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False Memory Palace

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Today’s post comes from perennial sophomore Bubby Spamden, a more-or-less permanent fixture at Wendell Wilkie High School.

Hey, Mr. C.,

OK, so I get it that you’re not interested in signing a permission form so I can donate my brain to science. I didn’t think you would do it but I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.

Anyway, that means I’m going to have to go back to school (again) in about a month, and the whole Wilkie High experience will happen to me one more time. Oh well. I guess they’d miss me if I was gone – I’ve been there so long I pretty much have seniority over all the teachers and administrators anyway, and they ask me how stuff ought to be done.

Imagine that – THEM asking ME for advice!

One year in early August Principal Peepers was just starting at Wilkie and he got visited by a delegation of parents saying he should change the lunchroom routine around to “the way it used to be” about 5 years earlier.

They had all heard it was better back then but nobody could recall exactly what was different about it.

The teachers weren’t much help. The youngest ones hadn’t been at the school that long and the old timers had gone through so many different lunch management schemes everything was just a blur to them.

So they asked me, figuring that I had such a famous history of breaking lunchtime rules I must be an expert on every single regulation throughout all of time.

“And your brain is young,” Principal P. told me, “so you can call up the details at will.”

But what he didn’t know is that I’d been pretty much sleep deprived my whole time at Wilkie – at first because I was a late-night-TV junkie, and then from staying up super-late to use the computer on the sly because my folks wouldn’t let me on the internet unless one of them was in the room to monitor my “activity”. So I didn’t remember either. But what was worse – I didn’t know I didn’t remember.

There’s this new research that explains it – they say being sleep deprived really opens up your mind to retaining false memories. So like your mind is really open to suggestion and you take something totally fictitious and buy into it like it’s real. My dad says Sara Palin has this same problem, so I know I’m in good company. Famous company anyway, which I think is pretty much the same thing.

Anyway, here are the rules I told them we’d had for lunch five years before. They questioned me pretty hard about it, but I stuck to my guns.

  1. The lunchroom lights must be kept super low.
  2. Everyone comes to lunch in costume.
  3. Extra points for extra appendages.
  4. Talking is allowed in as many languages as possible.
  5. Food and drink should be served smoking.
  6. There’s live music, but the band only plays one tune.

Anyway, nobody in the administration stepped up to “champion” my version of the rules and they wound up going with something pretty standard about keeping your voices down and your fingers off of other people’s plates.

Later on I realized that the “rules” I remembered were not from Wilkie High – that was a false memory I picked up from the Star Wars cantina scene.

Oops! My bad, but we almost had an awesome cafeteria that year!

Your pal,
Bubby

When have you been convinced a false memory was true?

39 thoughts on “False Memory Palace”

  1. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    Ia it possible to know the answer to this question? if I remember it, whether itis true or false, then I believe the memory, would I know it is false?

    At the endof April I was really tired after travelling for 3 weeks. Perhaps the whole thing is a false memory. But the chunk of money we saved for the trip is gone…..

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  2. Good morning. I am failing to remember any false memories. I know I have had false memories because I can remember that people have told me I don’t remember things correctly. I can remember being told I was wrong. I can’t remember what it was that I didn’t correctly remember.

    I’m sure I have had many false memories that have caused me to get lost when driving some place in a car. I don’t remember any of the exact details. I know there have been many times when I thought I knew where I was going and I didn’t.

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      2. Exactly, BiR. I remember, as a child, finding a fantastic agate, while my family was vacationing on the shores of Lake Superior. I remember the thrill of discovering it and the joy of having this beautiful rock as one of my possessions. Well, my sister told me that she found it and that I swiped it from her. I was crushed because I KNEW I had found it. I may have lost the verbal argument, but since I still have that agate in my possession, I guess I’m the real victor.

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  5. Husband and I frequently have ‘way different versions of the same event – or he things I made it up, as he doesn’t remember it at all. That kind of runs in his family, though. So I have not choice but to just presume I am correct, and it happened as I remember. I have no false memories. 🙂

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  6. I’ve spent too much time wandering the hallways of my memories, always trying to retrieve something new that I didn’t realize I still remembered. People shouldn’t be facing backwards that much. But I have long had the habit of checking my memories when possible.

    As I remember my high school days, I was a lonely loser. I used to say that I was especially afraid of two kinds of kids in high school: the boys and the girls. I remember fleeing for home at the end of day, avoiding all others so I could be happily alone again with my fishing rod, whiling away hours on the creek in front of my home, talking endlessly with the voice of my inner monologue.

    I’ve been forced to revise that characterization. At my 50th reunion, I ran into many folks who seemed happy to see me again. They talked about all the things we used to do together and how much they enjoyed those memories. I finally had to realize that I wasn’t quite as lonely or as much of a loser as I have been claiming for five decades. My teen years were a lot more normal than I’ve chosen to remember.

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    1. But how do you know their memories weren’t the false ones? Perhaps they were having a mass hallucination of congeniality. Or gin and tonics.

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  7. I once was convinced that my best friend told me she knitted sweaters for rescued chickens that had temporarily lost feathers in captivity at egg factories. I even made mention of it on the Trail. My memory of it was so clear that I even had an image of where I was when she told me this (On the road to Rockford, MN to see my husband’s sister). Dale was gracious enough to suggest that my friend contact him so that she could talk about her work on his new radio station. Imagine my shock and embarrassment when I excitedly told her this and she said “I have never knitted a sweater for a chicken, and I never told you that I did”. Further investigation on my part confirmed that she was correct, and that she had never driven to Rockford with me. I think what happened was that, on the road to Rockford with my husband, I either saw a billboard about rescue chickens and their need for sweaters, or I heard a story about it on public radio. My friend knits and is an inveterate animal lover, and my brain somehow put the factoids together and mixed them up and, presto chango!, my friend knitted chicken sweaters.

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    1. I relate closely to this topic. In the early 90s, at the peak of what was called the “false memory backlash”, a third party filed a complaint with my board that I’d planted false memories in a 22-year old client. It was her father, the perpetrator, who’d somehow found out who her therapist was. She had come to therapy experiencing horrendous flash backs.

      This began a two-year siege of investigations and interrogations aimed at me and this client. They combed over dozens of pages of her case notes, underlining every sentence they could find which caste doubts about my treatment of the young woman, then interrogated both me and her. It was a nightmare and I had no choice but to refer her elsewhere
      They told my client, “Don’t worry, you’re safe with us”, then proceeded to ask her intrusive questions like “Did your dad actually penetrate you or what did you do to entice him?”

      At that time in therapy history, any case of this kind was referred to the Attorney General’s office whereupon an investigator with no background in the psychology of incest aggressively attempted to impugn and “convict” any therapist charged with planting false memories.

      I was, however, the odd one out in that most therapists being accused of this “crime” laid down, rolled over, and relinquished their license to practice. I’ve always had a powerful reaction to being treated unjustly, so I set about making this about defending my whole profession. In other words, fighting these charges became much bigger than me.

      I addressed and rebutted every single item they charged me with, consulted with experts in the field of treating incest from coast to coast, and elicited very positive testimonies addressing how I performed with this client. I hired an attorney who’d dealt with the board as well. In the end, I’d produced an 80-page, detailed rebuttal, complete with bibliography, testimonies, and tied all of my interventions into research.

      The day came for my big “disciplinary hearing”. Each board member had a copy of my tome in front of him/her. There was a strange silence in the room until one of them asked me, “Do you have any questions for us?” I replied, “I thought you were the ones who have questions for ME” They then pointed to my tome and said that there was literally nothing left to question me over.

      In the end, the board did clip me for inadequate note-taking, fined me $500, required that I get time-limited supervision, then dismissed the whole case. Untold numbers of my fellow social workers put on a celebration party for this very rare victory and thanked my profusely for having the courage to fight the fight.

      As for me, I simply couldn’t allow myself to be steamrolled by what I believe was a corrupt board. All in all, it was a grueling and anxiety-provoking two years, but I consider this a solid test of my strength.

      I apologize for the length of this story, but when I read the question for Jacque, I just couldn’t not share this story.

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      1. Do you think things would be different now with HPPAA? I rarely hear about false memory accusations these days. I think we therapists are all aware of the potiential for it, though.

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        1. I really see it as a trend or wave that washed over any therapist specializing in sexual abuse and that it’s fully receded since the 90s.

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      2. That’s an amazing story, CB. I admire your tenacity – it’s hard to believe others would just roll over with so much at stake.

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  10. I was once convinced that someone had stolen a snow shovel off my porch. I had been out clearing the walks and had a very distinct memory of leaning the shovel up against a table on the porch when I had finished. The next day I went out to shovel again and the shovel was gone. I went to the hardware store and bought another shovel. I told several people this story, always asking “Who on earth would steal a shovel from someone’s porch?”

    In the spring I found the original shovel in the garage.

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  13. I will let you all know Thursday or Friday.

    Tomorrow, the s&h travels with me (I did not ask, I told) to Iowa. Real reason is to pick up a knitting machine in Urbandale, but since we will be just that close, we are also going to swing by Coon Rapids (Iowa).

    I was starting to book someplace to stay overnight, and research places it might be fun/interesting to see.

    Then I had a thought. Last time I was there, Garst & Thomas was still the main employer in the area and it was a nice enough small town I had fond memories of from childhood.

    A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then and I don’t know as there really is a “main employer” there now. There is precious little to find out about it online.

    So we will just go and see what we see, and decide at that time how it is going. We may well just drive back the same day.

    either way, my curiousity will be satisfied.

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      1. You are exactly correct, Steve.

        Knew him as the man who terrified my younger brother on the dangers of smoking to the point where everytime my dad brought home a cigar (remember when those were given out by new fathers? Odd custom looking back on it), my brother would see to it that it was broken into bits ( not that my dad ever smoked AFAIK).

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  14. I’m occasionally hurt when, after posting about a significant life experience, there’s little to no response. Like today’s story. I know that this shouldn’t bother me but it does because I so rarely tell anyone about these experiences. I’m sorry. I feel like the odd one out here, but then, I always have.

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    1. I could tell that posting about it was sort of like re-living it, and that it was a terrible time in your professional life. I was reported to my professional board last year and was eventually exonerated, and it was the most horrible time, even though I knew the complaints were bogus.

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      1. It was the worst, most challenging experience of my professional career and left me somewhat with PTSD. If I ever got a letter from my board again, I’d be right back there. Fortunately, I’ve mostly left the fear behind long ago. The only incest clients I’ve had since then are decades from their trauma.

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        1. I deal a lot with very young trauma survivors, and thanks to brave ones like you, false memories are never mentioned anymore.

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