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Comment by TillE | Hacker News Reader

I thought it was really odd that this never got discussed during the whole Brian Williams thing. Sure, sometimes people deliberately embellish their stories, but memory is a delicate thing that changes over time without you ever noticing.

It's very very common to clearly remember something that never actually happened.

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Yeah, definitely. I have a few memories like this. I can very clearly remember seeing the Easter bunny when I was a kid. Obviously this never happened, but I can describe the scenario and what the human-sized rabbit looked like. Also, I have a memory of my brother which is logistically impossible for me to have.

These are just examples of things I realize aren't real memories because the situations were never possible.

I was recently talking to some coworkers about a problem we had about 3 years ago. We all had different accounts of some of the details, but we were all about equally certain about our recollection of events. After digging through some old email, it turns out only one of the four of us was right.

The fallibility of our memories is something I think most of us significantly underestimate.

My favorite is having a chain of memories where A happened after B happened after C happened after D happened after A. At least one of them is wrong, but I don't know which, and unless I think about the entire chain at the same time, they all make sense.

I was completely convinced I played as Batman in Killer Instinct at the Wiz or something at a display kiosk until years later I looked it up and of course Batman never appeared in Killer Instinct.

I'm not sure the Brian Williams situation falls under this type of shock/faulty memory. Didn't he originally recount the story correctly, and only later change it? And I think physically being in a different helicopter for an entire ride is different than mistaking details in a quick, traumatic event.

This is a good view of the situation:

"While I can’t know what is in his mind, given what we know about memory it is reasonable to give Williams the benefit of the doubt. It is absolutely possible, even likely, that it is his memory that has shifted over the years, in a fashion consistent with memory research."

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/did-williams-li...

Recounting a story actually alters your memory of it. People think of memory like a recording that you just play back but it's more like, say, some hastily scribbled notes you made during a meeting, if you imagine that every time you read them, you had to then make a new copy and throw away the old one (tortured analogy but work with me here).

We all have that relative whose tall tale gets taller each time it gets told.

And it's not (usually) because they intentionally make it more outrageous each time.

There's that, yeah, but, to a certain extent, we're all that relative.

As I recall (of course the premise of this article is that you shouldn't trust my recollection), it was discussed, but all the discussion I can remember was extremely dismissive, claiming this was just a lame excuse.

cf most 35-45 year old British people and "I used to hide behind the couch when the Daleks came on".

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