The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us by Christopher Chabris, Daniel Simons Page B
Authors: Christopher Chabris, Daniel Simons
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remember Mitroff coming into Dan’s office, but Silverman remembers Mitroff yelling from his office first. Dan recalled nothing about a discussion of the image of a plane next to the tower; Mitroff recalled Dan commenting that the plane was small and that the image of a larger plane was edited; and Silverman recalls making those comments himself.
Three cognitive psychologists had vivid memories for what they experienced on 9/11, but their memories conflicted in several ways. Ifmemory worked like a video recording, all three reports about 9/11 would be identical. In fact, there is no way to verify which of the accounts is most accurate. The best we can do is to assume that two independent and mutually consistent recollections are more likely to be correct than one recollection that conflicts with both. Many cases of memory failure are just like this, in that there is no documentary evidence to establish the ground truth of what actually happened.
In some cases, like Neil Reed’s confrontation with Bobby Knight, it is possible to compare people’s recollections to documentary evidence of what actually happened. President George W. Bush experienced a similar distortion to his memory of how he first learned about the attacks on the morning of 9/11. You might recall the video footage of Bush reading the story “The Pet Goat” to an elementary school class in Florida when his chief of staff, Andrew Card, walked in and whispered in his ear. His stunned reaction provided fodder for comics and commentators alike. That moment, caught on video, was how he heard about the plane hitting the
second
tower. It was his moment of realization that the United States was under attack. He’d already heard about the first plane before entering the classroom, but like many in the media, he believed that crash to have been a small aircraft accidentally veering into the tower.
On at least two occasions, Bush publicly recalled having seen the first plane hit the tower on television
before
entering the classroom. For example, on December 4, 2001, in response to a question from a young boy, he recalled, “I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower—the TV was obviously on, and I use[d] to fly myself, and I said, ‘There’s one terrible pilot.’ And I said, ‘It must have been a horrible accident.’” The problem is that the only video footage broadcast the day of the attacks was of the second plane. There was no video footage of the first plane’s impact available until long afterward. 36 Bush’s memory, although plausible, could not have been right. He correctly recalled Andrew Card entering the classroom following the crash of the second plane and telling him that America was under attack, but his memory of how and when he first heard about the attacks mixed up these details in a plausible but inaccurate way.
There was nothing necessarily malicious in Bush’s false memory—details sometimes shift in memory from one time to another or from one event to another. Yet conspiracy theorists, suffering from the illusion of memory (among other things), decided that Bush’s false recollections were not false at all, but Freudian slips that revealed a hidden truth. He said that he saw the first plane crash on television, so he must have seen it. And if he saw it, whoever shot that secret footage must have known where to point a camera in advance, so Bush must have known the attack was going to happen before it did. The illusion of memory made some people jump to the conclusion that the government deliberately permitted or possibly even planned the attacks, skipping right over the more plausible (but less intuitive) explanation that Bush simply conflated some aspects of his memory for the first and second plane impacts in the attack. 37
Experiments building on Brown and Kulik’s article on flashbulb memories have sought ways to verify the accuracy of these memories, often by obtaining
Three cognitive psychologists had vivid memories for what they experienced on 9/11, but their memories conflicted in several ways. Ifmemory worked like a video recording, all three reports about 9/11 would be identical. In fact, there is no way to verify which of the accounts is most accurate. The best we can do is to assume that two independent and mutually consistent recollections are more likely to be correct than one recollection that conflicts with both. Many cases of memory failure are just like this, in that there is no documentary evidence to establish the ground truth of what actually happened.
In some cases, like Neil Reed’s confrontation with Bobby Knight, it is possible to compare people’s recollections to documentary evidence of what actually happened. President George W. Bush experienced a similar distortion to his memory of how he first learned about the attacks on the morning of 9/11. You might recall the video footage of Bush reading the story “The Pet Goat” to an elementary school class in Florida when his chief of staff, Andrew Card, walked in and whispered in his ear. His stunned reaction provided fodder for comics and commentators alike. That moment, caught on video, was how he heard about the plane hitting the
second
tower. It was his moment of realization that the United States was under attack. He’d already heard about the first plane before entering the classroom, but like many in the media, he believed that crash to have been a small aircraft accidentally veering into the tower.
On at least two occasions, Bush publicly recalled having seen the first plane hit the tower on television
before
entering the classroom. For example, on December 4, 2001, in response to a question from a young boy, he recalled, “I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower—the TV was obviously on, and I use[d] to fly myself, and I said, ‘There’s one terrible pilot.’ And I said, ‘It must have been a horrible accident.’” The problem is that the only video footage broadcast the day of the attacks was of the second plane. There was no video footage of the first plane’s impact available until long afterward. 36 Bush’s memory, although plausible, could not have been right. He correctly recalled Andrew Card entering the classroom following the crash of the second plane and telling him that America was under attack, but his memory of how and when he first heard about the attacks mixed up these details in a plausible but inaccurate way.
There was nothing necessarily malicious in Bush’s false memory—details sometimes shift in memory from one time to another or from one event to another. Yet conspiracy theorists, suffering from the illusion of memory (among other things), decided that Bush’s false recollections were not false at all, but Freudian slips that revealed a hidden truth. He said that he saw the first plane crash on television, so he must have seen it. And if he saw it, whoever shot that secret footage must have known where to point a camera in advance, so Bush must have known the attack was going to happen before it did. The illusion of memory made some people jump to the conclusion that the government deliberately permitted or possibly even planned the attacks, skipping right over the more plausible (but less intuitive) explanation that Bush simply conflated some aspects of his memory for the first and second plane impacts in the attack. 37
Experiments building on Brown and Kulik’s article on flashbulb memories have sought ways to verify the accuracy of these memories, often by obtaining
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