On a more recent event.
Many people swear that they heard Sarah Palin say she could see Russia from her house.
Not a political post. Just an example.
What she actually said was close enough:
“They’re our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.”
I disagree. I actually did see the Challenger explosion live. I was an elementary school student in Central Florida at the time, and my class went outside to watch the launch in the sky.
What we saw was a trail of “smoke” as the shuttle launched into the air (from our distance, you couldn’t actually see the shuttle, but you could see its exhaust). That turned into a big cloud of smoke when the shuttle exploded, followed by two divergent paths of smoke (I’m not positive what that represented, but I believe it was a booster). Nitpick, if you wish, as to the details of what exploded, but there was definitely a distinctive explosion in the sky.
Being about 7 years old, and standing outside without the benefit of a television anchorman, I didn’t know what had happerned. However, it was cold, and my friend had gone inside to get a jacket. When he came out, he explained what had happened, since he had seen the television in our classroom. (Of course, in the spirit of this thread, I’ll concede that this part of the experience may not have happened exactly this way).
“What she actually said was close enough:”
No, it is not. Two completely different statements, and implications.
You missed the point. Some people swear that they saw, and heard, Palin say the EXACT words. They did not.
I’ve read about this kind of thing so many times and it still seems incredible to me. I can not imagine how I could think I “remembered” something that someone has just now, this instant, simply made up out of whole cloth. (But then, there are few things I remember from past a few years ago anyway… so for all I know I just tend not to form memories, real or pseudo-, in general.)
Does anyone know if there are systematic levels of suceptibility? I mean, are some people more prone to this and some less? Or is it just pretty much everyone who can be made to confabulate so blatantly?
-FrL-
Did Tina Fey say it?
-FrL-
Yes. “I can see Russia from my house” was a Tiny Fey-as-Sarah Palin gag that parodied the Charles Gibson interview where Palin said “They’re our next door neighbors and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska.”
Yes, on a SNL skit.
The complete quote, taken from the skit: “And, I can see Russia from my house.”
One line from a skit about five minutes long.
No, it’s not “close enough.”
What Palin actually said was completely accurate. What Palin is thought to have said is ludicrously inaccurate.
Thanks for the examples, everyone.
Strictly speaking, Alice The Goon is correct; as I detail in [post=8796614]this post[/post], the Challenger did not explode. What occurred, in brief, is that a jet of hot gas leaking through a field joint in the starboard Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) cut through the outer skin of the External Tank (ET) and into the enclosed liquid hydrogen (LH2) tank, resulting in collapse of the ET and subsequent structural failure of the truss structure that tied the SRBs to the ET. This structural failure caused both the liquid oxygen (LOX) and LH2 tanks within the ET to rupture, releasing LH2 and LOX into the atmosphere where they spontaneously combined in a combustion reaction which, while dramatic, did little by itself to damage the Shuttle Orbiter, and technically was not an explosion as the pressure wave developed were only modestly above ambient pressure. The Shuttle, suddenly freed of the extra weight of all the released propellant, saw imparted axial and lateral thrust loads as well as aerodynamic loads well in excess of structural margins and came apart like a cheap gold watch. It was this, not the cloud of combusting propellant, which caused the Orbiter to break up.
The “two divergent paths of smoke” were indeed the SRBs which flew free of the wreckage, and did in fact explode (although the propellant did not detonate) when the Range Safety Officer activated the Flight Termination Linear Shaped Charges that run alongside the case of the SRBs. (This splits the SRBs open causing loss of chamber pressure and subsequent termination of thrust and reduction in propellant surface burn rate.)
However, I’ll submit that the breakup at T+73.13 looked like what a layman would call an explosion, and your observation is on point as a record of what you saw. But the oft-described explosion at that point was not any kind of explosion, just near-ambient pressure combustion resulting from (rather than being the proximate cause of) the breakup.
This is absolutely the case. Memory is nothing but a collection of preferred synaptic connections; in short term memory, these connections are created by an enhanced release of glutamate which is governed by 3’-5’-cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP). In persistent (long term) memory actual synaptic functions are formed but to continued presence of cAMP, which creates more pathways to same impulse chain. While these pathways are more permanent than the transitory presence of high glutamate concentrations, they can atrophy over time if not used.
Although the more complex memories involved in higher cognition are still not well understood, all current knowledge and theories about memory is that these are just massive interrelated networks of collections of as described above. However, when the memories are “accessed” by stimulation, more connections are made to existing and new memory structures, which can alter how the memories are accessed and what other cognitive processes are stimulated when they are. Hence, memories are inherently subject to constant revision, and the more you recall them, the more they will become entrenched in the context that you remember them rather than the context in which they were originally formed.
For instance, if you have an early childhood memory of your grandmother baking, and someone later tells you that she often baked snickerdoodles for you, you may recall her baking snickerdoodles and/or recall the memory of her baking any time you eat snickerdoodles even though she may have actually been making gooseberry pie. In your brain, the visual memory of “grandmother baking” and the olfactory impulse of fresh baked sugar cookies may become inexorably intertwined even though these were originally two separate memory structures. So the more you revisit a memory, the more likely it is to be the same or similar memory (provided you don’t add additional impulses to it) but it may be a progressive conflation or bastardization of the original event that stimulated the memory in the first place.
To answer Frylock’s question about susceptibility, it is clearly the case that some people form very literal and explicit memories and others form memories that are vague or easily influenced. This is most apparent in the so-called idiots savant who can perform seemingly outlandish feats of memorization like being able to recall an entire phone book or accurately reproducing the minor details of a picture after a single glance; such abilities are usually accompanied by autistic spectrum disorders or other mental defects, but there are cases of exceptionally functional people demonstrating remarkable abilities of memory or memory-related tasks. Even the more average person can improve the accuracy and literalness of memories by training exercises and tricks, albeit to a limited extent and only with conscious effort.
On the other hand, many people will intentionally (if consciously or otherwise) alter their memories to create a reaction more amenable to their value system or view of the world, hence how people can ‘remember’ being in the womb, or abuse as an infant, events in past lives, and other extremely unlikely experiences. Many people will remember past events in a way more favorable to themselves, such as being the victim rather than the instigator in a bad relationship. This, along with other influences, makes the use of polygraph, hypnosis and other “truth telling” techniques of highly questionable objective merit.
And while having a good memory and “being smart” are generally considered to go hand in hand I’m not convinced that memory and functional logical reasoning ability (i.e. “common sense”) are closely tied together except insofar as having at least a moderate ability to remember and learn from past experience. There are certainly many people with good memories who have poor reasoning skills, and others with poor memories but an ability to connect concepts together quickly.
For most of us, memory is a very tricky and unreliable part of our cognitive experience of both the external world and the internal experience. You may think, or even believe with all of your heart, that you remember some event having occurred one way even though all objective evidence demonstrates otherwise. This is why the lawyer’s old saw that “if it isn’t written down, it never happened,” can be applied anywhere in life. It’s not just that other people are liars; you may be unreliable yourself.
Eric Kandel’s *In Search of Memory* is a great non-technical introduction to the current neurophysiological understanding of memory formation as well as a fascinating and personal autobiographical account of his unlikely career as a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist. Ian Glynn’s An Anatomy of Thought is a good semi-technical (but still accessible to someone with a basic grounding in biology) description of the current knowledge how memory relates to cognition and the most accepted hypotheses of how both may have developed.
Stranger
I saw the Challenger “explode” live. I was one of the lucky few watching the raw satellite feed in Elementary school.
At this point, my memory is hazy enough that I’m not sure it matters. I don’t think I remember an announcer or anything… not sure if there was even NASA radio chatter. Nobody was quite sure what was going on. I don’t remember my immediate reaction, nor what the teacher did at that point, but I remember it affecting me pretty deeply.
This sort of thing has happened to me several times. In one particularly memorable case, there was a comic book which I had wanted in the early 1960’s, but my parents would not let me buy. (I forget why.) When I finally made it back to the store, a newer issue was on sale, but not the one I wanted. For many years I tried to find the one I wanted. The picture on the cover was indelibly etched in my mind, and over the years I went to many back-issue comic dealers in search of it. Knowing the cover so clearly was helpful, but even more helpful was my memory of the following month’s issue. On many occasions I did find that second one, which gave me a pretty good fix on the month and year of the one I was looking for. But the issue from a couple of months before that proved very elusive. Finally, in the late 1990’s, I searched EBay, where I could browse cover art without too much difficulty. After about two weeks, I finally did find the issue I was looking for. But I was disappointed to find that although the great majority of the cover was EXACTLY as I remembered, one key item was different. My reaction was “Well THAT’s not so interesting. From THAT picture I can figure out how Superman will solve this problem.”
I plead guilty, your honor. It seems that my memory had enhanced the cover of that comic to fit an even more intriguing storyline.
In the years since, I have found other cases where a character in a movie or tv show will say something, and I’ll comment that a much better line would have been such-and-such. Sometimes, my imagining of the character saying the other words becomes so vivid in my mind that it becomes a false memory, and I get disappointed when the rerun shows the version that I had forgotten. Much like Sr Siete’s memory of the statue. This is surely what happened to so many people’s memory of The Newlywed Game – the imagined line was so enjoyable that the constant replaying in the mind made it into a memory.
Guilty as charged. I’d swear I’ve seen the Thunderbird picture, but damn if I remember what book it was. I’ve seen at least one of the fakes more recently, but it’s definitely not the picture I remember.
Long shot, I know, but it wasn’t an episode of Get Smart was it?
was it?
This is an interesting thread, because I understand completely where it’s coming from.
I know I didn’t see the Kennedy assassination because I was in the backyard with my mother and the meterman came by and told us it happened. But my memory says I did see it.
I know I didn’t see the Challenger disaster because I was asleep and my wife called me to tell me what happened. I worked nights then.
I also know I didn’t see Columbia disintegrate right over my house, in Dallas, because again, I had been asleep, but I woke up to watch the landing. It was fairly early that day, which I believe was a Saturday, and I remember the news saying something had happened. Then I saw, I think, the video of the destruction in replay, before anyone really knew what happened.
However, I do have a question.
On Sept. 11, I was driving to work and I was stuck in traffic. I remember listening to the local radio station’s (WBAP, Dallas) morning news crew just before 8 a.m. central time saying that something had happened at the WTC. They were speculating that a small plane or commuter jet had crashed into one of the towers. Shortly afterward, they went to the top-of-the-hour news at 8. It was ABC radio.
What I remember it this: ABC was interviewing a guy on the street about ten minutes later and he said he saw the first tower explode and then he said; “Just like the second tower is exploding now.” or so somesuch. Does any else remember that?
There’s a famous episode of the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson where Zsa Zsa comes on carrying a cat. She arranges herself on the couch, then says to Johnny, “Would you like to pet my pussy?”. Johnny replies, “Sure - move the damn cat.”.
Millions of people claim to have seen it. Didn’t happen.
There was a late-season episode of Newhart in which vain and greedy Michael and Stephanie are charging people to see their newborn daughter, with the value of the gift determining how close a visitor can get. The brothers Larry, Darryl and Darryl offered a frozen goose and Michael, who had a habit of alliteration, said:
“I guess a goose is good for a gander.”
This line tickled me endlessly. Some years later, I happened to catch the episode and waited eagerly for the line. Then, at the critical moment, what Michael really says is:
“If you’re good for a goose, we’re good for a gander.”
I prefer my version.
I think this is exactly how a lot of urban legends keep going on forever. People hear a BS story so many times it turns into a memory. How many people claim to have seen the “Cram it clownie” incident on Bozo? It must’ve happened in every single market the way people talk about it.