American newscaster Brian Williams will likely never live down what became known as his “Chopper Whopper”.

The former managing editor of the NBC Nightly News lost his job in 2015 after falsely claiming that a helicopter he was in had been shot down over Iraq more than a decade earlier. In fact, another chopper had been fired upon and hit. And when crew members of that helicopter went public with the truth, Williams became the butt of late-night comedians’ jokes.

While North Americans laughed, London-based false-memory expert and criminology lecturer Julia Shaw had a decidedly more nuanced view of that situation. In her new book The Memory Illusion: Why You Might Not Be Who You Think You Are, Shaw writes that Williams “probably liked the idea that he was attacked by a WMD while in a helicopter, so when he began to misremember he was probably less critical of this memory than he could have been”.

In a phone interview with the Georgia Straight, Shaw explained that it’s possible for people to fail to remember traumatic events if their brains are overloaded with stress hormones. In fact, she noted, a moderate amount of stress can actually increase the capacity to remember events at these times, but too much stress or too little—i.e. boredom—actually undermines the brain’s ability to record and later recall what happened.

“This doesn’t have anything to do with the notion of repression…which is the idea that the brain conceals highly emotional events from us in order to protect us somehow,” Shaw said.

“It simply has to do with the fact that your brain physically has never encoded that memory. So the problem is, if you start digging for something that was never formed in the first place, you might accidentally create what we call false memories.”

Moreover, she said that laboratory research and studies have repeatedly demonstrated that people can develop false memories of traumatic or criminal events that never took place. “I think most false memories are created unintentionally, unless you happen to come into an experimental setting like mine where I intentionally hack your memory,” she quipped.

Shaw pointed out that memories are held in big networks of associated neurons in the brain, and she called a person’s attention “the glue” between reality and memory. That’s because paying attention to and engaging with an event in different ways—perhaps by writing down what happened and taking a photograph—will expand the neural network, enhancing the likelihood of remembering it.

She stated that most memories are “partially false” because of gaps in the sequence of steps in perception, biases, what is stored, the social process of recollection, and how attention acts as a filter on the external environment. “There are so many things that can go wrong along your way that your memory never really has a chance to be totally accurate.”

Shaw obtained her bachelor’s degree from Simon Fraser University and graduated with a PhD from UBC under the mentorship of forensic psychologist Stephen Porter. She and other memory researchers are now championing the notion that false-memory research should be relied on more heavily in courtrooms around the world.

“Memory is such a crucial part of the criminal-justice process,” Shaw said. “Whether there’s an eyewitness, a victim, or a defendant, memory matters. So understanding how memory works—and more importantly, how it doesn’t and how we sometimes build fiction into our recollections—is important, because if we don’t understand that, we have the potential to send innocent people to jail.”

She also said that there's common bias toward thinking that the past was somehow better than it actually was.

"This can be hijacked by people in politics who talk about the good old days," Shaw stated. "What they're doing is utilizing this reminiscence bias that people especially over the age of 40 have. They're reinforcing it and essentially distorting what actually happened."

According to Shaw, this can result in political decisions being made less on the basis of evidence and more on the basis of false memories.

"False memories are everywhere," she concluded. "And they matter at home, they matter when you're alone, they matter when you're with family, they matter in work settings, and they matter in the criminal-justice system or for traumatic events... I think that's why it's so critical for people to understand how memory actually works and [how] the errors actually occur."