It’s the only thing Bianca Jagger and I have in common: we’ve both been victims of false memory. You almost certainly have, too. False memory is the meanest trick your brain can play on you. Instead of refusing to admit that it can’t recall something, the treacherous little creep supplies a wrong answer instead. It’s a phenomenon I’ve been reminded of by two new books.
We wouldn’t mind if our brain fessed up, if it said ‘Sorry boss, can’t help you on that one.’ Simple failures of memory, where you know you can’t remember something, are common. But false memory is your brain going out of its way to provide you with incorrect information. It gives you a recollection of something wrong, after which you base the rest of your thinking on the assumption that it’s right. This can lead to all sorts of trouble.
Jagger’s example first. Her wedding to Mick took place in St Tropez on 12 May 1971. The whole day is a cloud of contradictory testimony. For a start, three people, one of them Keith Richards, claim to have been best man. Fair enough, that’s what you’d expect from rock stars. But Bianca’s mistake is harder to explain. On her wedding night, she claims, Keith Moon abseiled into her bedroom, naked except for the women’s knickers on his head and one of those joke pairs of glasses where the eyeballs go in and out on springs. All very lovely — except that, as David Hepworth explains in Never a Dull Moment, his meticulously researched account of 1971 in rock music, Moon wasn’t at the wedding. He was on his way to a Who gig in Birmingham. He may have appeared before her in such garb on another occasion.
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