4 Things Everyone Remembers Happening (But Totally Didn't)

The BRAAAM doesn't play during the opening credits, because there are no opening credits. And when we see "Inception" it's just plain white letters on a black background, at the end of the film. And that sound actually doesn't happen even a single time in the film. BRAAAM!

Warner Bros.

All those things you remember are from the trailers. The BRAAAM is all over two different Inception trailers (and emulated in many, many, many, many, many trailers since), but it isn't in the film. In fact, there is some controversy over whether or not it was even created by Inception's composer, Hans Zimmer. According to Indiewire, Mike Zarin and his team created the sound by building on the repetitive, percussive motif used in previous trailers, then Zack Hemsey put it into a song that really made it pop. According to Hans Zimmer superfan Hans Zimmer, it was made by Hans Zimmer.

The memory that we all have of that BRAAAM playing during the movie (especially playing during the nonexistent opening credits) is completely false. That means that the trailer for Inception inceptioned us into thinking the Inception sound was in Inception. That is impressively meta. Just like when The Prestige tricked everyone into thinking it was a good movie.

So what happened? Did the astronaut who didn't shit himself during the first-ever emergency in space suddenly become nervous? Was he an idiot who somehow managed to fake his way into a degree in aeronautical engineering? He very clearly says "One small step for man." It's right there in cold, hard ones and zeros, right?

Not according to Neil Armstrong. Armstrong insisted that he actually said "One small step for a man," because he knows how to speak English and is not Frankenstein's monster. A recent study at Michigan State University supports his claim. Their data suggest that Armstrong's accent may have caused a misunderstanding of the transmission: They have found that people raised in Central Ohio pronounce "for a" like "frrr(uh)." The bit of static in the transmission, then, may have been just enough to make it seem like the first words on the moon were tantamount to, "Man take step, man big jump."

NASA

At least this finally gives us conclusive evidence that Kubrick did not direct the moon landing. If he had, he would have done 49 more takes of it and then chosen the one where the footfalls were the loudest.

This isn't an isolated incident. Elizabeth Phelps researches the impact of emotion on memories and finds that confidence in a memory and accuracy in its details go together like peanut butter and tuna salad. The more emotional an event is, the more confident we are about what happened and the more likely our minds are to go back and "enhance" our memories. Despite what a CSI tech looking at a photo would have you believe, to "enhance" necessarily means to "alter." "Enhancing" your memories in this way is a great way to remember the gist of what happened, but it can have unexpected effects on the details.

The most emotionally impactful moments, then, may actually be the ones that we're most likely to get a little wrong. Try to keep this in mind when remembering the most emotional moments in your life: a fight that ended a friendship, the particular wording of your wedding vows, or what happens when you beat Dark Souls III.

Of course we all remember Tom Cruise jumping up and down on Oprah's couch. I know we just went through three examples of people misremembering important details of memories they were confident about, but this moment was huge. Surely this one we all have on lock-down: We remember Tom Cruise, dressed in all black, coming on Oprah to PROVE that Tom Cruise loves loves loves ladies, specifically the one called Cakey Homes or whatever. Of course, the thing we remember most clearly is him jumping up and down on that yellow-beige leather couch, yelling, "I love her!" while a terrified Oprah could do nothing but look on helplessly. It was a giant celebrity meltdown, and as Amy Nicholson points out in L.A. Weekly, didn't really happen that way.

First, it's worth noting that for the dozens of videos of Tom Cruise jumping on the couch, it's actually fairly hard to find unedited footage of the incident. People seem much less interested in what actually happened than in back-to-back repeats of two tiny snippets of it. That comports with most of our experience at the time as well: Not many of us were home watching Oprah waiting with bated breath for the Tom Cruise interview on his love life, but the condensed, replayed version was an early viral hit.

R.I.P. Oprah.

The interview taken as a whole shows Cruise jumping up and standing on the couch before hopping back down one second later. He does that twice in a 40-minute interview. So what happened to him jumping up and down, yelling about how much he loves her? We made that up. We created that memory after watching repetitive cuts on YouTube, obviously edited for comedic effect. And yet when we recall this incident 10 years later, we are shocked that he wasn't jumping up and down on the couch.

The Amy Nicholson piece also argues that this isn't a trivial distinction: It changes how we remember what is essentially happening in this interview. We don't remember (again, probably because most of us never actually bothered to watch it) that it actually feels like Cruise is on the defensive in the interview. Oprah and an audience of screaming fans press him for more and more tidbits about his romantic life with Katie Holmes. They want to know intimate details about their getaways, how they met, and whether or not they are getting married. Are they? Are they? Are they? As Tom gets more and more cornered, he gives a bigger and bigger performance as he keeps deflecting, to keep details private. We misremember the biggest celebrity meltdown ever recorded not only in terms of what happened but also why it happened.

When you remember something you saw on a screen, you're getting a story from an unreliable memory -- one that has no problem making up half the details -- about source material that was itself a weird collage of different sources and ideas. Hopefully these examples encourage you to take your memories with a grain of salt. Unless you remember really liking this article. You can be 100 percent sure of that.

Aaron Kheifets is an occasionally mustachioed comedian, writer, and director. You are allowed to follow him on Twitter, watch his videos, and look at his website.

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