Was Brian Williams a Victim of False Memory?

The New York Times:

How reliable is human memory? Most of us believe that our memory is like a video camera, capturing an accurate record that can be reviewed at a later date.

But the truth is our memories can deceive us — and they often do.

Numerous scientific studies show that memories can fade, shift and distort over time. Not only can our real memories become unwittingly altered and embellished, but entirely new false memories can be incorporated into our memory bank, embedded so deeply that we become convinced they are real and actually happened.

…

“You’ve got all these people saying the guy’s a liar and convicting him of deliberate deception without considering an alternative hypothesis — that he developed a false memory,” said Elizabeth Loftus, a leading memory researcher and a professor of law and cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. “It’s a teaching moment, and a chance to really try to get information out there about the malleable nature of memory.”

…

“Other famous people have said things that couldn’t be true, and it seems like they just were remembering it wrong,” said Christopher Chabris, co-author of “The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us,” and an associate professor of psychology at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y. “I think a lot of people don’t appreciate the extent to which false memories can happen even when we are extremely confident in the memory.”

Read the whole story: The New York Times