The Man In The Arena
When I first started doing trial work as a young lawyer I was constantly surprised and intrigued by the persistent inconsistency between different eyewitness accounts of the exact same incident. Particularly when dealing with a violent or otherwise shocking event, such as a car crash or a brutal street brawl, no two witnesses seemed to remember the same event in the same way. For a defence lawyer it was the welcome stuff of reasonable doubt, but I soon learned it was also just a fact of life. When people are confronted by emergent and traumatic circumstances, their brains can only take in so much detail, and the fact two witnesses remember one event in completely different ways doesn’t necessarily mean either one is telling fibs. Quite the contrary.