Nonpersistence of Memory

"No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar."

-Abraham Lincoln

Sitting here too early on a Thursday morning, waiting for the videographer to show up for today's mediations. This should be my last event in this office. The end of another season in life, I guess.

I started this morning on an unpleasant note. Yesterday I gave a deposition, a rarity for me, in a case in which some former clients are trying to set aside a settlement agreement from a mediation that took place two years ago. I was asked where I was that day, and replied I was here. I specifically remember meeting with these folks in our conference room.

Except I didn't. My memory of the day was kind of fuzzy--nothing special happened, just a mediation that ended in a settlement agreement. But in fact, I'd attended by Zoom. This was only a couple weeks after Hurricane Helene, a time of lots of unplanned travel, and I had come down from New York to work on the farm and attended to some things here, something that hadn't been contemplated when I built my calendar, then went back to NY a few days before the mediation. What actually happened, in this and a couple other cases during that time, was that the clients went to my office and sat in our windowless conference room with the big screen TV, and my mug showed up on the screen. It wasn't perfect, but we worked through the situation.

The solution, when one realizes sworn testimony was incorrect, is straightforward enough. Contact the lawyers, notify them of the error, and ask for an errata sheet from the court reporter to correct the mistake. The old testimony doesn't go away, but at least there's no longer this perjury problem.

I'd tossed and turned all night wondering if my memory was correct regarding my location. What finally convinced me I was wrong was a review of my photographs on my phone, with one on the date of the mediation from an upstairs window at Tara (no doubt to use on this blog). I then checked my flight logbook, which showed my departure date to fly back to NY, and my return flight to Florida roughly a month later. I guess I could've done that before the deposition, but I didn't anticipate the question. And I was pretty sure I was here.

Besides the embarrassment of the error, I find myself wondering how in the hell one "misremembers" something like that, including details that just weren't so. I'd met with these people in that space before, in person. Somewhere in there my memory airbrushed the details of those prior and later encounters onto what I thought I recollected about that day. How did that happen? Is this an age thing? What else do I remember that didn't actually happen, or didn't happen as the images in my mind suggest?

It turns out this is common enough to earn its own Wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory

And yes, to answer the question on your mind, and mine, the syndrome tends to get worse with age. Lack of quality sleep also contributes.

So what to learn from this experience? The ethical piece, which is the part that bothers me the most, suggests having to couch or make conditional any representation, sworn or not, about how something transpired. There's a distinction between having a recollection that's flawed for some reason, and just lying. Recognizing now that my memory isn't what it used to be, I suppose "to the best of my recollection" needs to be a standard weasel phrase whenever I recount what I recall about an event.

A busy day of depositions today, then back to the farm tonight.