Comment Re:I believe it was Mark Twain who said... (Score 1) 339
Unfortunately, this is not actually the case. Memories are fallible. You have to remember what you did or said, or what opinions you had at the time. Numerous studies have shown that it is trivial to make people remember details in a different way than what really occurred. How many people have heard stories from their childhood so often that they can't remember what is actual memory, and what is reconstructed from the story? I have a hard time remembering which of my siblings did stuff, or which of my friends told me a story. Hell, I've even forgotten an entire day (no drugs involved, honest).
Once I went on a trip with some friends and was excessively tired due to long work schedules. We had a great time hanging out at the lake and jet-skiing. A few years later, I went jet-skiing with the same friends. They were confused when I said I had never been jet-skiing before, and I had no idea how to operate the thing. They said, not only had I been jet-skiing, but that I was quite good at it. To this day, I have no recollection of the first outing. But I accept it as the truth, because they all said it happened. This was in the days before ubiquitous cell phones and digital cameras, and nobody would have brought a camera jet-skiing. So it's their word against mine, and I have to side with them.