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From: iayork@panix.com (Ian A. York)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: FOAF chains (Was: Re: Electronic Pets)
Date: 13 Feb 1997 11:34:12 -0500

In article <33032496.328475673@news.xmission.com>, Terry Lacy <tlacy@xmission.com> wrote:
>
>OB. Urban Legend: I'm curious about the mechanism for propogation of
>these stories. Doesn't it require a long chain of lies? They always
>happen to a FOAF, right? That means that everytime someone tells the

That's a really interesting facet of ULs in general, isn't it. I don't think "lying" is the right word; I think that the people who modify the story are honestly passing it on as they remember it. Rather than lying, it illustrates a deep property of human memory: it isn't very good.

Perhaps memories are stored, or more likely retrieved, as semi-independent bits. Think internet packets. Well, don't think internet packets too much, they're not a great analogy, but anyway: when I put a request into my muddled and disorganized brain for "story, interesting, one, scuba divers, for the use of" my brain starts sending back those packets that fit parts of the request. One packet has the snippet "found in forest fire" and also has the snippet "Dave told me this". Another packet has the bit "charred bones" and the bit "Dave heard this from a friend". Another has "airplanes drop water" and includes "I saw that at an air show once". Another, "Dave's friend saw something" and "cheap power tools".

When they reach my conciousness it starts piecing them together. What you get out is mostly a memory of one event, but it's jumbled together with minor pieces of a dozen conversations, observations, myths, and prejudices. As you go, the conciousness finds that some bits don't make sense, sends them back and asks for more packets, and so forth.

Perhaps because there are lots of packets that include the tag "A friend told me he saw this", this tag tends to override the more accurate tag "A friend told me his friend saw this".

Whether this is even remotely like what really happens, I've no idea; I doubt it, actually. But you see this general phenomenon a lot. People are really, really bad at accurate memories; people are really, really good at reconstructing memories, but those reconstructions are almost always incorrect. Usually they're wrong in trivial ways and it makes no real difference, but they're often wrong in major ways as well.

One of my favourite examples of a UL being supported by muddled memory came from this group. In a discussion on gerbil stuffing, a MD wrote to AFU to say he'd seen an x-ray of a colonic gerbil. Moreover, he could give dates, places, and the name of the person (his radiology professor) who had shown it. He had a clear memory of the event.

I wrote to the radiology prof asking where he'd obtained the x-ray. Here's what the prof replied:

        Thank you for your letter.  I wonder who the ex medical student 
     was.  Sadly he/she has confused my material.  I showed an X Ray 
     demonstrating a broken glass (tumbler) in the rectum - and another of 
     a snake with an undigested rat within the bowel of the snake!  Perhaps 
     both films have been confused with time.  I know of no X Ray of a 
     human being "with a gerbil" in the rectum - thus cannot help you with 
     this particular urban legend.  Good luck with your other searches.  

I'm not in any way slagging the MD who wrote the original comment. Everybody does this. Quite simply, memory is unreliable.

The interesting thing about ULs is that for some reason they seem to be even more prone to this phenomenon than most memories. Why? I don't know. Perhaps they fit into some kind of archetype, perhaps there are enough similar packets of memory from other events and observation that the UL gets intermingled with them, or whatever. I think, though, that the process that turns "a friend of a friend" into "a friend" is a universal one.

Ian "everything you know is wrong" York