Photo by Deniz Demirci
I expected to have aches and pains and to be hard of hearing in my old age, but I didn’t think I would start questioning my memory. However, as Mark Twain once said, “The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened.”
Some time ago, my older brothers Danny, Larry, and I were talking about our childhood, and I asked, “Do y’all remember that time we were squirrel hunting in Dugdemona swamp with Pop, and our dogs found a dead wolf?”
Larry’s response was unexpected. “I remember the wolf,” he said, “but I thought I found it while hunting alone in the swamp.”
Then Danny said, “I thought I was the one who found it off the Carter Crossing Road.”
The three of us clearly remembered a dead wolf, but we all had very different recollections as to who found it and where. How could that be?
This wasn’t the first time I have questioned my memory. Once, I was telling Carol about something that happened years ago, but she stopped me and said, “You weren’t there. I was and told you about it.”
Carol convinced me that she was correct, so somehow over the years my brain took an event that had happened to her and filed it away as one of my own memories. That’s weird.
I have vivid memories of stories my elders told me when I was a youngster that I have passed on to others. Now, I’m troubled by two thoughts. Am I correctly remembering what they told me, and, just as importantly, were they correctly remembering things they were told or experienced?
Misremembering, or false memories, has embarrassed several prominent people. One of the most memorable involved NBC Nightly News host Brian Williams. During one broadcast, he claimed that while covering the war in Iraq, his helicopter was forced down after being hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. When one of the helicopter crew members denied any such thing had happened, Williams admitted that he must have “misremembered” the event.
Nightly News suspended Williams for six months and then fired him. Was this just a case of someone having a false memory? We will probably never know for sure.
When misremembering occurs on a large scale, it is known as the “Mandela Effect.” The name is a reference to people believing they remembered South Africa’s civil rights leader Nelson Mandela dying in prison during the 1980s, when, in fact, he was released from prison, became South Africa’s president, and died in 2013.
Another example of the Mandela Effect is people recalling Star Wars’s Darth Vader dramatically declaring, “Luke, I am your father” when he actually said, “No, I am your father.” Similarly, many Star Trek fans clearly remember Captain Kirk telling engineer Montgomery Scott to “Beam me up, Scotty!” when, in fact, Kirk never said that in any of the Star Trek television episodes or movies.
The more I become aware of false memories, the more it troubles me in my position as a Civil War historian. Much of what we know about that conflict comes from memoirs the veterans wrote after the shooting stopped, sometimes thirty or forty years afterwards.
When I taught research methods to graduate students at ULM, I cautioned them to be aware of biases when using such sources. For example, soldiers often falsely claimed to have been heavily outnumbered to explain a defeat, and generals sometimes blamed subordinates rather than admitting their own mistakes.
But encountering intentional bias is not the only problem with using memoirs written long after the fact. Those veterans may have suffered from false memories, as well. No matter how well intentioned, their descriptions of battles and events might not be accurate because they may have unknowingly absorbed into their own memories stories they had read or been told.
When researching my book Lee’s Tigers Revisited (LSU Press, 2017), I came across Union veterans who claimed to have fought the Louisiana Tigers in battles in which the Tigers did not participate. And some Louisianans claimed to have been in Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, even though the Tigers were not even on that part of the battlefield.
At first, I thought these veterans were intentionally misrepresenting themselves to enhance their war record, but now I’m not so sure. Perhaps after hearing so many stories over decades of attending veterans’ reunions, they were suffering from false memories and really believed they were there.
Dr. Terry L. Jones is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. An autographed copy of “Louisiana Pastimes,” a collection of the author’s stories, costs $25. Contact him at tljones505@gmail.com
