THE SCIENTIFIC DEFENCE OF BRIAN WILLIAMS
Thanks to false-memory research, NBC news anchor’s explanation of his exploits in Iraq war zone may not be as far-fetched as it sounds.
The irony is that Brian Williams is now under fire.
He could even be fired for “misremembering” an event in 2003. He was covering the Iraq War when a U.S. military helicopter came under fire and was forced to land. Williams was not aboard that Chinook. He was riding in a different helicopter, one that arrived on the scene about an hour later.
But in the following years, as he recalled the in- cident, his brain seems to have conjured a cruel illusion. (Well, at least, if you believe his explanation.)
The two events — witnessing the grounded chopper moments after flying in a similar aircraft — fused together in his memory. There was a conflation between the real and the vicarious, between what he accurately reported in 2003 and how he later remembered it.
His story evolved until, one day, he was in that chopper under fire.
On Saturday, as the scandal deepened and a growing mob of critics called for his talking head, Williams announced he was stepping aside as anchor of NBC Nightly News “for the next several days.”
NBC is investigating other possible fabrications. You can bet rival networks and online sleuths are also placing Williams under a truth microscope to see if his past words prove he’s a chronic fibber and merchant of tall tales.
But until the investigation is complete, until there is proof this was a wilful deception, we should be giving Williams the benefit of the doubt for one reason: science is on his side. As far-fetched as his explanation may sound — how can someone wrongly remember being on a helicopter that was attacked? — it is entirely plausible.
We like to think of our memories as a video recording that keeps a perfect log of our lives. The truth is, these recordings are prone to overdubs, to deleted scenes and added dialogue, to changes in time and place and context.
Memory is dynamic. It can be unreliable.
Just ask my wife who, at least once a month, suffers a brutal false memory about some household chore I allegedly failed to do. I’ve started saying “Nice to see you” instead of “Nice to meet you” at parties after using the latter and having more than one person on the other end of the handshake respond with something like: “Oh, we met in the ’90s. We were arguing about rocket propulsion and then we got chased down the street by a pack of stray dogs before ducking into a seedy diner. Don’t you remember?” No, actually, I don’t. Coincidentally, as Williams was announcing his indefinite leave this weekend, the Star published a fascinating story about a new study in which psychologists got innocent subjects to “falsely remember having committed crimes as severe as assault with a weapon.”
This follows years of similar research and clinical studies, in which subjects were led to falsely believe they had witnessed everything from demonic possession to ritual sacrifice, had been attacked by vicious animals or nearly drowned. In perhaps the weirdest one of all, subjects wrongly believed they had proposed to a Pepsi machine.
We can debate the ethics of this and, to be sure, the field of false memory research is a fierce battleground for socio-political reasons. What’s beyond debate is that memory is fragile and susceptible to warping. If an otherwise sensible person can believe he fell in love with a vending machine — and get emotional when sharing the vivid details — is it that big a stretch to believe Williams?
Elizabeth Loftus, a psychology professor at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the world’s foremost authorities on memory, helped pioneer false memory research with a 1995 study.
When I call her to discuss the Williams case, she makes this observation: “As I listen to people say, ‘Oh, there’s no way he could misremember this, he has to be deliberately lying,’ they need to read some psy- chological work on memory distortion. As somebody who has been planting false memories in the minds of people for a long time, I know how relatively easy it is to get people to remember very richly detailed events that never happened.”
The big difference, of course, is Williams was not a lab subject. There are also questions that stray beyond memory. How did he conflate being on the helicopter from watching the 2003 footage when in the original story he clearly states he was not on the attacked helicopter? Why didn’t anyone aboard his helicopter, including an NBC crew, flag this discrepancy when it first surfaced years ago?
This is for investigators to unravel. But before we tear his career and reputation asunder, we should at least consider the possibility Brian Williams is telling the truth about how he came to believe a lie. vmenon@thestar.ca