Nothing Lies Like Your Own Memory
"[False memories] can be experienced with a great deal of emotion, even though they’re false..."
Hello! This is Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about science, curiosity, attention, wonder and great-smelling air.
Before today’s main story, here’s something I’m annoyed at myself for never knowing until this week.
This is actress Susan Oliver. If you’re a Star Trek fan, you’ll recognise her from “The Cage”, the pilot episode of the original series, playing the role of Vina.
This was the pilot that NBC famously refused to pick up - forcing Gene Rodenberry to make changes that included replacing Captain Pike (Jeffrey Hunter, who declined to return to the role) with William Shatner’s Kirk for Star Trek’s second pilot.
Over half a century later, Pike has now been resurrected for the small screen, thanks to Anson Mount’s wildly popular portrayal of him in Star Trek: Discovery - and now we have Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. (Its co-showrunner and executive producer Henry Alonso Myers has quipped that since 55 years had passed since “The Cage” was filmed, it’s the longest pilot-to-series-pick-up in television history.)
Susan Oliver’s role in both “The Cage” and the first-season two-parter it eventually became (“The Menagerie”) was as a guest star - but in real life she was, in the words of this post originally on Facebook…
“…an accomplished pilot competing in many air races and survived a bad crash. In 1970, Miss Oliver won the Powder Puff Derby. She was named pilot of the year by the Assn. of Executive Pilots. She described her attempts to be the first woman to fly a single-engine plane from New York to Moscow in the book ‘Odyssey.’ ”
The details are even more remarkable. In February 1959, before she decided to become a pilot, she was on a PanAm Boeing 707 on a transatlantic flight from Paris to New York when it suddenly dropped from 35,000 to 6,000 feet. This was on the the same day Buddy Holly died in an airplane crash - and this freak combination of events caused her to avoid flying for the next year. Determined to conquer her fear, she took hypnosis lessons - and in 1964 started training for her Private Pilot’s License.
Whew. What determination. In a better world, I reckon she’d have made a great first female captain for Star Trek - a full thirty years earlier than Captain Janeway.
So! Today, in the final part of our paid-supporter-only investigation of the science of human memory, we’re looking at the alarming havoc our minds can wreak upon our biographies and sense of identity - and it starts with the stupidest thing I’ve ever done on a bicycle.
“Right, lad. LET’S DO THIS.”
I line up on the homemade bike ramp halfway down the street, cycle madly towards it in a blur of pedals and knees - and it’s only when I launch myself into thin air that I realise what an endlessly awful idea this is.
This isn’t the usual way I do things as a teenager. I’ve always had a highly active imagination and I’m a shameless coward, so I’m normally quick to catastrophize my way out of attempting the kind of activities teenagers from British rural towns might do to numb their general existential horror: yes that might pass the time, John, but I can imagine laughing if I read it on someone’s gravestone, so no, I will not be joining you this time. Best of luck!
I hadn’t successfully avoided every stupid idea, though. In the frozen dead of a Yorkshire winter, a gang of us discovered a burnt-out car at the back of our local park late one night, and had the brilliant notion of inexpertly sawing the roof off it, flipping it over and turn it into the Death Sled™.
With four of us clinging to the jagged razor-sharp struts at each corner and the rest giving us a shove, we started down the slope of a hill. Success! It worked! Um - far too well, actually! Had we discussed the concept of braking? We had not.
Traversing the 300 metres to the park entrance in about ten seconds, we saw far too late that nothing prevented us from skimming up the sloping tarmac path and out into the main road to pancake ourselves into a row of shops on the far side. It’d be the stupidest of ends. Nothing could save us now.
But then, a winter miracle! With a clang, a hidden boulder knocks us sideways, away from the path and into the side of its grassy embankment. With a deafening, metallic PWONK! the Death Sled™ springs into the air, flinging us in all directions - at which point we scramble to our feet and leg it before someone calls the police about all the screaming.
This lucky escape has left me cautious about life and quick to say no. But for some reason, this natural line of defence has now failed me when I need it the most.
After watching an episode of The Dukes Of Hazzard, I decide that what my credibility needs is to be seen to be flying through the air like a bird - so I’ve stacked a pile of bricks in the road and laid a plank up one side of them, in an attempt to coax out the cooler kids and their bikes at the bottom of my street. What I lack in experience, foresight and almost every other survival trait evolution has attempted to bestow upon me, I’ve made up for with wild enthusiasm (an early sign of how I’ll approach the rest of my life) - so I make the ramp ten bricks high.
Now I see my error. Nearly knocked senseless by the impact of hitting the bottom of the ramp, I proceed up it at great speed. I know it’s probably too late to chicken out - but I try it anyway, squeezing the brakes so hard they’re in danger of snapping.
The next memory I have - and it’s a vivid one - is running laps around my Mum’s green Vauxhall Nova. Round and round and round I go, bawling my eyes out and unable to stop running or crying, because the pain from my broken arm, which I’m cradling with my other arm, is so utterly unbearable.
I continue to do laps until the ambulance arrives.
Even now, over thirty years later, when the weather is changing and the air-pressure is rising or falling, I feel it in my then-smashed arm as a throbbing ache (yes, medical science is at last concluding that this is a real thing).
So, that’s my bike ramp tale. It’s not a fun story, but it’s a good one to appal anyone who hasn’t heard it.
And I really, really wish it was true.
Let me be clear: this is exactly and precisely what I remember. I’m not consciously embellishing anything, I’m not pulling the wool over your eyes for entertainment purposes. I am not knowingly telling you porkies here. According to the inside of my head, this is a true and accurate account of what happened.
Unfortunately, my version wasn’t corroborated by a key witness to that absurd disaster. A decade later, I got talking to my late Ma about it (she wasn’t late at that point, I should add, it wasn’t one of those kinds of conversations) - and she didn’t remember me running around her car.
When she found me, I was sat on the grass verge on the outside of our garden hedge, rocking back and forth & howling with pain. She swore blind to this - and yet I remember none of that myself. In my memory, I was running, running, running until the ambulance arrived - except, come to think of it, she couldn’t remember if it was an ambulance or if she drove me to the hospital herself…?
When my Ma told me all this, I was indignant. OH COME ON. Was I not the one to whom all this happened, feeling all the feelings, dealing with the agony? She was just an onlooker and so must have muddled things up. Surely *I* was the most reliable source of information here?
I didn’t think about all this until I recently started looking into the mind-bending study of false memory - because it seems, entirely contrary to basic common sense, that your presence on the scene of an event may actually make your memory less reliable than a remote observer.
Since we construct so much of our personal identities on our memories, the implications here are extremely unsettling, and have the potential to call into question…well, everything about us, really, as we dip a toe into the science here.
What’s left of you if you can’t even trust your own memories?
Let’s take a look.