Brian Williams' future remains in limbo after the "NBC Nightly News" anchor falsified his account of a helicopter ride taken while reporting in Iraq in 2003. Critics are accusing the newsman of being an outright liar, but in a conversation with HuffPost Live on Tuesday, Dr. Stephen Lindsay, a professor of psychology at University of Victoria in Canada, explained how it's possible that Williams earnestly "misremembered," just as the veteran broadcaster is claiming.
"Memory, by its nature, is a very reconstructive process," Lindsay told host Caroline Modarressy-Tehrani. "We often can recall a lot of details, but we often also have to fill in a lot of details. We draw on information from lots of sources and it all goes together, and often it's hard for us to sort out the sources."
In the case of Williams, Lindsay suspects that years of handling larger-than-life news stories on a regular basis could truly impact his ability to access his own personal memories.
"[He's] told the story in casual settings, and [it's] evolved over the years, then, when he's in anchor mode, that gives him lots of sources of thoughts and images that are consistent with the idea that those things really happened to him," he theorized. "It makes it harder for him to be accurate."
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