The unreliable I. Listen in the night to a podcast discussing the utter unreliability of memory even when people are most certain of its accuracy. As they recount, all one has to do is google Brian Williams to be reminded of the newscaster’s classic invention of a “memory” of a wartime event that he did not in fact experience. And, even more surprisingly, the deeply held beliefs of many people regarding what they were doing when they first heard the news on 9/11 are demonstrably wrong.
A false memory of my own is of the same order. As a child I met a man whose father had been killed (as I remember him telling it) by suffragettes who mistook him for Lloyd George. But decades later, when I realised that this must be a googlable event, it became clear that he must only have been injured, albeit by murderously inclined women. Obviously the man would not have described this as being killed. Rewritten in my memory.
And a tiny example today. The sign outside the supermarket asking patrons not to remove carts is not written in English only, amusing as that might be. Less amusingly my Anglo eyes immediately rejected the Turkish writing I did not understand and took in only the English instructions, which I remembered almost immediately after as being the only ones there. “Yes, I remember it well”.
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