Dr. David Eagleman

And she was smart enough to interview them also about what they remembered from September 10th, you know, what they ate for breakfast that day and so on.

Okay.

She then found them three months later.

She followed up a year later.

She ended up doing that 10 years later as well.

What they found is that the traumatic memories of 9-11, even though those are amygdala memories, they drifted just as much as the memories of what they ate for lunch on September 10th.

And so an unfortunate –

Fact for the law is that memories are not accurate.

They drift.

Every time we check in on memories, we're changing them, and it becomes kind of like the operator game where one person says something in the other person's ear, and the next person repeats that, and the next person repeats that.

There's a sense in which we're always playing the operator game with ourselves.

Each time we pull up a memory, it's changing, and it gets modified and colored by new information that we have.

So that's the bad news for the legal system.

And so the legal system has gotten really smart about this over the last 30 years and tried to make sure that they take care of things that happen, let's say, with eyewitness identification.

So one thing is, you know, police suggestibility.

So if I'm looking at a lineup and I say, gosh, you know, I think that's the guy and the police officer says, yeah, I think that's the guy.

You know, I agree with you on that.

Then what happens is when I go to court three months later, I say to the judge, yeah, I'm 100 percent confident, even though at the time of the lineup, I wasn't confident at all.

But I come to think I am.

There are many, many ways that things get implemented so that we can try to work around how lousy our memories are.