Dr. David Eagleman

I say to the class, look, I'm going to call security, but I don't know what she looked like.

I need you guys to write down what you remember about her.

I said, all I remember is that she had a big mole on her left cheek.

And, you know, that's all I was able to really see.

And so everyone writes down their stuff.

Now, not surprisingly, eyewitness identification is terrible.

Everyone comes up with extraordinarily different descriptions of what the woman looked like.

One thing they tend to have in common is this mole on left cheek, which I made up.

The woman doesn't have that, but it's a demonstration that planting something, even accidentally, in my case on purpose, will influence your memory of what you think happened.

Obviously, it's an actor that I hire every year, but it demonstrates how poorly we remember things.

Yeah, well, this has been all the way up to the Supreme Court because some guy was accused from – he got sent to jail based on the eyewitness testimony of a woman who was up on the second floor seeing him from there, and it was dark out.

And he said, look, that can't be reliable eyewitness testimony.

So this went to the Supreme Court, and they said, look –

Sorry, but we can't guarantee reliable eyewitness testimony.

And if we were to ever try to legislate that, that would ruin most court cases because most things are predicated on eyewitness testimony.

So what the legal system tries to do is just educate jurors about this, about how seriously to take it, because – and by the way, I should mention –

Unfortunately, people are very swayed by this jurors are meaning, you know, a scientist might get up and say, look, there's this information or that.

But then some some I would assess, you know, I witness comes up on the stand and says, look, I don't know about all that science stuff, but I know what I saw.

And the jury is swayed by that.

So it's not easy to educate jurors on this because people fundamentally, even after education, feel like, OK, but I know that my memory is like a video camera.