Feynman Did you take the doors?

And that is how you hack the human mind. Subvert the intuition and expectation. Everyone thinks Feynman is joking and means "I didn't take the door" when he said "I did take the door". The former is remembered, not the later. The expectation, intuition, is that the speaker is lying/joking, thus, the opposite is true.

Time to re-read Feynman's books. It's been a long time.

I didn't see this story in his book 'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character)'.

Such a great read, I highly recommend it!

It's kind of like the tree that falls in the wood though isn't it? Nobody "heard" Feynman - so it's as though it never happened ...

More seriously though, it's not hard to imagine how someone might recall telling the truth but not having done so.

It's worrying that none of his contemporaries came out in his defence!

many magic tricks work this way: the performance _between_ the sleight of hand and the revelation is of utter importance: the time distance between the two will be reconstruct in the spectator's mind, and any memory gap will be filled by what our mind expect to have happened.