Unmasking the Scarecrow: The Shocking Truth Behind Fiction’s Deadliest Myth

In ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ one of the scenes features the scarecrow with a gun. The crazy part? Most viewers of the film deny ever having seen a gun.

Why do we miss certain things? Why do we deny their existence with such conviction? How do we miss a gorilla on a basketball court?³ How do we not see the gun? The answer lies in the nature of memory.

One particular misconception laymen and writers alike seem to hold of memory is that it is flawless. That is not the case. Memories are not videos, but reconstructed narratives.¹ ⁷ It is inevitable for your psychological reality to differ from your lived reality. However, this simple concept is not well-translated in storytelling. Whether you are writing a novel, a play, or a game, you need to ask yourself if you are being truthful to your character.

This is the one mistake writers make which make their characters come across as unidimensional. They are not badly written, but they are not authentic.

How can you integrate the nature of memory into your story?

The science behind misremembering

To begin, let us understand why memory distorts and how it distorts. Memory is malleable by nature. It is influenced by multiple factors, as minor as minute changes in wording.²

In an experiment by Loftus and her colleagues, participants witnessed a car accident. Later, they were asked either the speed of the cars when they (a) ‘hit each other’ or (b) ‘smashed into each other.’⁴ Participants who were asked the ‘smashed’ question remembered seeing broken glass during the accident a week later, when there was none. Even the subtlest change influenced recall. This is how delicate memory is.

Sometimes, memories do not get recorded right in the first place. We miss important things right in our vision simply because we were never looking there in the first place.

Remember the gorilla on the basketball field?

Participants missed the gorilla in the experiment because they were too focused on counting the number of passes a team made.