Amazing memory

The day after the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, researchers asked people how they had heard about the disaster, how they felt and what they had been doing. The same people were asked the same questions two and a half years later. It turned out that, for a quarter of the people, not one detail was consistent between the two reports. On average, fewer than half of the details reported in the follow-up interview matched those reported in the original questionnaire. Not one person was completely consistent. At the same time, most people were highly confident about the accuracy of their memory. (Gottschall, Jonathan: The Storytelling Animal. Boston and New York: Mariner Books, 2013: 163-4)