Here and Now
Have you ever been hanging out with friends and somebody starts telling a story from your shared past and they’re telling it just so wrong? You KNOW that’s not how it happened, because you were there too, and that’s not how you remember it. So, you look confused and (trying to be nice and never more sure of yourself than now) say, “No, it couldn’t have been Laura’s birthday, because that’s in April and we were in the mountains in the fall”, or whatever truth that will prove you remember it right, and your friend looks straight at you and says “No, I’m positive. It was her birthday and we were in the mountains.”
False memory has entered the room.
Actually quite common, false memory happens because of the way our brain stores events. While it would be nice to have a tiny little VHS recorder just south of the hippocampus to replay our lives with precision, our brains do not store things in one dimension, nor do they store them the same way every time. Each time we summon a memory, our mind “rebuilds the scene from fragments: emotions, sensory impressions, stories, and associations.” (OpenAI, ChatGPT, 25 Aug. 2025), and your fragments are not the same as mine, or those of anyone else who was there.
Try it for yourself: reach back and remember something big in your life: getting your driver’s license, having your first date, or moving away from home. That memory contains some of the same sights, sounds, and emotions that live in other memories too, and it’s more efficient for your brain to store them on your upstairs storage shelves, as it were, and piece them back together when one of these memories is called forth. Also, (don’t say you haven’t done this), because we sometimes “embellish” a story or make a mistake in a date or location, new or inaccurate things will weave their way into the memory and come out the next time we tell the story. Our stories revise themselves and we have no clue.
You’re at the Thanksgiving table. Your cousin shares an anecdote from the way-back and several of you kids were there for it, but not everything sounds right to you. Your other cousins at the table are thinking the same thing. Were you each to tell the story, every version would differ in some (hopefully minor) way. Should you wish to resolve the discrepancies, your family’s dynamics will shape the way this happens. If your precious granny insists that it happened her way, you’ll probably all lay it down and leave it there with respect for her. But if Cousin Eddie is in town, and he insists it happened HIS way, and he is obnoxious on other levels too, the whole table may rise up and empty into the yard, swinging like a clutch of Happy Gilmore’s boys.
If you read my December column, you know some of my decades-old college escapades. Last week, we three roommates were together again and as the stories started to flow, there were some pretty big differences in what we remembered. We were having such fun that it wasn’t a problem; we easily said, “You’re probably right” or “I don’t remember that” as needed. Those formative years of long hair, Doral Menthols, and meal tickets had been some of the best of our lives, and since we hadn’t all shared every adventure, it was fun to hear each other’s renditions.
Shelley reminded us that Josephine’s boyfriend Carlton had lived in her dorm room for a while (this was years before boys were allowed on the hall). Neither Marsha nor I remembered that, but I guess that was the point, for no one to know about it, so, mission accomplished.
Next, Shelley recounted one evening after open dorm visitation, when our suitemates’ suitors weren’t ready to leave and hid in our shower until the hall proctor had finished her sweep. I didn’t remember much about this event, and Marsha didn’t remember it at all, (most likely because she was at the library). I did, however, recall the Christmas break that my motorcycle spent couched in the cozy confines of my dormitory closet. We scrunched it in there and pulled the accordion door closed, but we couldn’t fix the way the handlebars pooched it out. Yeah, I did that. Gas tank in the closet. Looking back at the Golden Age of Mischief, sometimes I scare myself.
We all remembered the night that I tossed back the last half of a Diet Pepsi that had sat on our dresser overnight. As I swallowed, I realized that something small, flat and solid had gone down with the drink. It couldn’t have been a cigarette butt; they’re not flat and besides, we had an ashtray and knew how to use it. Hysterical screams burst into the hallway as I realized that I could possibly…hopefully not, but possibly…have swallowed a little bitty cockroach! Thanks to my strong (albeit queasy) stomach, we never found out what it was, but Josephine made it into yet another of our stories by resolving to not let me forget about it. For days, she would walk backwards by our door, mocking a backstroke, and singing a high-pitched “dee-dee-dee-dee-dee”, allegedly the song of a young cockroach in a tummy swim..
Marsha came next. Despite not remembering the boys in the shower, she said she would never forget the night that somebody put two live swans in there. Now, we clearly had a busy shower, but I’m as certain as I am alive that it never sheltered swans.
Let’s unpack this thing. Furman has a gorgeous campus and our dorms overlooked a beautiful lake across which the bell tower reigned majestic. The lake was large but shallow, and was bordered by a low rock wall that kept the water where it was supposed to be. It did not, however, do the same thing for Furman girls on somebody’s birthday. I got thrown in freshman year and, as adventurous as I was, this December event was not one bit fun. I stood up in the slippery muck that was generated, I knew, by the lovely waterfowl that gave a feathery dimension to the lake, and swore to celebrate future birthdays off-campus.
The ducks were wild-colored (not that Easter-duck-white) and pretty, and of course the swans were beautiful too. With your now-clear vision of lake, wall, muck, ducks, and swans, please tell me if there’s any universe in which an intrepid college girl would (a) desire to capture two swans, (b) be ABLE to capture two swans if she so desired, or most of all, (c) wrangle said swans into her own personal bathing space, and (d) get them to stay there??? It was hard enough to keep those showers clean without someone parking a couple of incontinent waterfowl in there!
I just don’t think we did that. To be sure, and in fairness to Marsha, all the components of this memory did exist, but this just doesn’t work on so many levels. Picture the low rock wall, and the shallow muck. Picture how fast swans can flap-swim away when they want to (or spit at you when they don’t). Picture their awkward bottom-heavy shape and their shiny wet feathers. Picture your feet miring up in that mucky you-know-what-containing mud. How could you ever catch one swan out there, much less two? And even if you caught one, picture the flapping, squawking bird being borne across the lawn, into the dormitory, down the hall, and into the shower. Twice. I just can’t.
I’m not saying Marsha has a false memory; knowing our crowd, it could absolutely be true. I’m just saying I don’t remember it. And this, treasured reader, is how friends resolve their false memory stories: they either concede, “You’re probably right; I just remember it differently”, or they bail, “I just don’t remember it”. We southern girls are too polite to say “You’re wrong!” Either way, we didn’t let those hypothetically showering swans cloud our evening of fellowship; we love one another way too much for that.
In fairness to my two Rooms, I’ll close with a false memory of my own. After living in New Orleans for several years, Shelley and her husband Ed moved to Boston in the mid-80’s and I went up to see them. I remember the weather being oppressively hot, to the extent that Shelley and I rode tour buses around town because they were air conditioned (their house was not). I enjoyed the visit of course, but for forty years I’ve told people I’ve never been as hot as I was in Boston. I remember Ed driving us up to the Cape in their air-conditioned car to eat lobster out in a wonderful sea breeze. I remember being pregnant with Jedd, and Shelley and Ed anticipating the adoption of their first son, Charlie, soon.
Shelley remembered my visit and the lobster, but not the hot weather. I said let’s look up 1985 weather records to see how hot it was. She said it could not have been 1985 because they didn’t move to Boston until February of 1986, and she also said that Charlie was born in April that year. These are not dates that Shelley would falsely remember, and they totally derailed the time frame of my visit. In February of 1986, my son Jedd was four months old; I would not have left him at home with his dad and four year old sister yet. And even if I had, there was certainly no heat wave in Boston from February to April. I cannot dispute Shelley’s dates, I know they didn’t have Charlie yet, and I also know I didn’t visit in 1986. I am hugely confused and simply cannot reconcile this thing. Here is my own very strong, very wrong false memory, and there’s no way to ever find the truth.
One thing good has come of it though: the inspiration for this month’s column. So for that, you are welcome and I hope you’ve enjoyed it!
