Hillary under fire

This week it’s Hillary’s turn to be under fire – media fire, not sniper fire, that is – for her “misspeaking” (or “misremembering”) of the events on the Bosnia tarmac in 1996.

Memory is a notoriously unreliable entity. When I was in graduate school, my psychology professor talked about an interesting study he had conducted on memory. Volunteers were recruited for an experiment. When the volunteers arrived, they were told that the researcher wasn’t ready yet, so they’d have to wait in a graduate student’s office. After a short wait, they would be directed to another room where the experiment took place. Well, here they learned the actual nature of the study – they were asked to describe the room in which they had just spent time waiting. They were to write down as many details as they could remember.

A substantial number of people included “books” in their description, even though there was not a single book in the room. We expect that there be books in a graduate student’s office, so the brain fills in the missing details to make our recalled experience consistent with our expectations.

As this experiment illustrates, memory is not a computer that records everything and can replay it accurately on cue. Memory is a mishmash of actual events, our perception of events, our previous knowledge, cultural expectations, and perhaps our wishes and desires.

Certainly, some events are forever etched into memory, and running to escape sniper fire would probably be one of them. Ah, but what if it didn’t happen but we wish it did? Can we lure our brains into thinking that our lives are more dramatic and interesting than they really are?

It’s hard to believe that Hillary was telling this story as a deliberate lie. That wouldn’t be a very smart move; she must have known that there were plenty of witnesses to set the record straight. It is more likely that the situation gradually became more dramatic as she replayed the events in her mind and retold her story to different audiences.

Just like she continues to believe that she will be the next president of the United States and cannot come to grasp with the possibility that it may not happen. In her mind, she is already there, and she cannot believe that the world around her does not conform to that fact.

I have always had a lot of respect for Hillary, but it is beginning to look like she’s so bent on becoming president that if she can’t have the nomination now, she would rather take down Obama and help McCain win, so she can get another chance in 2012.

Let’s just hope that Democratic voters aren‘t going to let that happen.