41. Grounded by an Autobiographic Memory

[00:00:00] Andrew: We think memory's meant to be this absolute representation of things in the world when, in actual fact, there are different kinds of memory serving different functions, and we've evolved that memory system to do those things so that we can remember how to use a tool, remember how to locate a place, remember a fact about what kind of berries will poison you and also,  for maintaining a sense of who we are in the world and enabling us to interact with each other as social animals.

[00:00:25] Steve:  Brian Williams first worked in broadcasting in 1981. In 1993, he became a correspondent for NBC Nightly News and within ten years had risen to become America's number one news anchor.

In the March of 2003, the United States with a little help from British, Australian and Polish forces, had invaded Iraq on the basis that Saddam Hussein was supporting global terrorism and that he kept stashed away weapons of mass destruction. And who better to inform and educate Americans what was happening on the ground than Brian Williams? The invasion started on the 19th and on the 26th of March, just a week later, Williams started to report back from the front line. And he didn't shy away from the action.

Brian Williams in Iraq

[00:02:01] Brian Williams: We are one of four Chinook helicopters flying north this morning, third in line. We quickly make our drop and then turn southwest. Suddenly, without knowing why, we learned that we had been ordered to land in the desert.  On the ground, we learned the Chinook ahead of us was almost blown out of the sky. That hole was made by a rocket propelled grenade, or RPG, fired from the ground and punched cleanly through the skin of the ship, but amazingly, it didn't detonate.

[00:02:31] Steve: The four Chinooks had been ordered to land due to a fast approaching sandstorm, which was severe enough to suspend the war effort for several days. They'd all landed safely, including the lead helicopter who'd been hit by the RPG. Now they were stranded in the desert close to the Iraqi front line, awaiting rescue. Williams recalled later the relief at hearing the American troops closing in towards them.

[00:03:00] Brian Williams: We heard a noise, and it was Bradley fighting vehicles and Abrams tanks coming. They happened to spot us. This was the invasion, the U. S. invasion. They saw us. They surrounded us for three days during the sandstorm that was so big it suspended the war effort. It was called Orange Crush, and they got us out of there alive.

[00:03:21] Steve:  Command Sergeant Major Tim Turpak had headed the small protection team that kept Williams and his crew safe for those few days. Just eleven days later, the capital city of Baghdad was captured and President George W. Bush declared the end of major combat operations on the 1st of May.

Life is good for Brian Williams

[00:03:43] Steve: Back home, William's stellar reputation continued to grow. He was already considered an outstanding journalist and by 2007, Time magazine had labelled him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

 He wrote about his experiences from time to time and appeared on various TV shows to reminisce. In February 2015, during his usual Friday night broadcast, Williams took the opportunity to make a special announcement.

[00:04:25] Brian Williams: We want to share with you a great moment that took place here in New York last night. The story actually started with a terrible moment a dozen years back during the invasion of Iraq, when the helicopter we were travelling in was forced down after being hit by an RPG.

[00:04:42] Steve:  Williams had invited that Command Sergeant Major, who protected him and his crew during the sandstorm in Iraq back in 2003, to a New York Rangers hockey game in New York. Williams and Tim Turpak were both Rangers fans, as it turns out. Well, news travels fast, and during a break in the game that evening, the stadium announcer dutifully delivered this message.

[00:05:08] Stadium Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, during the Iraq invasion, U. S. Army Command Sergeant Major Tim Turpak was responsible for the safety of Brian Williams and his NBC News team after their Chinook helicopter was hit and crippled by enemy fire. Command Sergeant Major Terpak was awarded three bronze stars for combat valor in Iraq, and recently retired after 23 years in the U.S. Army. Both men, both Rangers fans, have been reunited for the first time in 12 years for tonight's game. Please welcome Command Sergeant Major Tim Terpak and Brian Williams.

[00:05:54] Steve: The camera panned to Williams hugging Turpak in the crowd. Williams looking the consummate professional, Turpak looking a little bemused. It was a crowning moment of celebration, because those cheers marked the very peak of Brian Williams' career in broadcasting. It peaked as a result of that evening, and it was about to fall away very rapidly. Do you remember this?

[00:06:26] Brian Williams: When the helicopter we were travelling in was forced down after being hit by an RPG.

... After being hit by an RPG.

[00:06:33] Steve:  And how about this?

[00:06:35] Stadium Announcer: was responsible for the safety of Brian Williams and his NBC News team after their Chinook helicopter was hit and crippled by enemy fire.

 was hit and crippled by enemy fire.

The collapse of Brian Williams' career

[00:06:48] Steve:  The problem was, Brian Williams helicopter wasn't hit and crippled by enemy fire. His helicopter wasn't forced down after being hit by an RPG. That fate befell the lead helicopter, which was about an hour ahead of Williams at the time. The other problem was, for Williams anyway, it didn't go unnoticed. NBC had posted the Rangers story to its Facebook page. Facebook lit up. Flight engineer Lance Reynolds wrote...

[00:07:20] Flight Engineer Lance Reynolds:  Sorry dude, I don't remember you being on my aircraft. I do remember you walking up about an hour after we landed to ask me what had happened.

[00:07:28] Steve:  One by one, members of the Chinook flight crews from that day, 26th March 2003, stepped forward. The Stars and Stripes magazine picked up on the story from the Facebook comments and the story gained momentum. Brian Stelter of CNN interviewed Don Hellis, pilot of the lead helicopter. Stelter asked Hellis if he knew where Brian Williams was at the time he was hit by an RPG. Hellis replied...

[00:07:58] Don Hellis: Well, we all had a lot going on, but I'm pretty sure he was not on our flight at all.

[00:08:03] Steve: And then the final bombshell. Chris Simeone wrote...

[00:08:07] Chris Simeone: Such a liar! I was the pilot in command of the CH-47 flying Brian Williams into Iraq during the invasion. He was on my aircraft, and we were not shot down. That was the sister ship and a friend of mine. As far as Brian Williams goes, he's a fake.

[00:08:24] Steve:  Mockery and disdain flooded social media. Brian Williams issued an apology on air shortly afterwards to try and subdue the deluge.

[00:08:39] Brian Williams: I made a mistake in recalling the events of twelve years ago. I want to apologize. I said I was traveling in an aircraft that was hit by RPG fire. I was instead in a following aircraft. We all landed after the ground fire incident and spent two harrowing nights in a sandstorm in the Iraq desert.

This was a bungled attempt by me to thank one special veteran and, by extension, our brave military men and women, veterans everywhere, those who have served while I did not. I hope they know they have my greatest respect and also, now my apology.

[00:09:13] Steve: The apology, not surprisingly, didn't stem the flow. In February 2015, NBC suspended Williams for six months. Then he was quietly moved over to the role of breaking-news anchor at a sister cable news station, MSNBC. He never returned as America's number one anchor.

What went wrong?

[00:09:36] Steve:  So, what had happened between 2003 when Williams originally reported that the lead Chinook had been hit by an RPG and almost brought down, to his pivotal news report in 2015 where he stated that it was actually his helicopter that took the hit?

[00:10:08] Brian Williams: ...when the helicopter we were travelling in was forced down after being hit by an RPG.

[00:10:12] Steve: It seemed odd that America's number one anchor would deliberately embellish and fabricate a story like this. Yes his reputation had, from time to time, been dogged by rumours of misrepresenting stories over the years, suggesting on a number of occasions that he was a little closer to the action than he actually was. But he really was in Iraq. He really was in a Chinook helicopter, flying over enemy territory, with every bit as chance of being hit by an RPG as the helicopter in front who actually was. This extra embellishment didn't really make sense.

Brian Williams on board the USS Tarawa

The British national newspaper, The Independent, were interested in the story and approached Preethi Premkumar, at the time lecturer in psychology at Nottingham Trent University, now at London South Bank University. They asked her if it's possible to 'misremember' or even completely fabricate events that you then believe to be factually accurate. Preethi said, "Yes, it can happen". This phenomenon is known as Critical Lure. She further explained that research shows that if events similar to something you actually experienced happen, you can be lured into thinking they happened to you.

I tracked down Preethi's former colleague Dr. Andrew Dunn, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Nottingham Trent University, with specific research interests in perception, developmental psychology and memory. I started by asking Andrew about that Critical Lure and, in particular, how it's demonstrated through what's known as the 'DRM paradigm'.

Dr Andrew Dunn (1) - Critical Lure

[00:12:02] Andrew: The DRM is this idea by Deese Roediger McDermott. They give people a list of words. So say, for example, a list of tools; screwdriver, plane, whatever... but what's missing from that list in the original learning process is the word "saw", which is a common item in a toolbox perhaps. And then when you get people to recall that list of words, what they tend to do is fill it in with missing but semantically relevant and highly likely items that might have been in that list. So they'll forget about the left-handed spanner or something and what they will remember is the things you would commonly associate with, and therefore fill in the gaps with, items that might be in that list. So, saw, hammer, and so on.

[00:12:51] Steve:  Okay, so a saw might be mentioned even though it wasn't on the original list. It's like an assumed item.

[00:12:59] Andrew:  Yes. We often see, in eyewitness testimony, where people fill in information that we sometimes call the "what might be true errors". And so people have a kind of schema or representation of what might happen in an event like a bank robbery... and where the information is missing, perhaps you didn't see the face, you didn't see the sex or gender of the person that was robbing the bank as they were wearing a mask, you didn't see what kind of weapon they were holding if they were holding a weapon, you tend to assume it was a man, tend to assume they were holding a shotgun or a handgun or whatever's relevant. And what they don't fill in are things that probably wouldn't fit in, like the colour of a getaway car or, I don't know, the colour of the interior of a getaway car that they might have seen outside. These things aren't things that we would commonly associate and therefore fill in those gaps. And so they fill in gaps with Information that is semantically relevant, meaningful for something where that information is actually really missing from their own memory.

Dr Andrew Dunn and friend

Brian Williams' story changing (1)

[00:13:57] Steve:  Four years after the Iraq war in 2007, Brian Williams returns to Iraq and in a blog post celebrating the life of the now deceased General Wayne Downing, who you'll remember was in the Chinook with him that day, William says...

[00:14:16] Brian Williams:  Some men on the ground fired an RPG through the tail rotor of the chopper flying in front of ours. There was small arms fire, a chopper pilot took a bullet through the earlobe. All four choppers dropped their heavy loads and landed quickly and hard on the desert floor.

[00:14:32] Steve:  The story had subtly changed. Williams is still clear about the RPG hitting the helicopter in front, but rather vaguely referred to 'small arms fire'. The whole piece left an impression of an incident which forced his helicopter to land, whereas in reality the Chinook was ordered to land due to the rapidly approaching sandstorm. He refers to all four choppers landing quickly and hard, which arguably implies that he was in proximity to the RPG which hit the helicopter in front, whereas he was actually an hour behind.

Dr Andrew Dunn (2) - Memory

[00:15:10] Andrew:  Human memory isn't perfect. It's not like a photograph or a video or an indelible recording of something that remains unchanged. It's naturally messy, it fades, bits fall away, they're just forgotten, it changes over time. It changes as we learn new things, or as we meet new people. Memory's just one part of a much wider system of things like perception and language and attention and thinking and reasoning and all sorts of other things. And it's influenced by things like stereotypes, or what might be in the news that day, or just how you're feeling that day, or what you're actually paying attention to when something happens, how focused you are on a task, how much coffee you've had and so on.

[00:15:54] Steve:  And of course, there are different types of memory, aren't there?

[00:15:57] Andrew: Yes. When we study psychology, psychologists like to study memory as part of this broader system, but what they like to do is parcel it out into different kinds of memory; like short-term memory, so that's memory for here and now; long-term memory, so enduring long-term memories of past events et cetera; procedural memory like learning how to ride a bike or bounce on a pogo stick; and other kinds of memory such as semantic memory, so memory for facts about the world, like the capital of France or Spain. And there's also things like episodic memory, which is memory for events, which is obviously relevant here, so like the loss of the queen and the crowning of a king. But a particular type of episodic memory is that of autobiographic memory.

Dr Andrew Dunn (3) - Autobiographic Memory

[00:16:42] Steve: And autobiographic memory is going to be central to this story, so just give us a quick flavour of this kind of memory.

[00:16:51] Andrew:  An autobiographic memory is really a memory about ourselves and the events of our lives. So it's not just memory for recalling a particular event, but it's about events that are related to us and our experiences. So, we may recall the death of the queen and the crowning of the king, but an autobiographic memory is perhaps our memory of sitting there watching the procession and watching the news coverage of the passing of the queen, et cetera.

Brian Williams' story changing (2)

[00:17:17] Brian Williams: the narrative continues to wander. In an NBC blog post on the 12th of May 2008, Williams notes... The Chinook helicopter flying in front of ours from the 101st Airborne took an RPG to the rear rotor as all four of our low flying Chinooks took fire. We were forced down and stayed down for the better or worse part of three days and two nights.

[00:17:47] Steve:  Now Williams is suggesting that his Chinook had taken fire and was forced down. While it is conceivable that his helicopter did take fire, the idea that they were forced down is new and seems to contradict the evidence.

Dr Andrew Dunn (4) - Autobiographic Memory is unreliable

[00:18:02] Andrew: The thing that's different about autobiographic memory is that it can be really highly unreliable. So every time we recall a memory, a personal memory, an autobiographic memory, what we're doing is we're drawing on memories about the world and our place in it and all the other things that we know about the world and ourselves. But the whole process of memory is active. We're constantly encoding and retrieving and recalling and so as we remember or as we recall something,  we're also forming new memories associated with the recalling of that. So, for example, as I'm recording this and I'm talking about this particular issue, I'm forming a memory of that event about things that we may have previously talked about. And so they're all becoming part of a brand new and newly constructed memory,  and as a result the things that we recall each time naturally change the original memory. And so, as a consequence, autobiographic memory can be highly problematic and highly unreliable.

[00:19:06] Steve:  So, is unreliability the main factor that distinguishes an autobiographic memory from other types?

[00:19:13] Andrew: Okay. So different types of memory seem to be affected in different ways. For instance, procedural memory, like riding a bike or jumping on a pogo stick, if anybody does that these days, not only remains stable, because you can always ride a bike or jump on a pogo stick once you've learned how to balance, but you might actually get better at it. You  might actually become better at riding a bike the more you do it, or more skillful at skipping or whatever it is you're... doing.

[00:19:41] Steve:  So, in the case of procedural memory, it's reinforced or possibly improved through recall. So, for autobiographic memories?

[00:19:51] Andrew:  Autobiographic memories change in a way that can make them less reliable, not more, and in fact the more you recall an autobiographic memory, you know, telling your favorite childhood story, the more likely you are to change that memory and in a way that you won't even notice. So what's curious about this is you don't really know that your autobiographic memory isn't quite the way it was. And that new memory becomes the core memory.

So, you might remember something about going on a school trip to a museum that you somehow mix up, and  I know I've done this, mix up with an event where I've taken my own children to a castle and suddenly the memory I can't quite distinguish between one event and another, they've all become the same thing.

 And the influence of stereotypes and social norms also are important in this because they... very much shape what we remember and how we remember it. Maybe you want to impress somebody or you, or you want to confess something or something. So your memory for something you did the night before at a party maybe very hazy. You know, maybe you've had one too many sherries and maybe you'll feel a bit embarrassed about it  and so over time the telling of the story  changes a little bit. Or you want to sound more impressive, you know, an event where you perhaps maybe ask somebody to keep the noise down in the cinema turns into that big event where you caused a fuss and you got all these people to stop talking and people were cheering you and  because you're trying to impress somebody about  how big and brave you are.

Brian Williams' story changing (3)

[00:21:22] Steve:  But it's on the David Letterman show in 2013 that the story takes a step change towards fiction.

[00:21:37] Brian Williams:  What we didn't know was... we were north of the invasion. We were the northernmost Americans in Iraq. We were going to drop some bridge portions across the Euphrates so the 3rd Infantry could cross on them. Two of our four helicopters were hit by ground fire, including the one I was in, RPG and AK47.

[00:21:56] Steve: Much of the statement is true. But for the first time, Williams directly states that his helicopter was hit.

[00:22:04] Brian Williams:  Two of our four helicopters were hit by ground fire, including the one I was in, RPG and AK47.

 including the one I was in, RPG and AK47.

[00:22:15] Steve: Letterman asks Williams what happened the minute everyone realised they'd been hit. Williams says...

[00:22:22] Brian Williams: We figure out how to land safely and we did. We landed very quickly and hard, and we put down and we were stuck. Four birds in the middle of the desert. And we were north, out ahead of the other Americans.

[00:22:36] Steve:  The story also seems to be taking on a new bravado.

[00:22:40] Brian Williams: Four birds in the middle of the desert.

 Four birds in the middle of the desert.  

[00:22:46] Steve: Letterman then asks...

[00:22:48] Letterman: As a journalist, what do you think, "This is a great position to be in" or, "Holy crap, I've gotta get outta here"?

[00:22:53] Brian Williams: More toward the 'holy crap'. ' This is great' was flying over Iraq. 'Holy crap' started when I realized the now deceased former four-star general we were traveling with, Wayne Downing, said to me using an old Vietnam era term, because he was a Vietnam infantryman, "We're over Indian country". You'll forgive the political incorrectness.  He said, 'This is unpoliced virgin territory. We're not here near any U. S. troops".  So we got hit. We sat down. Everyone was okay.

 So we got hit. We sat down. Everyone was okay.

[00:23:31] Steve: The narrative is now snowballing. Williams is adding humour and seems to be revelling in the event. The fact that they were hit is now a fully integrated part of the story.

Dr Andrew Dunn (5) - Autobiographic Memory is affected by the way you feel

[00:23:44] Andrew: The way you feel at the time a memory is formed will affect the memory itself and also how you feel when you're recalling that memory. So if you're excited or you're scared or bored or just distracted, that's going to affect what you encode and how you encode it. So your attention might be elsewhere, or your intention might be elsewhere. And so that's going to affect the recalling, as well as the encoding and in some ways the retrieval of what you recall. The effects are really quite profound or they can be quite profound and in a court of law or in a TV show or in front of the public or...  just in your day to day relationships, it can really affect your life and those around you.

Brian Williams interviews Mitt Romney in 2012 before the storm

Dr Andrew Dunn (6) - Flashbulb memories

[00:24:25] Steve: Okay, so I understand Critical Lure, the elements of autobiographic memory, that all makes sense. Except, in this case, it's not about telling your favourite childhood story. It's about being shot down in a helicopter by a rocket propelled grenade!

[00:24:51] Andrew: it's hard to accept that a memory isn't exactly as you remember it. A phenomena that's related to this is  flashbulb memories. So people have very intense memories, usually for world events, although it could be something else, quite often traumatic events, whether they specifically happened to them,  or it was a traumatic event in the world, like the shooting of JFK, the death of Princess Diana, lots of people remember those events,  even though they weren't there,  and they become very burned in and very  intense memories.

But we can have flashbulb memories for other events, you know, maybe a first kiss or a  car accident that you might have been in. So, good or bad. The core of that memory, the basic outline, the schematic if you like, might be true.  Princess Diana died. JFK was shot. But the specifics about where you are and... what you are doing, you know, your autobiographic aspect of that might not be as you remember it. And it might be because maybe you were fixated on a particular thing at the time or maybe there was something about that event that day that becomes part of that event and suddenly those things become blended because they're all sort of intense. So even flashbulb memories where people think they're kind of crystal clear, that snap of a flashbulb with camera picture perfect memory might in fact not be as reliable as you think. So how we remember the event, it changes  and it changes over time.

[00:26:15] Steve:  And for Brian Williams, he was present in the Iraq war. He was in a helicopter on the front line and one of those helicopters definitely got shot. So it's not out of the question that the idea of his helicopter being shot down has become part of his memory, his autobiographic memory.

[00:26:34] Andrew: Oh absolutely. So it's really quite interesting this case, in that what you've got here is somebody that was in a very stressful situation. You know, it's a pretty... you could say foolhardy or very brave thing to be a journalist in a... in a war zone.  So you've got somebody who's in this situation and It's confusing, attention might be elsewhere, there are similar events going on, there are other things that maybe he's reporting on or have happened, and then over time, that narrative, that experience and other narratives start to get blended together. So you know, you imagine if you tell a story and it comes off well, you might then retell that story and you  become central to that event and at one point you're a bystander in the event, the next thing you're the central character in that story. And this happens not intentionally, this happens naturally in social communication.

Brian Williams apologizes

[00:27:26] Steve:  The follow up apology makes for uncomfortable viewing. Talking to NBC News colleague Matt Lauer shortly after the original made-for-TV apology, Williams tries to explain his actions...

[00:27:45] Brian Williams:  Looking back, it had to have been ego that made me think I had to be sharper, funnier, quicker than anybody else. Put myself closer to the action, having been at the action in the beginning.

[00:28:02] Steve:  And he continues, desperately searching for some plausible explanation...

[00:28:08] Brian Williams: I told the story correctly for years, before I told it incorrectly. I was not trying to mislead people. That, to me, is a huge difference here. After that incident, I tried and failed, as others have tried and failed, and why is it when we're trying to say, "I'm sorry", that we can't come out and say, "I'm sorry"?  

[00:28:34] Steve:  I told the story correctly for years before I told it incorrectly. I was not trying to mislead people. Andrew, what's happening here?

Dr Andrew Dunn (7) - Cognitive Dissonance

[00:28:44] Andrew: I guess this kind of leads up to what we might call 'cognitive dissonance' in which you've got two conflicting memories, or two things that you're trying to hold simultaneously,   you know, we do this all the time, "I like to recycle, the planet is burning, I'm pro green things",  and then on Saturday I decided to have a nice big bonfire and have a barbecue and just throw everything in the bin.  That's an example of cognitive dissonance.  We do it all the time. We're human. We're fallible, memory's fallible. But what you've got here  with Brian Williams is a situation where he gets called out for it and the facts are presented to him. And then his memories don't really match those facts, and he knows that they don't match and what you end up with is him apologizing partly because it's socially acceptable, partially because he's kind of apologizing because he... doesn't understand what's happened to his memory and partially, he now doesn't believe what he'd said before and it's confusing and, you know, his reality is distorted. I wouldn't mind betting that his actual memory for that event is almost blank  because that quite often happens. You sort of go "That is not in my memory", and so when you try to remember what actually happened, it's changed.

[00:29:53] Steve: Yes, that's interesting, and I'm glad you said 'we' do it all the time and it's not just me. I can think of a number of situations where I've recalled details of an event some time back, to later find through some evidence that it couldn't possibly have happened that way. And the result is a real fog, a... mental disorientation when you, for that moment, can't remember anything. It's very disorientating and almost nauseous.

[00:30:23] Andrew: Yes, and in Brian Williams' case you've got an event that did happen to him, an event that happened very close to him and a whole bunch of stories that are similar and that is a recipe with stress and whatever else, to lead to errors.

Dr Andrew Dunn (8) - The challenge of Autobiographic Memory

[00:30:39] Steve: And we're focusing on Brian Williams but, of course, there's a much broader context, isn't there?

[00:30:45] Andrew: The challenge is for all of us, because it has an effect on everyone's lives. It's not to disprove or to not believe that person, but to try and perhaps uncover what it is that is true and maybe even better understand how that comes about. And you can imagine in a court of law how that challenge might play out because those kinds of errors, witness errors, eyewitness errors, can have profound effects on the people standing in the dock, the people who were associated with the event, the people who are pressing the case or defending the case, the people who are related to the person involved. Because of course, Brian Williams will have family and friends who are also  in some sense affected by this discovery that his memory isn't true. And so they're also a victim in a sense of, you know, caring about someone and believing something and then finding out it's not true and, you know, there's a whole lot of complicated emotions going on there...

Dr Andrew Dunn (9) - The function of Autobiographic Memory

[00:31:43] Steve: So, Andrew, you've explained what autobiographic memory is, it's fragility, it's unreliability, that doesn't seem great. But we've evolved with autobiographic memory which suggests there's a benefit there too. Am I on the right lines?

[00:32:10] Andrew: Autobiographic memory really kind of serves two particular social functions. The first is a communal one. So it allows us to engage with others and to share stories with them, and the other is a protective one, that is it helps to maintain a conscious sense of self and a coherent sense of self, of  who we are, who we want to be, and so on. And our autobiographic memories, when we recall them, are really a kind of sharing of that and also of  maintaining who we are in a social sense  because ultimately we're social animals. The function of autobiographic memory isn't to be absolutely, veridically accurate, that is, perfectly accurate. It's meant to be accurate in terms of maintaining our social selves for communicating and maintaining us psychologically.

[00:32:59] Steve:  That's quite a shift, certainly for me, to discover that memory isn't just about trying to hold accurate information about the past. But actually, in the case of autobiographic memory at least, it's inaccuracy is helping me to flourish as a social being.

[00:33:16] Andrew: Actually it doesn't matter how accurate quite a lot of memories are, so long as they're good enough. So you don't need to be able to be perfect at cycling all the time to cycle successfully,  you just need to be good enough. Autobiographic memory just needs to be good enough in order to maintain that everyday interaction. But of course, that can then have catastrophic consequences in other circumstances. So for the case of Brian Williams or for somebody in a court of law who  may be the defendant or may even be the witness giving evidence.

[00:33:48] Steve:  It's complicated, isn't it? There's very little black and white, and lots of shades of grey. So, what do we reckon about Brian Williams?

Brian Williams - villain or victim?

[00:34:02] Andrew:  He was a respected journalist, he's telling a story, the nature of his job is to tell a story and memory, autobiographic memory, is a telling of a story and so, I guess you could even say he's naturally good at telling stories and so maybe he might be more prone to it.

Was Brian Williams making it up for fame and glory? I don't know. Is it likely that he believed what he said? I think probably, yeah. Did that change over time? Almost certainly, because it happens to everyone. So I'm not gonna judge Brian Williams or the people that might have called him out about that. I think Brian Williams, or the case at least, is a really good illustration of how memory is fallible. And I think that there are lots of things going on here sociologically in terms of how he was treated and the consequences of him getting this wrong, but I think we can use it as a way of perhaps maybe better understanding the way memory works, and perhaps even understanding why he may have remembered things the way he did and why it might be understandable that he has slightly different memories of an event that don't really match the original memory.

[00:35:13] Steve: So, that's the Brian Williams story. He eventually retired from NBC in December 2021. His career had been cruelly defined by a savage press and social media, but he maintained a strong level of popular support to the end.

 The Brian Williams story is really our story. It tells us about being human. We all have autobiographic memories that aren't exact copies of what actually once happened; not necessarily untrue, but not always 100% perfect. We're social animals who crave social interaction and certainty. We live in a social media-saturated world where people are quick to judge and where the information overload leaves us feeling less certain and more detached from the world than ever before.

[00:36:18] Steve: Judging Brian Williams is perhaps missing the point. It might be more constructive to consider our reaction to his story in the context of our own fallibilities and to search for the truth rather than apportion blame. As Andrew says, "We didn't evolve to be perfect. We evolved to be good enough".

[00:36:40] Andrew: It's messy. Human beings are messy. Human memory isn't perfect and memory is susceptible to change because it needs to be. And in the case of Brian Williams, you can see how his personal experiences and those events that took place around him all led to a blending of a memory that isn't really an accurate representation of what happened, but it is still his memory and he believes it to be his memory. We think memory is perfect, it's a perfect representation of the world. But it isn't.

ATTRIBUTIONS

Anthony Quintano from Mount Laurel, United States, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

U.S. Navy photo by Journalist Seaman David Senn, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Anthony Quintano, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo: POA(Phot) Sean Clee/MOD, OGL v1.0OGL v1.0, via Wikimedia Commons