I recently emailed my cousin when I ran across a Web page mentioning the man whom I thought was our grandfather’s business partner in a Tulsa, Oklahoma, menswear store.

No, she said, our grandfather had been the manager but never a partner.

Once again, if I were trying to write a memoir based on my own memories, I would get another detail wrong.

And that is the problem: Our memories are rigged.

We don’t remember what happens, but we let other, archetypal stories shape our memories.

And, as this brief NPR piece also points out, we see patterns where there are none.

I did learn that much as a young guy when I got a job servicing slot machines in a variety of logger bars and VFW halls in western Oregon.

People always thought they saw patterns: “That machine is ready to pay out.”

Nope, every spin is a fresh universe, so to speak.

But if people really understood probabilities, state lotteries would go bust.