flashbulb memories

Do you remember watching Baywatch in the 90's?

Can you remember where you left your car keys?

Is it strange how you can recall something from nearly 20+ years ago but you cannot think where you left those keys?

Our brain is an amazing organ which has many functions including how we remember the past.

I want to introduce you to Brian Williams.

Mr Williams was the anchor for the NBC Nightly News programme for many years but is infamous for his lapse of memory.

On 26th March 2013, Brian Williams was a guest on the Late Show with David Letterman. Speaking to Letterman, Williams proclaimed that while in Iraq “we were going to drop some bridge portions across the Euphrates. Two of our four helicopters were hit by ground fire including the one I was in.”

He went on to say “We’re not near any U.S. troops. So we got hit, we sat down, everyone was okay, our captain took a purple heart injury to his ear in the cockpit but we were alone.”

After the broadcast, military personnel recounted a different version of events in which Mr Williams was aboard a Chinook that was actually an hour behind the 3 helicopters that took fire. That Chinook took no fire and landed later beside the damaged helicopter due to an impending sandstorm, according to Sgt. 1st Class Joseph Miller, who was the flight engineer on the aircraft that carried the journalists.

Mr Williams was suspended from his role as anchor of NBC’s Nightly News show and lambasted in the media for his recounting of events.

So what is going on here? How can he get this so wrong?

Have you ever told a story about an event in the past and been certain of the sequence of events? Or have you said to a friend that you can “vividly remember your wedding day/birth of a child?”

The mind has a funny way of remembering events, especially what are known as ‘flashbulb memories’. These tend to be significant moments in the past as there is an expectation on remembering them. They also tend to be the stories we tell over and over, which means they are susceptible to distortion over time.

What neuroscience has found is that what we remember may not be factually correct. Our minds are so powerful, they can alter history.

So how can we link this to the investment industry? Well, it is all about storytelling when it comes to investments and if you listen to a fund manager, they will no doubt recall a great investment they made in the past and the details of how they were thinking in the moment of purchase and how they knew it was approaching the high point and to get out in time. It is particularly pernicious around significant market events (GFC, Tech bubble, etc.).

These memory lapses can happen to any of us and no doubt will, so treat these great stories as just that. If you want to go a step further, you could always seek the decision log of when the buy/sell was made to check the feelings at the time map to the current narrative.

We can all be a little bit ‘Brian Williams’ sometimes.