Brian Williams not alone in having false memories

It seems hard to believe that NBC News anchor Brian Williams would remember riding in a helicopter that was shot down if he was nowhere near it, but there are reasons that it's plausible.

Ask Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist who pioneered the study of false memory — what happens when people remember things that didn't happen or remember them differently than how they happened.

She has conducted hundreds of experiments on more than 30,000 people over the past 40 years. She has found that a person's memory is highly susceptible to suggestions or insinuations from conversations with other people or from watching, reading or listening to news stories.

Most people, she says, think of their memory as a recording device that they can turn on and off, one that records everything precisely. But she says it is more pliable.

Think, for example, of a conversation with a relative who recounts an event as if it was firsthand but it really happened to you, she says. In those instances, the person may have heard about an event often, and over time it became so familiar that it felt like the person's own experience.

She says everyone also embellishes memories or adds to them when they recount them, and over time those changes become part of the memory.

"Frankly, we are all vulnerable to having our memories tampered with," she says. "Your memory is not a recording device. It's more like a Wikipedia page. You can change it, but other people can, too."

Williams, 55, came under criticism after he honored a retired command sergeant major at a New York Rangers hockey game Friday and told the crowd a story about being in a helicopter that was hit by RPG fire.

Except he wasn't.

Crew members on the helicopter that was hit told Stars and Stripes that Williams was nowhere near the aircraft. Williams and his camera crew were aboard a Chinook that was about an hour behind the three helicopters that came under fire, according to Stars and Stripes.

That prompted an apology by Williams on the Nightly News on Wednesday. He told his audience, "I want to apologize. I said I was traveling in an aircraft that was hit by RPG fire. I was instead in a following aircraft.

"This was a bungled attempt by me to thank one special veteran," he said. "I don't know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another."

Different aspects of a memory are stored in different parts of the brain, says Kevin LaBar, a Duke University neuroscientist who studies memory and emotion. For example, the visual elements of a memory go to one area, and auditory elements go to another. When people retrieve a memory, not all the pieces come back to them, which is why we rarely recall 100% of a memory, he says.

He says if someone talks about an event frequently, the memory of it is susceptible to change over time. In Williams' case, LaBar says, the veteran journalist was covering a war, which would have been stressful and would have affected his memory. Over time, he could have confused his experience with something he saw, someone he interviewed or footage he viewed of the downed helicopter.

The other factor that can contribute to a faulty memory is age, LaBar says. He says the normal wear and tear on the brain makes confused memories more likely.

Loftus says there are two plausible scenarios with Williams' faulty memory: He lied and knows it, or the event became a false memory that he believed.

She compares what the anchor called a bungled memory to a story Hillary Clinton recounted during her run for president in 2008. She said she had come under sniper fire on a trip to Bosnia in 1996 when she was first lady. She described how she and her daughter, Chelsea, ran for cover with their heads down when their plane landed. However, video of the trip showed Clinton and her daughter walking calmly from the plane and being met by a young girl during a ceremony on the tarmac. There was no sign of danger or sniper fire.

Loftus points to one study she conducted in which researchers told adult subjects that they heard the participant had gotten lost in a shopping mall as children and a senior citizen helped them find their parents. She said researchers successfully planted that false memory in a quarter of the subjects.

In another, a third of participants came to believe the false memory that they nearly drowned and had to be rescued by a lifeguard as children.

In each of those studies, the people retold their false memories with detail, confidence and filled with emotion.

The lesson, she says, is don't believe a story based on a person's memory, no matter how sure they sound. Make sure there's corroborating evidence.

Her research has made her a lot more forgiving about lapses in memory she sees in friends, family and people in the public eye.

Loftus says, "Let's give Williams a break."