One event. Multiple Stories. Why? pt1

Whenever there is some dramatic event, a fire or let's say a robbery, after the fact the authorities get statements from as many witnesses as possible. They are trying to piece together exactly what happened. But, have you ever noticed that if ten different people are all separately asked to tell exactly what they remember, you end up with ten different stories? And sometimes some of them are wildly different from each other.

Is it because people are trying to cover up what happened, out of guilt or fear that they may somehow unknowingly be involved in what's going on? Maybe some of the witnesses are pathological liars that couldn't tell the truth if their lives depended on it. Or maybe one of the witnesses is the actual culprit responsible for the crime. Are powerful aliens bending the space time continuum and causing all those different people to experience the same event in different ways?

While one of those things may occasionally be true, its not the most common reason that ten different people who witnessed what happened will have ten different stories. And actually the alien theory is closest to what normally happens, except we as individuals are the aliens.

Don't go calling the funny farm on me just yet. I promise a somewhat reasonable explanation if you'll just hear me out. In order to explain how this works first requires some insight into how we as humans function.

There is a lot going on around us all day everyday. In fact, our brains take in billions of bits of data per second, through our five basic senses. There is so much going on that we literally cannot process all of it at once. We would go insane and have zero focus if we tried to absorb it all. So, to make the process easier for us, our subconscious minds edit events to make them more manageable.

The way this happens is in three separate stages. We delete, distort and generalize. I'm listing them in this order but it happens kind of all at once with no real rhyme or reason for which happens in which order.

First, things that our minds tag as not important bits of data our brains block out. The data is still technically there within our minds, but we don't remember it upon casual recall.

Second we distort what actually happened. This is where things go kind of sideways and tend to get weird. Each one of us has a certain way we view the world due to our experiences up until this point. It includes what we think is normal, what we think is okay or not okay and really how we perceive everything.

Imagine your point of view as a set of rose hued glasses and my point of view as blue colored glasses. If you and I each are asked to tell about the same event, my story will be skewed by the blue tinge everything has and yours will be skewed by the red tinge that yours have.