A shade over ten years ago, in a study concocted by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, which has come to be known as “The Invisible Gorilla,” subjects were shown a video of two teams, one dressed in white and one in black, tossing a basketball back and forth. They were told they’d later be asked to jot down how many aerial and how many bounce passes are pictured. However (don’t you love how psychology experiments all seem to be based on some kind of scam?), in the middle of the video, our experimenters had arranged to have a woman in a gorilla suit wander into the camera’s frame, pound her chest, then walk out again. And, sure enough, when queried about it afterwards, about half the subjects never noticed the gorilla. We see what we want to see, the authors of the experiment concluded. Or what we’re told to see. When our brain lasers in on something, by God (in this case, passing around a basketball) everything else gets excluded. So much for eyewitness testimony.
The study design might be shot through with trickery, but the basic conclusions are hard to argue with. And reading about this made me recall my recent experience recording, in a dialogue with my sister, some recollections from our childhood on the ranch in California where we both grew up. Our palaver into the microphones was relaxed enough, though we did interrupt each other from time to time to offer a qualifier or a different view of certain individuals or events.
The memory which held the most interest for us – far more dramatic, I have to say, than a woman in a gorilla suit – concerned an uncle who, in 1960, was shot to death by the local sheriff in the streets of Seminole, Oklahoma. About the basic act there was little dispute. But everything that led up to it was fraught with dueling recollections.
Keep in mind, I have written stories about this incident. Several versions, as a matter of fact, each a little off the mark for reasons that remained unclear to me, so I’ve never sought publication. And of course I had told the story many times, to various audiences, in various situations, with growing awareness that, each time you tell a story, it changes slightly – more or greater detail, now more deadpan, now peppered with a generous dollops of dramatic adjectives. Of course I can’t know how many times my sister has told her version of the same event, but I’m sure it’s plenty. So our “he said, she said” mish-mosh of memory and speculation is hardly surprising.
And you know what? We weren’t even eyewitnesses. I was in New York City at the time; my sister in Idaho. I learned about my uncle’s death in a letter from my mother, which I remember opening and reading just before a seminar in Russian History at Columbia. I assume my sister got her word from the same source, but a different letter. Was my mother an eyewitness? Of course not! In fact my mom and dad were still living on that same ranch in California I alluded to earlier, so she would have gotten the news in a letter from her mother, whom my uncle was staying with in Oklahoma at the time he challenged a local lawman to a duel that proved fatal. And of course my granny was not an eyewitness either; she had gotten the word from . . . well, wherever she had gotten it from.
So what are the chances of our two memories jibing? But still. You want it to be the same. And it’s not.
Is it any wonder I write fiction? It would all appear to be fiction anyway. As a late, lamented novelist friend used to say, the moment you take pen in hand to start putting it on paper, you’re writing fiction.