On March 24, 2003, Chief Warrant Officer Randy Summerlin, 31, looked out the window of his Chinook helicopter and became concerned. Several men were running across the Iraqi desert. They were whirling what appeared to be white towels over their heads to signal the impending approach of Summerlin’s three-copter convoy. Farther ahead, two figures emerged from a Nissan pickup. One held an AK-47 rifle, the other a rocket launcher.
What came next happened in a flash. “I felt a shudder in the aircraft and a big boom,” Summerlin told Stars and Stripes. A rocket-propelled grenade ripped through a cargo container the helicopter was transporting on a sling. Another tore a melon-sized hole into the aircraft’s tail housing. Two rounds from the AK-47 pierced the cabin, one hitting an electrical panel and the other nicking a soldier’s cheek. The Chinook retreated, ran into a sandstorm, and made an emergency landing many miles away, in a safer bowl of dust.
An hour or so later, a helicopter deterred by another sandstorm arrived and offered assistance. It was a run-of-the-mill detour, except for one detail: NBC News anchor Brian Williams was on board. The significance of Williams’s presence at this location wouldn’t be relevant until Williams publicly recalled the incident as “a terrible moment a dozen years back during the invasion of Iraq when the helicopter we were traveling in was forced down after being hit by an RPG.” He told versions of this story several times—all in public venues and all placing himself nearby or inside the downed aircraft—until January 2015, when his narrative, as well as his reputation, collapsed under scrutiny.
The ensuing public condemnation, wavering between moral outrage and mockery, was overwhelming. Williams responded by saying that he had “misremembered” the incident. The general public—at least most of it—would have none of that. He lied. Flat out. Bald faced. The weight of social media reinforced Williams’s new reputation as a scoundrel. NBC placed him on unpaid leave for six months (that’s a $5 million mistake, for those counting). Mission veterans put the final nails of judgment in Williams’s coffin. “I don’t know how he could have mistaken that,” one said.
“I don’t think it was a mistake.”
The most captivating public controversies are the ones where the response reveals more than the transgression. The “pants-on-fire” reaction by the public to Williams’s fabrication, the almost gleeful vehemence expressed on Facebook pages and across the Twittersphere, certainly confirms the seductive pleasure of catching someone red-handed. But this reaction also obscures the underlying messiness of the Big Lie. The gavel-like finality with which Williams was judged absolves us of pondering the deeper questions about how a situation like this one arises. What is the machinery of memory? How does memory concoct the stories we tell about ourselves? The failure to address these questions is unfortunate. The road to Truth might be paved with righteousness, but the precarious relationship all of us have with the past also lends false assurance to the stories that we consider to be objectively true. Condemning Williams and leaving it at that is an all-too-easy response to a much more interesting phenomenon: unintentionally misrepresenting the truth.
Autobiographical (or as psychologists call it, episodic) memory is necessarily flawed. The colloquialisms used to describe it—“etched into my brain,” “seared into my memory,” “if memory serves,” “never forget”—might emphasize its reliability. But these catchphrases capture an outmoded understanding of memory. It’s memory as an ageless photograph instead of memory as a time-sensitive dive into murky psychic territory. Psychologists who study the mysteries of memory speak with a tellingly different lexicon. Transience, misattribution, binding failure, and positive illusions—terms that point to the messiness of recollection—present memory as it really is: a necessarily flawed reconstruction of past experience rather than a carbon copy retrieved from a static cognitive archive.
If retrieving memory is a process—and recounting it a performance—then there are numerous ways its accuracy can derail. Daniel Schacter, a professor of psychology at Harvard, has spent his career researching those ways. In The Seven Sins of Memory, he notes how “binding failures,” which happen when memory latches onto an inaccurate detail and deems it true, create “confusions between events we actually experience and those we only think about or imagine.” Our innate suggestibility tempts us to weave extraneous details from subsequent events—conversing with friends, absorbing miscellaneous media bytes, reading a novel—into the fabric of our original recollection. The gist remains (you know you landed in a helicopter in a desert amid a frisson of danger) but, as Schacter and others explain, the specifics can blur into impressions that in some cases disappear altogether. It’s not exactly a comforting thought, but every time we return to the incident, we take a different route to reach it and, in turn, come home with a slightly—or not so slightly—different story. The mind never remembers the same way twice.
Considerable research into the neurobiology of memory retrieval supports the idea that our recollections are inherently shaky. According to a literature review in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, the molecular mechanisms underscoring what scientists call memory reconsolidation—basically, the recovery of a memory that has already been coded into the brain—highlight the presence of a “labile period” during which “the memory can be modified.” The initial consolidation of a memory depends on a protein synthesis. When protein synthesis inhibitors are introduced into the brain after retrieval of the original consolidated memory, the updated memory, which has passed through the labile phase, takes a different cellular pathway. The result is an alteration of the original memory.
by James McWilliams, The American Scholar | Read more:
What came next happened in a flash. “I felt a shudder in the aircraft and a big boom,” Summerlin told Stars and Stripes. A rocket-propelled grenade ripped through a cargo container the helicopter was transporting on a sling. Another tore a melon-sized hole into the aircraft’s tail housing. Two rounds from the AK-47 pierced the cabin, one hitting an electrical panel and the other nicking a soldier’s cheek. The Chinook retreated, ran into a sandstorm, and made an emergency landing many miles away, in a safer bowl of dust.An hour or so later, a helicopter deterred by another sandstorm arrived and offered assistance. It was a run-of-the-mill detour, except for one detail: NBC News anchor Brian Williams was on board. The significance of Williams’s presence at this location wouldn’t be relevant until Williams publicly recalled the incident as “a terrible moment a dozen years back during the invasion of Iraq when the helicopter we were traveling in was forced down after being hit by an RPG.” He told versions of this story several times—all in public venues and all placing himself nearby or inside the downed aircraft—until January 2015, when his narrative, as well as his reputation, collapsed under scrutiny.
The ensuing public condemnation, wavering between moral outrage and mockery, was overwhelming. Williams responded by saying that he had “misremembered” the incident. The general public—at least most of it—would have none of that. He lied. Flat out. Bald faced. The weight of social media reinforced Williams’s new reputation as a scoundrel. NBC placed him on unpaid leave for six months (that’s a $5 million mistake, for those counting). Mission veterans put the final nails of judgment in Williams’s coffin. “I don’t know how he could have mistaken that,” one said.
“I don’t think it was a mistake.”
The most captivating public controversies are the ones where the response reveals more than the transgression. The “pants-on-fire” reaction by the public to Williams’s fabrication, the almost gleeful vehemence expressed on Facebook pages and across the Twittersphere, certainly confirms the seductive pleasure of catching someone red-handed. But this reaction also obscures the underlying messiness of the Big Lie. The gavel-like finality with which Williams was judged absolves us of pondering the deeper questions about how a situation like this one arises. What is the machinery of memory? How does memory concoct the stories we tell about ourselves? The failure to address these questions is unfortunate. The road to Truth might be paved with righteousness, but the precarious relationship all of us have with the past also lends false assurance to the stories that we consider to be objectively true. Condemning Williams and leaving it at that is an all-too-easy response to a much more interesting phenomenon: unintentionally misrepresenting the truth.
Autobiographical (or as psychologists call it, episodic) memory is necessarily flawed. The colloquialisms used to describe it—“etched into my brain,” “seared into my memory,” “if memory serves,” “never forget”—might emphasize its reliability. But these catchphrases capture an outmoded understanding of memory. It’s memory as an ageless photograph instead of memory as a time-sensitive dive into murky psychic territory. Psychologists who study the mysteries of memory speak with a tellingly different lexicon. Transience, misattribution, binding failure, and positive illusions—terms that point to the messiness of recollection—present memory as it really is: a necessarily flawed reconstruction of past experience rather than a carbon copy retrieved from a static cognitive archive.
If retrieving memory is a process—and recounting it a performance—then there are numerous ways its accuracy can derail. Daniel Schacter, a professor of psychology at Harvard, has spent his career researching those ways. In The Seven Sins of Memory, he notes how “binding failures,” which happen when memory latches onto an inaccurate detail and deems it true, create “confusions between events we actually experience and those we only think about or imagine.” Our innate suggestibility tempts us to weave extraneous details from subsequent events—conversing with friends, absorbing miscellaneous media bytes, reading a novel—into the fabric of our original recollection. The gist remains (you know you landed in a helicopter in a desert amid a frisson of danger) but, as Schacter and others explain, the specifics can blur into impressions that in some cases disappear altogether. It’s not exactly a comforting thought, but every time we return to the incident, we take a different route to reach it and, in turn, come home with a slightly—or not so slightly—different story. The mind never remembers the same way twice.
Considerable research into the neurobiology of memory retrieval supports the idea that our recollections are inherently shaky. According to a literature review in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, the molecular mechanisms underscoring what scientists call memory reconsolidation—basically, the recovery of a memory that has already been coded into the brain—highlight the presence of a “labile period” during which “the memory can be modified.” The initial consolidation of a memory depends on a protein synthesis. When protein synthesis inhibitors are introduced into the brain after retrieval of the original consolidated memory, the updated memory, which has passed through the labile phase, takes a different cellular pathway. The result is an alteration of the original memory.
by James McWilliams, The American Scholar | Read more:
Image: David Herbick
