False Memory vs Constructive Memory: A case study of BW

Source

Subject BW is a 55 year old male with 12 years of education plus 18 college credits. For the past 34 years he has been employed in journalism. His case was brought to attention when his dramatic first-person story that he’s told and retold since 2003 of being in a helicopter near another helicopter that was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq suddenly morphed into a different story where his helicopter was the one that was hit. In the aftermath of this change in story he was suspended from his job, with all signs that he will be fired. Previously, I showed that everyone's stories change over time, where details are changed, details are added and details are omitted (Kurczek, 2014). Everyone has heard of fishing tales where the fish gets bigger and bigger every telling, but not everyone tells their story over and over again on camera. I've since seen story after story after story about false memories and while I was impressed with the slate article (except for the blatant plugging of their book), I can't see why false memories keep being brought up.

Episodic memory, our memory for the events we experience in life is inexorably linked with episodic narrative, how we tell the stories of our memories. However, does the episodic narrative of an episodic memory constitute the entire memory? Stories are altered by the contexts that we are in including the people that we are telling our memory to (your friend versus your parent versus a research assistant) and the time (i.e. how much time you have to talk and how long its been since the experience). Is someone lying because their narrative of their memory changes in different contexts? This is not to say that contextual changes mean that instead of a helicopter in front of you getting hit be a RPG its all of a sudden your helicopter, but makes the point that our memories are inherently labile, constantly going through changes as they are disused or updated in subsequent re-experiencing. Few people's lives are documented as news anchors, politicians, and celebrities (the other cases highlighted in the slate article) so our own fibs, embellishments and misremembered events are brought to light and to shame at the same frequency. BW's downfall, as with previous politicians stems from our perceived belief that they be trustworthy, how can you trust anything someone says when one of their memories appears to be a lie? In the future we may be able to go to the tape, but for now we just have to understand that (almost) all of our memories are flawed and constructed from bits and pieces of what we perceived to be the experience and (un)motivated remembering and forgetting of the experience in the time since.

P.S. How does one become a quoted expert, do you have to write a book or something? Considering that my dissertation included a chapter on narrative and memory and how narratives change over time in healthy individuals and individuals with amnesia, I think I may have been of service in this case. I guess this blog will have to do for now