the car and hearing it on the tv in the living room as I opened the door. The reason I know it’s false is that we didn’t have a tv in the living room of that house, ever, but I remember rushing inside carrying some stuff from the car because I had just heard something about it on the radio and couldn’t make sense of it.
The kids must have had it on in the tv room, at the back of the house, but my memory is of stepping into the living room and watching it on a tv in the book nook beside the front door. Could not have happened that way.
wilfred
We had the Twinkie Defense and now we have the Brian Williams Defense, to be used against all witnesses to anything. The more confident they are, the less accurate. Thus fuzzy, evasive witnesses are probably telling the truth about things they misremember.
Didn’t Hilary dodge sniper fire at some airport in the former Yugoslavia? “Serpentine, Chelsea, serpentine!!”
Num Nut
Why is this so hard for you to understand? I don’t remember nearly anything about where I was during the challenger other than we were in school. I understand that completely.
But one thing I do remember is I WASN’T ON THE CHALLENGER. You don’t misremember that the same way you wouldn’t misremember whether you personally were on the helicopter that was shot down.
Brian Williams is a LIAR.
Just One More Canuck
@Baud: does she?
Matt McIrvin
@Pogonip: I have no memory of my daughter’s birth weight, but I posted it on LiveJournal so I can look it up if I need to.
low-tech cyclist
@Gin & Tonic:
Which adds to the distinctiveness and seeming veracity of the memory. As one of the smallest guys on the team (since I was only 14), I generally got the honor of being crammed in back there, basically lying down.
opiejeanne
@Matt McIrvin: I’ll bet your wife remembers, though.
lefthanded compliment
For anyone interested in learning about traumatic memory, Bessel van der Kolk’s work is a good place to start. His most recent book is “The Body Keeps the Score.”