Yes I've had my own experiences related to me by others. But I always figured it was just grandstanding for attention. Never heard of the above psychological aspect. I also had a friend relate stories to me that she was never a part of. She didn't steal my stories directly, but she put herself in the role of a mutual friend who actually was present and did experience the events with me.

Yes. My sister does this. One example is a family dog. He had been my great-uncle's dog and when he passed away, my Grandmother brought this elderly dog home to live with her. This was in 1926. My sister tells stories of playing with dog and how much they loved him and that yes, he was elderly. Impossible. That was 20 years before she was even born. I told her she was recalling stories that our aunt's and uncle's told as he could not have lived into her childhood. When we look at old pictures she smiles sweetly and asks if I remember the dog. No. He would have been 35 or 40 years old.

She still tells the story though as if I were confused.

Yes I have seen that before...who knows... may have done it myself...as the memory fades, it's easier to fill in the bits as one sees fit.

A similar thing -- we were cleaning our the family house, setting various bits and pieces out for a yard sale. I said, "I wonder who will want my doll" -- and my sister said, "Hey, that was MY doll." Thought about it and my world shifted because yes, it technically was her doll. It sat on a dresser in our shared bedroom so I saw it every day growing up. It was an odd feeling, looking at the doll, feeling it mine/not mine. The doll went to a cute little neighborhood girl. Not the same as putting yourself in someone else's story, but it makes me believe your brain can play tricks with your memories.

Matt, this is interesting. I have not heard of this. In your case though for me it is easy to see that your sister’s psyche changed the story to protect her from the guilt she was feeling by turning her into the victim.

I can also see if a young child hears a story over and over, at some point facts can get blurred and they could think they were actually part of the story.

Some people enjoy drama and making themselves the center of attention.

They bend the truth so much they don’t know what is real.

How about Brian Williams “misremembering” being in a helicopter crash? After so many years of embellishing, did he really start to believe it or..... was this his way of saving face after getting caught in a lie?

I have also heard that it works kind of in reverse too...something that is

definitely Their memory becomes something that happened to someone

else. Usually, something bad and it is the mind's way of

throwing it away. Interesting topic...thanks for posting this. How blessed

we are, though, that we can't remember all that is in our brain for our

entire life.

I think memory is so interesting in general. I could not tell you what I had for breakfast 30 days ago, yet I have a few crystal clear memories of early childhood events.

When I have been witness to stories like this told, I too always chalked it up to grandstanding.

There is so much we don't understand about the human mind.

This happens all the time with my younger sister! She tells these stories of our childhood and appropriates my memories. Not just remembering the same events, but she "remembers" events that happened to me before she was born. It is interesting to hear that others have dealt with this. I had always thought it was just part of her "diva" personality where she has to be the star. Maybe I should give her a break and not call her on it...(Nah!)

About forty years ago, my sister did a slightly embarrassing thing after we all had one too many drinks. I brought it up to her when we were reminiscing about that night, and she said I had done the embarrassing thing! I can still clearly picture her doing it and I knew for a fact it wasn't me, but she insisted it was!

Now as I think about it, I wonder if she's told that story to other people for years with me as the culprit.

Neither my sisters or I have any memories of before we were school age. I have heard this is unusual.

Never heard of this. Maybe it only happens between close siblings?

I'm very skeptical. Is it a case of "appropriating" a story from someone else because it was liked or interesting and trying to foist it off on others as involving oneself? And then forgetting it's a fib and not the truth? That's a common thing liars do, they wind up being unable to distinguish fact from fiction.

Is it a case of faulty cognitive function, remembering the story but not remembering whose story it was and thinking it was one's own?

We've all known fibbers. That's a polite term for liars. People who make things up, happenings and experiences, and then relate them as if true. Such people make up their own stories and also take stories from others that they hear.

The world of psychology has a long history of "discovering" things that turn out to be other than what is initially posited from research. I remember learning of a number of instances of same in college psych classes.

My reaction- Nope. My expectation is that something else is at work that produces such situations. But I don't know.

I have read on the Psychology Today website, that we don't remember things as they happened but the way we last told the story. The old memory is altered and the newer takes it's place. Therefore when people "fib" it eventually become real to them.

I think the reason we see siblings mentioned here is that they have a shared past and have expectations that their memory of events be identical. By my own experience, that is mostly true.

Perhaps we re-shape our stories to put ourselves in a better light?

"Is it a case of "appropriating" a story from someone else because it was liked or interesting and trying to foist it off on others as involving oneself? And then forgetting it's a fib and not the truth? That's a common thing liars do, they wind up being unable to distinguish fact from fiction."

Nailed it Elmer-you just described my older sister and her ability to tell the story that only she knows as truth...when it fact, it always lies.

Well, a big honkin' lie is just that. Isn't it? I am not so sure that outright liars don't know that they are doing that.

This is off topic, but interesting. I read the article and them clicked on the author's link to check his credentials.

Ira Hyman, Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychology at Western Washington University. He has published research on memory for song lyrics, the creation of false childhood memories, collaborative remembering, memory for traumatic events, and inattentional blindness for unicycling clowns. He is the co-editor, with Ulric Neisser, of Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts. He received his undergraduate degree from Duke University and his Ph.D. from Emory University.

Does anyone have any idea what "inattentional blindness for unicycling clowns" means?

I've never had this happen to me that I can remember. I do, however, know two people that are compulsive liars. No matter what story or event you tell of, their experience was a million times more exciting than yours. They have been everywhere and done everything. That is so frustrating to me to be around. It really makes me annoyed.

This is off topic, but. . . .

I read the article and then clicked on the author's link to read his credentials.

Ira Hyman, Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychology at Western Washington University. He has published research on memory for song lyrics, the creation of false childhood memories, collaborative remembering, memory for traumatic events, and inattentional blindness for unicycling clowns. He is the co-editor, with Ulric Neisser, of Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts. He received his undergraduate degree from Duke University and his Ph.D. from Emory University.

Can anyone help me understand what "inattentional blindness for unicycling clowns" means?

My younger sister does this frequently. It seems to me that she even "remembers" things from books and movies.

Sure but we call this phenom "Cuckoo for CoCoa Puffs!!!"

I’ve wondered about childhood memories. I have some that are crystal clear. These usually don’t have people in them. I can remember the house I grew up in, in great detail. The backyard. The inside of cabinets and closets. I can remember my relatives farms and the house my parents had built nearby. My mom would have to bring me with her to work sometimes when school was out. She worked at a residence in Sutton Place Amazing home I remember in great detail.

I think that photographs keep certain memories alive. It also may skew things. Taking the camera out for special occasions, when everything and everybody is at their best. Holidays and birthdays etc.

Photos bring back floods of memory for me. Even though my childhood snapshots are in B/W, I clearly recall the color of people's clothing and household furnishing and the minute details of the room. I have a photo of Christmas tree that I took when I was maybe 9 because it was the most beautiful tree ever! It was being taken down later that day and I felt so badly I always wanted to be able to see it again. I found that picture recently and had a good laugh. It is the ugliest tree I ever saw. Short, choppy and it has a huge bare spot about the size of a bushel basket on one side. Were we not even bright enough to put that gap towards the wall at least?

Elizabeth, sometimes DH and I talk about the sub shop we loved in college, or the chili cheese burgers from the bar that went out of business two decades ago -- were those treats as uniquely delicious as we remember them? LOL sometimes it's better to not know.

I am over 60 and I still remember my Mom potty training me. She would sit me up on the toilet and tell me to go wee-wee. One time she left me there to finish and my little bum fell in. Scared the heck out of me! I couldn’t have been much older when we were visiting family friends and their pet bird landed on my head. That terrified me!

Louiseab -- I don't remember it, but my grandmother claimed to have taught me the same way she taught my DM, the same way she'd been taught...to pee into a teacup! Before I could walk! I don't know if that was customary for Scots-Irish, but it saved on washing diapers, and it had to have helped prevent diaper rash.

People definitely *block* memories and sometimes substitute more palatable ones for others. Most people you ask about their childhoods will immediately tell you they were happy. Even if they were whipped regularly, they'll claim it was 'good for them'. Nobody wants to acknowledge cruel parents.

Adults benefit from 'editing' their ideas of truths laid down in childhood. Children make sense of the world using 'magical thinking', which persists until they can comprehend logically, at about age seven. Carrying around childhood 'rules' can inhibit adults.

My older brother does that, tells tales from his childhood that I know aren't true - I was there. Sometimes he does it to get laughs, other times I can't figure out why. Who knows what he has told his wife and kids about our parents and family over the years? After Mom died, I called him on a few things, made him go quiet for awhile.

Maybe he gets it from my Mom's brother, our uncle. My uncle was in the service during the war. He was a mechanic, never saw battle. He brought home a purple heart. Told towns people he had a wooden leg! Neither was true. Other stories from his youth used to astound Mom and his sibs. It was like he lived an entirely different life than they. Kind of sad in a way. He must have been starved for attention.

I've heard that an important rule for liars is that they need to a have a well functioning memory.

o j

My sister-in-law does this. One example is a story I tell about cleaning about my grandmother's home as she was going into assisted living. Her trinkets were so stained with years of cigarette smoke we thought one porcelain figurine was a different race.

She tells the story like it's her own, yet she hadn't even met my brother yet!

"I've heard that an important rule for liars is that they need to a have a well functioning memory."

My experience is that most often the exact opposite is true. Serial liars are often uncovered because they forget what they said in the past to a particular person, about a particular topic and then on a later occasion say something that's different.

One trite and silly reason for always telling the truth, one which no one should have need to use when deciding how to conduct themself, is that when you always speak truthfully, there's no need to mentally keep track of what you've told anyone. If you always speak the truth, repeating the truth on another occasion will always match what you said before.

I grew up in a family where we rehearsed our memories. It was something my mother did. We would "remember when" . One of my sibs doesnt remember anything of our childhood and another constantly makes up a new one. One of my younger sibs resents being abandoned by us all since she never got that sort of family confirmation. so it goes. I do have a friend who complains of her sister stealing her life. She will be interested to see this article.

Elmer -- I think that was OJ's point. A liar has to keep all his lies straight lest he be caught out *as* a liar.

chisue, I think I understood what he said.

Is something a "rule" (his word choice) if it's rarely followed? I'd say no. That was my response.

OK -- I did it -- maybe I've told this here before. I was out for dinner with my good friends. We were sitting on the restaurant patio and the conversation came around to Jan's friends who hosted a terrible wedding set up in a cottage garden. I mean they ran out of food, no drinks it was terribly hot but no drinks, bride and groom arrived late and guests were waiting in the garden, two hours from anyplace to get a drink, bride and groom wrote their own ceremony and both were in costume and everybody starving waiting for it to be over. And, repeat, ran out of food at the reception. Jan is a rather shy story teller so I said, would you like me to tell it? I told the whole story to much laughter. At the end I said this: "there's one thing I don't understand -- why did she invite ME?" Jan said -- "She didn't -- you weren't there."

I had heard the story about a year before, there were photos and a lot of laughing exasperation at such a terrible experience. I really relived that day!

I have heard my sister tell stories that happened to me. I don't challenge her because we'll just argue about it and who will be the winner?

My older sister "does not recall" any stories that are not flattering to her. Not even in jest. I think she has pretended not to recall so many times that she actually has forgotten them.

We all just laugh........

Jan is a rather shy story teller so I said, would you like me to tell it? I told the whole story to much laughter. At the end I said this: "there's one thing I don't understand -- why did she invite ME?" Jan said -- "She didn't -- you weren't there."

That was SO funny and I'm sure has become a time honored tale at get togethers, like many funny family/friend stories, no matter who tells it.

On a more serious note, there is much we do not know about the mind, but I feel sure that in the distant future it might be possible to erase or replace memories of abuse or fear or trauma that cause distress and harm. I am equally sure that if and when it becomes useful for good, someone will weaponize such a process and implant false memories for various nefarious purposes.

Lucille -- it is a good story to tell -- but now that I've told this to my sister, do you think I have a leg to stand on when we have arguments about things that happened in our childhood? I have absolutely lost credibility!

"Can anyone help me understand what "inattentional blindness for unicycling clowns" means?"

Google it, you'll find it along with a video.

It was a perception experiment. Would someone walking across a college quad while talking on the phone notice that also in the quad was a clown on a unicycle? Or would the phone conversation distract them so that they wouldn't notice? Most didn't see the clown.

I was riding in my brother's car on Venice Blvd in Los Angeles and happened to notice a clown driving beside us. He was in full clown make-up, and I thought this was a bit scary, since he was incognito.

I mentioned this because I do notice clowns, but then I spend very little time on my phone.

I had to look up grandstanding, because this is not something that bothers me, and so I don't care if it happens. I usually find it entertaining.

What bothers me is when people tell the same story over and over again. I wish they could steal some memories and come up with new stories.

I struggle with my memories of early childhood and sometimes believe what people tell me about what happened then, but I am never quite sure whether this is accurate or not. For the most part, I have too many memories, and I don't have room in my brain to steal someone else's - or any need to do so. However, I do not think that my own memories are worth stealing either.

I can see how children would appropriate other people's memories, because they may not have that many of their own. If adults do it, then it is just sad.

What bothers me is when people tell the same story over and over again.

I think that happens a lot at family gatherings and can sometimes create part of the family identity. I'd give anything to hear my Dad tell some of his same old stories one more time.

Answer to Fudd ..... it would depend on what that Student had smoked before

that walk across the Quad. After experiments, I find it amusing and

distressing on how little a student in a classroom will notice...and how different

things are seen by different students. Not always due to unintentional blindness...just non attention in general. The point of attention jumps pretty

fast, at certain ages especially. Unintentional blindness is, of course, another

subject entirely and an entirely different level.

One of my sisters is an abuse counselor, but I'd heard and read of implanted memories, even before she chose her career.

Speaking of children's magical thinking, when I was a child I had the strangest memory of a time when my aunt (10 years older) and I started to cross into a field near my grandparents' house. There was a barbed wire fence, which she started to raise for me to slide though. I remembered seeing the hose to my grandmother's vacuum cleaner. Not the vacuum--just the hose, and it was moving.

Years later, when I was an adult, my grandmother asked me if I remembered the time my aunt and I started to go through the fence and almost stepped on a snake. It hit me--at the age of almost two I didn't know what a snake was, so I co-opted the nearest image I had--the vacuum cleaner hose. Maybe my aunt didn't make a big deal of it, just hustled me home, because I don't remember anything else of the incident.

My sister thinks she got separated from my mother while they were shopping downtown when she was very young. She thinks she found her way home on her own too. She's not sure if it happened or if she dreamt it and my mother has passed away so she can't ask her.

"Answer to Fudd ..... it would depend on what that Student had smoked before
that walk across the Quad"

????

Was this supposed to be a funny comment?

"... so I co-opted the nearest image I had--the vacuum cleaner hose..." Had to laugh, because I distinctly remember calling my first First Grade teacher by her kinda odd name, Mrs Vacuum Cleaner. I didn't much like her, and got the impression she didn't much like me either. Many years later I realized the woman's name was probably Van DeCamp, or Van De Kleer or similar. How many other little kids also called her by the closest thing they were familiar with?

I sometimes have trouble remember whether things really happened or if I just dreamed them. I've always had extremely vivid dreams, whose memories persisted with me long after I have woken up.

When I was young (before my mid 20s), I used to go into trances in which I seemed to be partially dreaming and partially awake. These could happen when I seemed to be fully awake and could be quite disorienting. In my trances, I would feel that I had lost contact with the physical world to some extent and sometimes had the sensation of floating. I could also see different rooms from the one I was physically in. I think this happened partly because I am hypoglycemic and have passed out during some of the more extreme episodes of this. I have been able to control is (since my mid 20s) with diet, but more recently I was diagnosed with sleep apnea, and that may also have played an effect. I also go immediately into a dream-like trance under certain strobe lights, which have a hypnotic effect on me. The strobe lights have to flash at a very specific rate, but when they do, I immediately go under and enter a dream state. Afterwards, I do not remember where I am.

Lars, that sounds like it might be a form of epilepsy: https://www.epilepsy.com/learn/types-seizures/absence-seizures

That's interesting, partly because I know that epileptic fits can be triggered by strobe lights.

I might have experienced Focal Onset Impaired Awareness (link from your article), and also interesting is the Dietary Therapy recommended, which is what was recommended for me, and which seems to help.

For now, sleep apnea therapy works best for me, but I do try to keep a low carbohydrate diet and avoid sugar and HFCS. I have had EEG tests recently, and they came back normal, according to my doctors.