I remember thinking when I wrote that that it would eventually help someone solve a problem.
Many years ago, I knew a lovely gentleman who was a big-shot muckety-muck at one of the country’s largest insurance companies. He was as old then as I am now (yikes) and forgetful/absent-minded. Sometimes he would show up at work wearing two different shoes. Not so bad, you say? What if I tell you one shoe was a slip-on and the other had shoelaces. 
In The Invisible Gorilla, Daniel Simons and his student Christopher Chabris creators of the experiment, discuss how much of our perception is just an illusion.
They quote a couple of examples of this “stolen memory” type thing, made funnier because the perpetrators are scientists working on problems of memory.
Bosses are notorious for doing this so use it to your benefit. Plant ideas which are beneficial to you and the company in their minds during your everyday conversations. It works like a Jedi mind trick. Most important is to dissuade them from whatever crazy ass shit they have got it into their heads will help but which will hurt the company. If you do it right they will believe it was their idea all along.
We did a variation of that at one place I worked.
We had a higher up that could NEVER let something pass him without a “fix”.
We did sciencey engineery stuff. So it was often graphs with curves on them. Well, lets say we had a graph with 2 curves/lines on it. “We” would think curve A should be blue and curve B should be red say. So we would make A red and B blue because we knew Bob would insist we change it around (to what we wanted in the first place).
Now, keep in mind Bob was a damn dick because this was back in the day when something like changing the color on some curves actually took somebody a good bit of time to fix when nobody, when push came to shove, gave a damn fuck.
Many years ago, I knew a lovely gentleman who was a big-shot muckety-muck at one of the country’s largest insurance companies. He was as old then as I am now (yikes) and forgetful/absent-minded. Sometimes he would show up at work wearing two different shoes. Not so bad, you say? What if I tell you one shoe was a slip-on and the other had shoelaces.
It’s helpful for me to remember this when I get frustrated with my mom for “rewriting history.” I used to be certain that she knew she was making shit up, but I’ve come to believe that she really believes her own stories.
Back in October, she told me that she really wanted to have Thanksgiving dinner at her house, so I agreed to go there. Not one week later, she told my sister that I had asked her to have Thanksgiving. If you knew anything about my family, my mom, my mom’s cooking, etc, you would know how completely batshit insane that idea is. I was initially really irritated and almost said something to her about it but then I thought, well, this isn’t a battle I need to choose. She needs to believe that I really want to be at her house for Thanksgiving so I will let her believe that.
Then while we were there, she told a story about buying the turkey this past week. But the thing is, she has told the same story at least 4 times in the past 6 years. So again, she is either purposely bending the truth (in this case to be entertaining), or she keeps encountering the exact situation every time she goes to buy a turkey. And again, I stood to gain nothing by pointing it out, except some bitchy superiority that would have left me feeling crappy.
I see what you did there.
What happened when she was buying the turkey? I don’t have a good turkey-buying story for this time of year and might like to borrow hers if it’s good enough.
It’s not even a good story, but that doesn’t really matter when adopting someone else’s tale as your own, I suppose. Allegedly she asked “the guy at the meat counter” if the turkey would be OK in her fridge until Thursday, and she knew the moment she asked the question how absurd it was. If it’s ok in their fridge, of course it will be in hers.
Clearly my mom has a brain meltdown every 3rd Saturday in November in which she forgets that turkey will remain safe for a specific amount if time regardless of whose refrigerator it’s in.
ETA: when you tell the story, be sure to mention the raised eyebrow and slow speech of the meat counter guy, as he patiently explains that the turkey will be fine. Then chuckle at yourself.
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A friend told me about something he read once about brain research. I have no idea how well substantiated this was at the time, whether it’s been discredited since (or even if I remember it right), but the gist of it was that we have less conscious control over our words and actions than we realize. Our responses to events are, in some sense, pre-programmed into our brains, and the control that we think we have is just our mind coming along after the fact trying to understand why it just did something.
I find that idea interesting and also troubling. I mention it here because maybe something about having family together for Thanksgiving triggers the response in lorene’s mom’s mind to tell that story. I can’t say I’m immune. There are times when I’ll read an OP, think of a reply, and then discover the thread is a zombie and I’ve already posted the reply I was thinking of.
- To me. the absurd thing about asking that question is that the store had probably already accounted for that, given that they had a pretty good idea that turkey would be cooked on Thursday.
Having raised an absurd number of children, one trait I have noticed in nearly all of them - around 14-15, mostly - is the ability to tune out conversation around them, then suddenly jump brightly in with something that had just been said a few minutes earlier. Connect the dots as you will; I simply learned to be patient and say, “Yesss, we were just talking about that.”
Ah, that revisits at an older age.
Both my parents are losing their hearing. Conversations are now doubled as one will say something and the other will agree heartily and then say exactly the same thing. Hilarity ensues and they explain they only got the gist of what the other was saying.
Har har.
Conversation will resume.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
My roommate does this, and it drives me insane. First, he was repeating stories my boyfriend had told him about his own childhood and pretending they had happened to him. I thought he must be unaware of this, because he would repeat them back to my boyfriend, who would OBVIOUSLY know he was lying. Now though, I think it may have been a test to see if my boyfriend would call him out (he was flummoxed by the oddity of the situation and did not).
When I leave the room, he tells my friends ideas I have had, but claims they are his own. I know he has to be doing this on purpose, because he shuts right up when I walk in. I point out that he is lying and he makes up a lame excuse.
He tells a lot of self-aggrandizing lies and loves to brag, regardless of the accuracy of what he is bragging about. The weirdest part is that he’s not lying only about things we could never know the accuracy of, but often things we were present for and know for a fact not to be true. I think it’s just part of being a compulsive liar. When you lie all the time, maybe reality and your lies get mixed up and you make these kinds of mistakes.
Not quite the same thing, but there’s research that shows that our brains are amazingly good at rationalizing, without us being aware of it.
You may have heard of studies of people who’ve had the nerves between their brain hemispheres severed, usually to treat seizures, but sometimes as a result of an accident or illness. They make interesting study subjects. One example is where they could show different slides to each hemisphere. Now, while hemispheric separation of faculties isn’t nearly as cut-and-dried as we once thought, there is definitely separation regarding language processing. Scientists would show a slide saying “Get up and leave the room” to one side. As the person gets up to go, they’d ask “Why are you leaving?” and the answers would range from “I have to go to the bathroom” to “I have an appointment”. Rarely would it be “Because that’s what the slide told me to do.” And the test subjects really believed their rationalizations.
Applied to your comment, maybe we have control, but we often don’t know why we’re doing what we’re doing, so we make up reasons.
Guilty. It’s not just kids, either. Maybe it helps to be borderline ADD.
^^^This.^^^
Except for the fact that it’s really “I.”
But other than that, definitely ^^^this.^^^
Well, sometimes it’s “me.”
…or just the opposite end of the spectrum. We’ll be watching a television show and my wife will randomly guess whodunnit; as the show progresses she changes her answer. Then at the end of the show; she proud of the fact that she figured it out ahead of time. :dubious: Of course you did… you’ve selected every major character in the show at one point or another.
My mother does that sometimes.
How about this one – every time we watch a movie on TV, she says “I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this one before”, whether it’s true or not. Even if it’s a made-for-TV movie that is being shown for the first time in history, she’ll still say it.
My wife and my mother both do that one!
I think this happens more as you get older; I know when talking about old family stories with my sibs; it’s amazing how differently we remember the same event.
A much more recent example of this is regarding an umpire friend of mine.
Set up: Back when I used to umpire a LOT more than I do now; it was not uncommon to be known among several teams, coaches, parents, etc because you saw them so many times throughout the year. This one game was one of those cases. In rec ball you have one uniform, in High School ball you have to wear a similar uniform that contains certification patches on the sleeve and breast. A lot of umpires don’t want to limit an umpire shirt for high school season only; so they’ll either Velcro or double-sided tape the patches to their shirt. My partner elected to do this during a varsity game. As luck would have it; his patch came off. One of the parents whom we knew saw this and yelled out “Hey Marcell, if you keep doing a good job, you’ll get to sew that on there some day!” Hilarity ensues! I can’t tell that story anymore around another umpire (who’s always one with the grandiose stories) because he insists he was there. When I tell him it’s impossible he was there because I was (and of course Marcell); and there are only two umpires scheduled to varsity games! Somehow he was there ‘dropping something off’ or some other nonsense. It drives me nuts. The thing is, I’m positive that he really does believe he was there.