The science behind Brian Williams' misremembering

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Did Brian Williams lie, exaggerate, or misremember?

If he originally reported the truth behind the events in Iraq more than a decade ago, and those events were filmed and broadcast on the nightly news, then why didn’t he fact-check himself before going on national television and recounting a false version of those same events? Surely, as a journalist, he knew the original video was out there for anyone to watch.

In the first segment of this episode of the YANSS Podcast, psychologist Daniel Simons explains that although we will never know for sure if Brian Williams intentionally mislead people in the many retellings of his adventures in the desert, the last 40 years of memory research strongly suggests the kind of misremembering he claims to have suffered is easy to reproduce in our own lives. In fact, chances are, giant swaths of your own personal history are partially fictional if not completely false. The problem isn’t that our memory is bad, but that we believe it isn’t.

Our in-depth interview in this episode is with psychologist Julia Shaw whose latest research demonstrates the fact that there is no reason to believe that a memory is more accurate just because it is vivid or detailed. Actually, that’s a potentially dangerous belief. Shaw used techniques similar to police interrogations, and over the course of three conversations she and her team were able to convince a group of college students that those students had committed a felony crime. You’ll hear her explain how easy it is to implant the kind of false memories that cause people just like you to believe they deserve to go to jail for crimes that never happened and what she suggests police departments should do to avoid such distortions of the truth.

After the interview, I discuss a news story about implanting false memories into the brains of mice using viruses and beams of light.

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