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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

Even if Landis is being honest to the best of his ability, this account seems suspect for one simple reason: human memory is incredibly unreliable even in routine cases. Considering the stress and trauma around witnessing and being so close to an awful event like that, as well as the amount of time that has passed, I don't see how we can consider this story to be even remotely reliable.

He may truly remember these events as he is describing them, even if what he's described never actually happened. That's unfortunately how (poorly) human memory works.

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I am reminded of an incident relayed to me by an office worker in the early 2000s. A colleague had left the building at lunchtime and had been witness to some kind of shooting incident where robbers or gang members on motorcycles had opened fire on someone or something else - I don’t think it was ever discovered what the target or cause was. This was in South America, so not a wholly unusual scenario. But the debrief of the employee was eye-opening. He described everything that had happened from his perspective: he heard gunshots, hid behind a bin, and waited until it was over. He said there were dozens of gunshots and he had stayed in hiding for about ten minutes, until he heard the bikes speed away.

However, upon reviewing the CCTV footage, it became clear that the whole incident, from bike arrival to employee emerging from behind the bin, lasted about 11 seconds.

The colleague was astounded to see the footage and couldn’t explain why he had felt it was so much longer.

I think there’s a good chance that stressful situations play havoc with human memory formation.

My theory is that in a really stressful situation the mind hyperfocuses and "processes more frames per second" to react quicker. Just like with movies this mean that replayed at normal speed the movie serms very slow, hence the long timespan memory.

I believe this is also responsible for so called dad reflexes.

Time dilation is well known to occur in dangerous situations.

https://doi.org/10.1111%2Fpsyp.12836

Time dilation is pretty amazing.

I experienced it one time when I accidentally put the car into a a skid at 70mph. I remember calmly realising the car was moving sideways. Having time to ponder that for a few moments. Then deciding to start steering into the skid. Then think about that for a while. Release the break a bit. Finally we did a full 360 and ended up in the middle of the road again.

It seemed like it took a minute or more but was probably a few seconds if that.

Brains are awesome! (My younger self driving ability, much less so)

My understanding of time dilation is that at the time the event is actually happening, things occur at normal speed, it's just that our memory of the event is time-dilated and so we remember everything slowing down and taking a long time.

A really interesting example here in a PBS doco of someone's experience of time 'stretching out' in a dangerous situation. It includes footage of the entire event, the individual's recollection, and a possible explanation:

https://youtu.be/7eCniXtM__g?si=26Gbd2w8PEozKL0i&t=2768

Is it an issue with forming memory, or did the person experience ten minutes worth of 11 seconds?

There's an interesting dialog about this in Catch-22, the novel, but it intentionally revolves around boredom, not fear (which of course also is a primary subject of the novel)

I assume you were also aiming at a point of absurdity, because I don't want to imagine that you'd like to lenghten your perceived lifespan i.e. by being tortured...

My dad kept a diary during his WW2 duty. In his 80's, he read it and was shocked to discover it did not line up with his memories.

Interesting! Without going into personal details, can you explain what sort of incongruence he found between his diary and his memory?

I sometimes keep a diary, for example when I go on long trips that are different from my day-to-day life. I try to be as accurate as possible, but sometimes i notice what i write isn't fully representative of my state of mind at the time, simply because when you're writing stuff down (especially when you're writing with a pen and paper (slow!)), you can never fully capture all the concurrent thoughts and emotions you're experiencing, so its impossible for a diary to be fully accurate. Undoubtedly, e.g. Elizabeth Loftus has done a lot of prominent research in that field, our memories tend to be fallible, but maybe that's part of the reason?

It was about what transpired on the missions.

When I was writing a paper on the history of D, I had kept a lot of records, such as emails. I was often surprised when the details didn't quite line up with my memories.

This is one reason why one cannot get a fair trial 40 years after the fact, if any of it relies on eyewitness testimony.

maybe your memory of being surprised or the one that the details didn't line up is the false memory!

I remember with 100 percent clarity doing great in sophomore high school math. I loved it and I went on to get a PhD. Then my mom passed and I got a box of stuff with my name on it from her house. It included my report card. C.

That's because you remember correctly...the simulation just messed up the report card object and accidentally decremented the counter twice.

In all seriousness it's crazy how bad memory is. Like we all have a false version of the truth.

Conversation is throwing fictional worlds at each other.

Sorry that came off like a reddit comment. The first part was just me joking. I don't actually believe in the simulation hypothesis although it is fun to think about.

The second part was just me agreeing with their comment that it's crazy how bad our own memory is and how it's difficult to come to grips with. Like when my mom, sister, and I are all arguing over a past event and remember it very differently. The true events are (to my knowledge) absolute, but in a philosophical sense, we're all living in our own reality as our memories are telling us the events unfolded differently even though they didn't.

It's not only memory. Realtime perception is completely warped as well. An objective view of reality is impossible for humans.

You had low standards when you were a kid. You thought a C was great.

yep possibly "oh shit I'm gonna fail, I better study like crazy" gets 100 on the final and brings a D up to C, and realizes he can do math pretty well when he tries.

I agree. Having gone through stuff I know how my mind can distort / hallucinate stuff in confusing / high stress situations. Even without questioning the person's honesty.. your brain is not a high quality source of information.

Totally, that's why I don't trust anything anyone says, ever. I can't trust that my fallible brain is hearing what people are saying correctly, so even if they're right my understanding of what they're saying may still be wrong.

There is no such thing as knowledge, just justified beliefs ;)

The JFK assassination has been such a recurrent theme for so long that I reckon I might have memories of it, even though it happened decades before I was born.

As time goes by I'm less and less sure that I saw the second plane hit the tower on 9/11 live.

I think there's a similar "induced memory" surrounding who watched the challenger disaster live.

(Fwiw, I'm still pretty sure I watched it live)

I didn’t see it live, it was on a news replay minutes after it happened. I remember thinking I have to tell my brother and my dad, but what will I say? It felt a bit like when you stub your toe and it doesn’t hurt yet, you know something bad has happened and this is the pause before the impact hits when you tell everyone. I seem to remember them asking what exactly had happened, and I struggled to explain what I’d seen on the few seconds of replay I’d seen, and couldn’t really describe it.

Years later we discussed it and they were both adamant we all watched it live on TV. Am I misremembering, or them, or all of us? Tough one.

With 9/11 I seem to remember one of the impacts only being seen from the explosion, but you couldn’t see the plane itself. Maybe that was the second one?

> With 9/11 I seem to remember one of the impacts only being seen from the explosion, but you couldn’t see the plane itself. Maybe that was the second one?

There is an archive of several news channel and their coverage of 9/11 at https://archive.org/details/911/day/20010911#/. Some of the news channels had better viewpoints and saw the second plane hit on live footage [1]. The NEWSNW channel has a very solid view of the second plane as it hits, which causes the reporter there to react mid-sentence. Note that's the live coverage; since there's so many cameras pointed out the towers by that time, there's several different angles of the actual moment of impact (although most news channels were focusing on the views that best showed the damage at the first tower when it happened live).

There's only three known recordings of the first tower being hit (the best quality one being from someone shooting a documentary film who heard the plane, looked up with the camera, and recorded it as it hit). The hit of the Pentagon is only recorded by a security camera, where there is but one frame with part of the plane being just barely in the view before the impact.

[1] This takes place in the first or second clip of the second row of the 9:00-9:10 segment, depending on how bad the delay is.

Thanks, that's great. After this amount of time I can't say what memories of seeing a plane impact is which tower. I suppose I must have seen footage of the second impact, I just know I didn't see it live.

There probably even a conspiracy theory that you did it!

Just to reiterate and point it out, this was 60 years ago.

This seems like a pretty arbitrary criticism. Do you have any reason to believe that he didn't remember things correctly?

Landis also said different things in his report at the time.

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