I watched a plane crash back in the 80s. I was standing in the parking lot, and watched it disappear behind some trees. I’ve confirmed this by talking to others who were there, and even was interviewed by officials later for my observations about what happened.
The pilots attempted to eject, but were apparently too low and didn’t survive. The crash site was along my route home, and this is also confirmed later via friends and news stories.
I distinctly remember passing the emergency personnel on the drive home, and seeing them working over (apparently) the form of one of the pilots. It was on a grassy slope leading down to the lakeside where the plane ended up.
Everything above seems correct and much can be re-verified via memories of others. Except – there is no grassy slope near the lake where I saw emergency services. From the vantage point of my car, I couldn’t have seen the scene in my memory, because the entire lakefront is rocky and tree-lined. There’s no grassy area within miles of that particular place.
I have no idea where that memory came from, but it can’t possibly be correct.
I “backtracked” my memories - and given that the AR-Studios are quite near to Regent’s Park, I am now fairly certain, that I was really there at the famous cebra-crossing.
But, again, that is due to a cognitive exercise NOW … and not accessing memories …
Quite a possible scenario - that my memories are a mixture of prior (secondary TV/Google information) and first hand experiences.
These are examples of a reality oft-discussed in legal contexts, about the unreliability of “eyewitness testimony”. And it doesn’t even have to be from years ago, it can even be relatively fresh.
IMO this is related to that memory is not really a hard print – not only is there a POV factor but the files can get corrupted. And the way the human mind works on the basis of pattern recognition means other patterns that “fit” the memory can get associated and crosslinked and filled in gaps, as it were. In the OP case, so, yeah, most of us have been bombarded with so many media visuals of the Abbey Road crossing that when seeking to summon it up from memory, our “search engine” will “helpfully” fill the cache with a hundred of those results while we’re trying to look at ours.
And like an AI-bot given a prompt, the system can wind up inserting those other references to produce the final image we have asked for. For the air crash aftermath in pullin’s case, there are the things that they know they saw and can corroborate with others, but then there is something where the memory system decided that there was a blank that needed filling in a space it expected an image, so it got filled from whatever other reference was sitting around.
I had jury duty for a case that involved a cop and the suspect fighting over the cop’s gun and then just punching each other out until back-up arrived.
During the fight the gun ended up on the ground and a witness ran over and kicked the gun out of their reach. The witness and the cop both testified that the gun was out of the bad guy’s hands and on the ground when the witness kicked it away.
The second witness, who was with the first when this all went down swore that the witness who kicked the gun, had kicked it out of the bad guy’s hand. When it was pointed out that everyone, including the person who actually kicked the gun said that was not what happened, the second witness just looked really stubborn and said “That’s what I saw.”
I don’t seem to have anything like this.
In every case where objective checks are possible, my memory seems to be fairly accurate.
There are things I don’t remember, but I realise I don’t remember them and know I don’t.
But I don’t seem to have any false memories.
My wife does seem to suffer from a sort of deja vue sometimes: I sometimes have to go to some lengths to prove to her that what she thinks happened is not actually real.
There may be cases where family or friends say, “don’t you remember…”. But I don’t
I’d like to add more to this. I’m reaching the 6 month anniversary of losing sight in one eye. During the adjustment period, there were some weird visual events* that the docs were able to explain to me as a sort of mental “filling in the gaps”.
Apparently, the visual image in our brain is constructed mostly from memory and interpolation of some type. I knew our minds made some assumptions about real-time images, but had no idea how significant this is. One ophthalmologist said the amount of “filled in” data could be as much as 90%. Since we’re forming visual memories of images which are mostly memories themselves – it’s surprising there’s any accuracy at all. I realize this delves into perception and other issues best addressed by neurologists, but I’m really surprised how much visual memory seems to be a product of something akin to mental recursion.
*Weird events, sorry about the length.
(FTR: vision loss is in left eye – and I was previously left-handed and left eye dominant)
When first navigating my home with one eye, I was very aware of my field-of-view (FOV) missing a lot of data on the left side. It was like everything was dark on that side, and I learned to be hesitant reaching for, or turning toward my left. It was like the former “circle” I previously saw, had shrunk to an oval centered mostly on the right. As time went on, my FOV returned to its normal look (at least from my perception), and I could navigate confidently throughout my house. But when in a new environment (store, restaurant), I returned to the narrow FOV, with the left side dark again. My wife noticed that even my gait changes in an unknown place, more hesitant and even reaching out with my hand when turning left around shelves, etc. It’s very noticeable, at least to us.
Secondly, I am completely confident navigating around the kitchen in the morning, and easily grab and use whatever I need. But one day for some reason, my wife put my favorite coffee cup in the window-sill above the sink. I hunted around for it for 3 days, completely unable to find it – not in dishwasher, coffee table, or near the coffee maker. When she returned home and I mentioned its absence, she pointed at the window and it just – materialized. I would have sworn in any court, anywhere, that the window sill was empty, as it normally was.
Apparently, this is due to my brain filling in a lot of gaps for me. Since I didn’t need to interact with the window, I guess I spent those days using a stored image for that part of the kitchen. This seems to be the same for the feeling of complete vision in the house, but limited when out and about.
Weird. I was just reading this thread when I mentioned to my sister that some cookies I bought I didn’t like (while she was on the stepladder getting something out of the cupboard where the cookies were). She asked me why I didn’t throw them out. I said I already did.
She had to get back on the stepladder to confirm that they were gone. She’d looked in the cupboard, but didn’t notice they were gone before because her memory filled them in? As I said, it’s so weird.
As a child in the 60s I visited New York City three times and saw a variety of iconic sites. Since then I’ve seen the same images in person as an adult a number of times, and throughout my life seen them in television and movies. There cannot be a shred of my childhood memories left in my brain that could be separated from all those numerous images that have passed through since. Sometimes they were persistently associated with a host of other information. Sometimes they rapidly made their way from inbox to outbox only updating some metrics on the way. I could not now determine that any image in my mind came from what source and how it was processed. And that is the image alone, not including the wide complex net of associations and information that make up my memory of events. Thinking about this now I can’t reliably say I’ve ever seen the New York Public Library Lions with my own eyes, then or since.
My favorite story of this type is from High School in the '60s. Social Studies class. A large class that was held in the Choral room, so lots of room and raised steps for the desks. As class was settling down two boys jumped out of their chairs and started shouting and pushing one another. A confrontation. The teacher stepped in and ordered them both out of the room. Which they did. Then the smartest person in the class called fake-the boys were well known good kids. The teacher agreed. We all had to immediately write down everything that we had witnessed. Then we passed our writing to a few other students and they were quickly ranked as to completeness and detail. I am proud to say that my writing was judged to be the most accurate and complete by everyone who read it.
Then the 2 boys came back into the classroom and I read my report. When I looked up everyone had a surprised look. I had accurately described both boys and their actions-except that I had described the clothes both of them had worn the previous day. I could never have done that consciously.
It taught everyone to be very careful with eye-witness accounts.
me, in front of the open fridge: honey, are we out of mustard?
wife from a good distance away: no, we have a pack in the fridge.
me: scanning … NO, no mustard (turning away)
wife: it is in the fridge!!!
me: opening the door again … scanning again… NO, no mustard in the fridge!
wife: (standing now behind me, reaching over my shoulder, grabbing the mustard in the fridge, putting it in my hand): here you go - thank me later!!!
I already reckon with introspection: if for whatever reason stuff doesnt fit my “pre-programmed pattern” (e.g. mustard sitting upside down or short side to the front or mayonaise in a black package instead of the typical beige one) - I have a hard time “seeing” it …
which is very compatible with what is mentioned above, that seeing is a brain-eye compounded process.
Almost every time I reminisce with someone about an experience we shared, I realize we remember the event differently. I often find myself missing a piece of a memory and trying to fill it in by reasoning rather than actually remembering. I suspect most of us don’t remember things as well as we think.
I worked night security on campus at the University of Utah while I was going to school.
I had the most vivid memory of discovering that the Park Building, the historic administration building had a museum on the third floor. It was really cool, with many items such as the original globe and an old telescope.
The problem is that there is only the basement and two floors. I must have dreamed it.
When I was a kid I had a dream about opening the back of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and discovering another fancier bathroom behind it, all shiny white with a jacuzzi.
Except, my brother absolutely insisted he had that dream and just told me about it. Either we both had the same dream at around the same time, or one of us told the other our dream and implanted a memory, or one of us told the other about the dream and then the other had the same dream as suggested by the story.
But we both insisted forever that we were the one who originally had this dream.
I think vivid dreams may often be the cause. When you dream, and according to your sleeping brain, you are actually experiencing something, so it is entirely possible that your brain could incorporate it as a memory so that, later on, you might actually view it as a memory.
Wouldn’t it be interesting to live in a solar system where you could actually see other planets as spheres rather than points of light! (Quite a few SF movies seem to show a sky like that)!
I suspect a system like that would not be stable for any length of time, though.
In the right geometry and with a very clear sky and good eyes, Venus is very obviously not a point. It is a very small partial disc or obvious crescent.
But yeah, the SF “artists conceptions” where a circular planet of some interesting color fills one fourth of the sky and another smaller one peeks out from behind it farther away would be really cool to see.
Shame about the resulting tidal forces kneading your planet to the temps of molten rock. How long can you tread lava?
There are times when I can’t remember if I actually played a video game or just watched someone play it. Usually it’s a game I know I played at least a little bit of, but I’m not sure how far I actually got.
