John Hopton for redOrbit.com – @Johnfinitum

NBC anchor Brian Williams claimed, now infamously, that his helicopter was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq in 2003 while reporting on the invasion. Having had his version of events challenged by veterans, he backtracked and said that he was in a helicopter following the one that was hit by an RPG, and that the “fog of memory” had been responsible for his mistake. The thought that he lied to increase his journalistic credentials is unavoidable, but memory expert Ed Cooke believes that the complexity of memory could give some credibility to the argument that error rather than deceit informed Williams’ behavior.

“We tend to think of our brains like computers, and our memories as copies of our experience exactly stored in some internal database,” Cooke told redOrbit. “So we expect memories to be the same every time we recall them, and accurately to reflect the real events that gave rise to them.

“But this isn’t how the brain works, for anyone. For instance, third person perspectives are very common in memory, when you see things you did in the past from outside of you, which obviously wasn’t your experience at the time. This isn’t normally grounds for saying the memory is wrong, just that it doesn’t literally reproduce the experience as you had it at the time.”

Intriguingly, Cooke says that imagination and memory are not entirely separate things.

“Remembering is an imaginative act, and every time we remember (i.e. re-imagine) a moment from the past, we do so differently based on context. Memories are also influenced by related experiences we have in the meantime, and they even change a little bit with each act of remembrance.”

Cooke is a Grandmaster of Memory and founder of the learning site Memrise, and believes that when it comes to learning, it is important to realize how memory can change, which is why “active recall and repetition are so critical for effective learning- these are our best tools for shaping memories.”

Memories are like compost, not computers

The psychologist WL Randall recently suggested that the computer metaphor for human memory -“encode, store, retrieve” – should be replaced by an “organic compost” metaphor of laying it on, breaking it down, stirring it up, and mixing it in, Cooke explains.

“This certainly seems to be what Brian Williams has been up to. He’s recalled the memory in one context (glorifying and bearing witness to the heroism of which he was a close witness of an armor mechanized platoon from the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry). In this context, the specifics of his own witnessing may not have seemed very relevant, and the story’s certainly better with his proximity.

“But his comments were interpreted (somewhat ungenerously in my humble opinion) as an attempt to reflect glory on his own heroism, and so the absence of the relevant parts of the memory in that context (such as that he was in a different helicopter) stood out like lies, for which he’s been roundly hounded.”

Fallibility of memory played a part, but malleability is more significant

“My bet on this is that the problem of memory we’re talking about isn’t anything to do with gaps, confusions and distortions (even if they may also exist, a bit),” Cooke continued. “Instead, the memory problem here is more likely that the contents of a memory will differ depending on the social context of recall, and Williams remembered his story the wrong way given his audience, who therefore felt his intentions weren’t honest.”

So it seems that Williams did tailor his memory to his audience, but not as deliberately as we have assumed.

Williams has now been suspended from NBC for sixth months, but it will clearly take us a lot longer than that to get a full grasp on the science of memory, a subject that Ed Cooke says still needs a lot of work.

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