Memory Researchers Explain How Brian Williams Forgot What Happened in Iraq

​The story goes something like this: NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams was aboard a military helicopter in Iraq in 2003 when it was hit by an RPG blast and forced to land. Everyone lived. Williams, by association, was quasi-heroic.

Except it didn't happen; not like that, at least. Wednesday, Williams admitted that he was in fact in a trailing helicopter that didn't take any fire but ended up landing along with the one that was hit.

"I don't know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another," Williams told Stars and Stripes. On his broadcast, he said that he "made a mistake in recalling the events of 12 years ago."

Erik Wemple over at the Washington Post wrote that "'conflating' the experience of taking incoming fire with the experience of not taking incoming fire seems verily impossible."

So, Williams is full of shit. He's just trying to save his soiled reputation. Right?

Maybe not. We all know that memory is a fickle thing, and Williams's story of conflated memory isn't exactly probable, but there's no way of knowing whether or not he's actually been purposely sharing a lie all these years. Many a memory researcher has studied false and conflated memories, and it turns out that there are several possible explanations for what happened here.

"Brian Williams's explanation seems very plausible," Dario Rodriguez, a false memory researcher at the University of Dayton, told me. "The event was stressful, happened a long time ago (memories weaken with time), and the account was retold (perhaps erroneously) for a long time in situations where he would know that he would be held accountable."

We commonly think that when something chaotic happens, we'll remember it better than if it were a normal day. That's not always true, however.

"Extreme stress actually harms memory, which may make recollections for those types of experiences particularly vulnerable to distortion," Rodriguez said. "Someone who is the victim of a violent mugging may certainly never forget that he was mugged, but the details of the memory for that experience could become distorted over time."

This has been demonstrated in laboratory tests and in several studies. While not exactly the same thing, there's the popular idea that people will never forget where they were when JFK was shot, or when 9/11 happened, or when the Challenger exploded. That's true, sort of: A study by Ulric Neisser, a highly-regarded cognitive psychologist, found that people weren't that great at recalling specific details of these so-called "flashbulb" memories.

After the Challenger explosion, ​Neisser interviewed college students about exactly what they were doing during the explosion. Three years later, he re-interviewed them and found significant lapses in their memories.

That study was about people who merely witnessed or heard about a major news event, not about someone who actually experienced it. So maybe Neisser's study can't be used to explain away Williams's experience. But combining two memories together to form one, or even combining a thing you heard about with a thing you experienced, is also extremely common and has been demonstrated in laboratory tests. It's called a "memory conjunction error."

"I can show you a bunch of words, for example, one is 'spaniel' and the other is 'burnish.' You might claim you saw the word 'Spanish,'" Harvard memory researcher Daniel Schacter, who wrote ​The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers, told me.

Schacter says this has been demonstrated in the real world, too. After the Oklahoma City bombing, the infamous "John Doe No. 1" and "John Doe No. 2" sketches were drawn based on the descriptions given by a man who worked in a body shop. John Doe No. 1 was McVeigh, John Doe No. 2 was a completely innocent man.

"His memory of McVeigh was accurate, and it was eventually figured out that his of John Doe No. 2 memory was an accurate description of an innocent military private who had been in the body shop the day after McVeigh with a guy who looked like McVeigh," Schacter said. "He put the two memories together to form one."

Schacter says that the laboratory tests that have proven this kind of thing is possible are different from remembering you were in a helicopter being shot at. He says that memory changes for other reasons, too: Memories can be distorted to suit one's ego, for instance.

"People remember the past in ways that are favorable to them," he said.

Much of Rodriguez's work has centered on the idea of false memories forming as a result of "dissonance inducing events." In other words, the mind when something happens that fundamentally changes your worldview, you may change your earlier memory and perceptions to better align with your new sense of self.

This idea could, possibly, explain how or why Williams changed his story from an accurate one soon after the event happened—Williams didn't initially report being in the fired-upon helicopter—to a false one later on.

It wasn't until 2007 that Williams suggested that all the helicopters in the formation, including his, were under fire. Other news reports (not Williams's) had previously suggested that maybe his Chinook was also under fire. Williams may have, somehow, convinced himself that this was actually the truth.

"If it really was an intentional misrepresentation of his experience, then his being presented with his credibility as a newscaster versus his intentional misrepresentation of the truth could produce dissonance, and his explanation of that inconsistency could be a strategy to bring those two cognitions in line with each other," suggested Rodriguez, who believes that ultimately it was an innocent mistake.

"It's possible that one can make an honest error, but then the memory trace for that error becomes strengthened over time because of the frequency with which that false memory trace is activated, and our brains try to find ways to integrate our disparate memories into a coherent sense of self and identity," he added.

The more times you remember that "false" memory, the more it becomes ingrained in your mind as the actual truth. And the Williams-plus-helicopter story has been told many, many times. Williams himself said that " the constant viewing of the video showing us inspecting the impact area" caused him to misremember.

Schacter says he doesn't know what was actually going on in Williams's mind. But how could anyone? Williams himself says that he "spent much of the weekend thinking [he'd] gone crazy."

Schacter says there are some weird things going in here—the idea of dissonance causing him to change his story is a bit farfetched, and why would his story change four years after it happened? But still, we can't discount what he's saying.

"All I can say is it's possible he's telling the truth and memories can be distorted, which can include situations like this where it's honestly difficult to believe that he'd not remember," Schacter said.

So, maybe Brian Williams is a lying liar who lies. But maybe he's just a guy who went through a traumatic event and honestly thought he was telling the truth. It's hard for any major public figure to earn the benefit of the doubt these days, but if you want to believe, well, maybe you have a reason to.