Dr. David Eagleman

I say, excuse me, I'm teaching a class.

She says, I've been sending you emails and you haven't written back and blah, blah.

I say, excuse me, I am teaching a class.

I'm happy to talk to you afterwards.

I'm sorry I don't get to all my emails.

And she says, well, I'm going to wait for you.

Okay.

So then I keep teaching the class.

And then after 20 minutes or so,

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.