Brain Drain

In Unknown White Male--a new documentary about Doug Bruce, a 35-year- old man who woke up one morning on the New York City subway with no idea who or where he was--a Harvard psychology professor named Daniel Schacter plays a supporting but crucial role. He serves as the film's memory expert and, in between scenes of Bruce being reintroduced to his family and friends, Schacter appears on-screen to explain that Bruce likely suffers from an extremely rare condition known as retrograde amnesia. Unknown White Male has been greeted with rumors that Bruce is faking his memory loss and that the film is a hoax. But most reviewers have given both the man and the film the benefit of the doubt (Roger Ebert: "Unknown White Male is either (a) factual and authentic, or (b) the most convincing mockumentary ever made"). That, in no small part, is thanks to Schacter's persuasive performance. His authoritative tone and his ability to explain the vagaries of memory in impressively clinical terms, not to mention his Harvard affiliation, lend weight to Bruce's seemingly implausible tale. Now, on the heels of his big-screen debut, Schacter is preparing to vouch for the memory difficulties of another, albeit better known, white male. In January, Scooter Libby hired the Harvard psychology professor to help with his Plamegate defense.On a recent afternoon, Schacter, a balding man with deep-set eyes and a furrowed brow, sat in his office on the eighth floor of a building just north of Harvard Yard. His bookshelves were lined with titles like The Handbook of Memory Disorders and Neuropsychology of Memory; hanging from the walls were reproductions of memory-themed paintings by prominent artists, including Magritte and Dali. It was as if the memory expert had sought to create an environment in which, were he ever to forget that he is a memory expert, he would be instantly reminded of that identity. Schacter refused to discuss Libby's case or his involvement in it. "I really should not comment on anything to do with that," he said. But he agreed to talk about his work in more general terms, and, as he spoke, it wasn't difficult to discern how he might be able to help Dick Cheney's former chief of staff beat back obstruction of justice, perjury, and false statement charges--and stay out of the slammer. According to Schacter, there are "seven sins of memory" (which is also the title of his most recent book), or seven common ways in which people's memories can malfunction. And, while Schacter himself wouldn't say so, it seems that at least three of those sins could serve as an innocent explanation--an alibi, if you will--for why Libby told a grand jury and FBI agents that he first learned of Valerie Plame's employment with the CIA from reporters. In fact, it appears that Libby conveyed that information to reporters after learning of Plame's CIA status from other government officials. One such sin is "transience," which, as Schacter explained, is the forgetting that occurs with the passage of time. He pointed to a study by a Danish psychologist who, moments after learning of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme's assassination, recorded that he had heard the news on his radio while eating breakfast by himself. Several months later, when the psychologist tried to recall for the study how he learned of Palme's assassination, he was already misremembering certain details--reporting, for instance, that he had been with his wife when the news came over the radio. "All these things," Schacter said, "are modulated to some degree by time." Seeing as how Libby didn't speak to the FBI and the grand jury until months after his conversations with reporters, the sin of transience could be invoked to argue that he simply misremembered the details of how he learned of Plame's CIA status. A second memory sin that might be useful to Libby's legal defense is one Schacter dubbed "absent-mindedness," which typically occurs when a person is doing too many things at once--or is focused on one particular thing and is therefore paying insufficient attention to form accurate memories. A person not remembering where he placed his car keys while he was preoccupied with thinking about a problem at work is one example of absent-mindedness. But Schacter ticked off other, more extreme examples, including a study--"done right here on the eighth floor"--in which participants were shown a film of a circle of people passing a basketball. While watching the film, the participants were supposed to keep track of the number of times the ball changed hands. In the middle of the scene, a person in a gorilla suit suddenly walks through the circle beating his chest. The remarkable thing is that only half of the study participants noticed the gorilla. "That study," Schacter said, "shows when attention is sharply focused, it's surprising what can occur outside the focus of attention and apparently not register." Which is a point Libby's lawyers made, in so many words, in a recent court filing. "Mr. Libby was immersed throughout the relevant period in urgent and sensitive matters, some literally matters of life and death," they argued. "[I]n the constant rush of more pressing matters, any errors he made in his FBI interviews or grand jury testimony, months after the conversations, were the result of confusion, mistake or faulty memory, rather than a willful intent to deceive." Or, to put it another way, Libby was so focused on national security issues and terrorism that he didn't even notice--or failed to remember the exact details of how he learned about--the chest-beating gorilla Joe Wilson and his wife. The third sin that could serve as Libby's get-out-of-jailfree card is the one Schacter called "misattribution"-- remembering aspects of an experience correctly but attributing those aspects to the wrong source. For instance, if a person reads an interesting article in The New York Times but then, in recalling that article for friends, tells them that it ran in The Washington Post, that would be a case of "source misattribution." This, of course, is essentially what Patrick Fitzgerald has accused Libby of committing. Fitzgerald just has another name for it: perjury. But Schacter struck a less accusatory posture, explaining that the real victim of source misattribution is the misattributor himself, since he's often quite convinced that he's telling the truth. "I think, in general, [source misattribution] can be pernicious because you have the possibility for high-confidence errors, because the person's memory is right about some aspect of the event," Schacter said. "It's not uncommon for source misattributions to result in high-confidence, inaccurate memories." Schacter noted that high-confidence, inaccurate memories are hardly unusual in the political realm. A couple of years ago, he wrote a New York Times op-ed trying to puzzle out why Richard Clarke and Condoleezza Rice had such different recollections of the Bush administration's response to terrorism issues. And then there was the he-said, she-said dispute between Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. The most famous instance of an inaccurate memory in politics, Schacter said, was that of Richard Nixon's White House Counsel John Dean, who, like Libby, was asked to recall conversations for an investigation into political wrongdoing. Dean provided such detailed recollections of his Oval Office conversations with Nixon and other officials that he came to be known as the "human tape recorder." But, when actual tapes of those conversations surfaced, it turned out that Dean's memory wasn't so accurate. He remembered the gist of the conversations, but not the details. "Sometimes he didn't even remember the gist accurately," Schacter noted. These were likely innocent mistakes, he continued, the sort anyone might make when performing the difficult task of trying to recall past events. But then Schacter remembered an alternative interpretation. "Of course," he said, "there's always going to be the question, in a case like that, as to whether some of it is intentional."