When I was about eight years old and my youngest brother about six, Tim and I and our parents were coming back from a trip somewhere. I don't remember where we were coming from but we were going home. Tim and I were fussing. We had been fussing the whole damn trip and all members of the genus parents know how annoying and ultimately exasperating that can be. Mum and Dad had told us to stop fussing, we would stop but would then reengage and this went on for hours. Mum and Dad reached their breaking point. We were driving on a corkscrew mountain road--I can still see the road curving away from me to the right and disappearing--when Dad abruptly pulled the car over into a dugout by the side of a shale rock hill and told Tim and me to get out. We did and Mum and Dad got back in the car and drove off.
Abandoned! Tim and I were shocked; we didn't know where we were or how to get back home on foot so we just stood there and cried. We were still whimpering when Mum and Dad came back around the road from the opposite direction about 5 minutes later. Abandonment and rescue. Tim and I had just been in the plot of every Disney movie. We didn't fuss no more, I'll tell you that, hooo-doggie.
Thirty years or so later Tim and I were talking on the phone, just bs-ing, we must have been reminiscing, and we were laughing as we told stories and I mentioned the above incident and asked Tim if he remembered where it happened and where we were coming from. "I don't remember that," he said and he meant the entire incident, not just the "wheres." I couldn't believe it. "Don't you remember..." and I repeated it in detail and he still didn't. We chalked it up to the two year age difference which can be significant at 8 and 6.
Months or years after that phone conversation, it was after our father passed away, I was reminiscing with my older brother Don on the porch of our parents' retirement house. My parents had four children, all boys, but there were really two generations of children. Don is 10 years older than I am and Mike is 14 years older. Then there's me and Tim, 2 years younger. So, Tim and I really did not grow up with Don and Mike. Don and Mike were not in the car with us at the time of the "abandonment incident," they were probably in college and certainly were not living at home. I told Don about the abandonment incident and added with astonishment "And Tim doesn't remember it!" Without hesitation, Don said, "Ben, that happened to Mike and me, it didn't happen to you and Tim."
I felt struck dumb for an instant. "Really?," when I next spoke. "I have such a specific recollection of it." And I had; all of the details had been correct. I have no memory of ever being told of the incident--If I had such a memory it would not have morphed into my own experience!-- but at some point I was told about it, by Don or Mike or Mum or Dad or some combination and somehow, at some point, my mind did some transference thing and I and Tim became Mike and Don. Man, I would have testified under oath about that incident and could have passed every lie detector test in the world on that memory because I had not lied. It was a false statement but not a knowing false statement.
I thought of this today when I skimmed over a portion of an article in Slate on the Brian Williams situation. Our minds are amazing things, they enable us to have memories without which we could not function in the real world, we'd go around touching hot stoves all the time without remembering that the first time we did that we burned our fingers. But our minds also work mysteriously, they play tricks on us, they are the source of our imagination and enable us to create new worlds out of fragments yet sometimes our minds produce "false memories" that all of us in the criminal law are familiar with. Witnesses in criminal cases who testify falsely do not always do so knowingly; they too could pass lie detector tests. They are wrong nonetheless, I was wrong, Brian Williams was wrong. I did not lie; most witnesses in criminal cases do not lie (And most of the time they are accurate as well!); I do not know if Brian Williams lied but one can be factually wrong--spectacularly, as I was--and still not have lied.
Abandoned! Tim and I were shocked; we didn't know where we were or how to get back home on foot so we just stood there and cried. We were still whimpering when Mum and Dad came back around the road from the opposite direction about 5 minutes later. Abandonment and rescue. Tim and I had just been in the plot of every Disney movie. We didn't fuss no more, I'll tell you that, hooo-doggie.
Thirty years or so later Tim and I were talking on the phone, just bs-ing, we must have been reminiscing, and we were laughing as we told stories and I mentioned the above incident and asked Tim if he remembered where it happened and where we were coming from. "I don't remember that," he said and he meant the entire incident, not just the "wheres." I couldn't believe it. "Don't you remember..." and I repeated it in detail and he still didn't. We chalked it up to the two year age difference which can be significant at 8 and 6.
Months or years after that phone conversation, it was after our father passed away, I was reminiscing with my older brother Don on the porch of our parents' retirement house. My parents had four children, all boys, but there were really two generations of children. Don is 10 years older than I am and Mike is 14 years older. Then there's me and Tim, 2 years younger. So, Tim and I really did not grow up with Don and Mike. Don and Mike were not in the car with us at the time of the "abandonment incident," they were probably in college and certainly were not living at home. I told Don about the abandonment incident and added with astonishment "And Tim doesn't remember it!" Without hesitation, Don said, "Ben, that happened to Mike and me, it didn't happen to you and Tim."
I felt struck dumb for an instant. "Really?," when I next spoke. "I have such a specific recollection of it." And I had; all of the details had been correct. I have no memory of ever being told of the incident--If I had such a memory it would not have morphed into my own experience!-- but at some point I was told about it, by Don or Mike or Mum or Dad or some combination and somehow, at some point, my mind did some transference thing and I and Tim became Mike and Don. Man, I would have testified under oath about that incident and could have passed every lie detector test in the world on that memory because I had not lied. It was a false statement but not a knowing false statement.
I thought of this today when I skimmed over a portion of an article in Slate on the Brian Williams situation. Our minds are amazing things, they enable us to have memories without which we could not function in the real world, we'd go around touching hot stoves all the time without remembering that the first time we did that we burned our fingers. But our minds also work mysteriously, they play tricks on us, they are the source of our imagination and enable us to create new worlds out of fragments yet sometimes our minds produce "false memories" that all of us in the criminal law are familiar with. Witnesses in criminal cases who testify falsely do not always do so knowingly; they too could pass lie detector tests. They are wrong nonetheless, I was wrong, Brian Williams was wrong. I did not lie; most witnesses in criminal cases do not lie (And most of the time they are accurate as well!); I do not know if Brian Williams lied but one can be factually wrong--spectacularly, as I was--and still not have lied.
