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WRT to eye witnesses: I remember making a statement to German police about an accident I had witnessed the day before. The officer on scene has asked me to go to the station the next day where another police officer and an official interpreter would take my statement. I had a mild emotional reaction to the accident (OH ?!$#!), namely that it very well could have been me that this lady ran into (instead she hit a delivery truck) and the car I was driving I had already sold (this was the very end of my military assignment).

They asked me pretty much everything you would expect, and I answered without a problem, until the investigator asked me what color her car was. I was absolutely stumped. I could see everything about the accident -- except the color of the car. It was bizarre image in my mind, a little BMW with no "color" to it. All I could tell him was it seemed to be dirty. He asked me several times, finally grinned and told me it was gray.

That and some other military experiences (not violent ones either, fairly benign situations) convinced me that eye witness accounts need a large shake of salt.

I believe there is a current theory or explanation that says we (our brains) pretty much function with models of the world, with only a few "actual" details that the brain deems significant being processed -- otherwise our brain would be overwhelmed with all the sights, sounds, touches, smells, etc coming in every moment. So we alot of what we "see" and remember is based on what we thought we should see.

Some years back, there was an off-duty police officer in Detroit (maybe Chicago) who was working security at a...(wait for it) McDonalds! that had a problem with robbers. A robber did come in one night, he and the cop exchanged gunfire. The officer had always told himself to keep fighting even if he was hit, so when the robber fired and the cop felt the hit in his abdomen and went down, he kept firing and put the robber down in return. When the cop went to check on how badly he was wounded...he could not find ANY wounds on his body. He had subconsciously wired himself to not only expect to keep fighting if wounded, but to expect to be hit, so strongly that he actually felt the strike and responded to it by falling down backwards, even though it was all in his mind.

So yeah, I could see how some having a gun pointed at them with the robber pulling the trigger could hear "clicks". Maybe we should be surprised he didn't hear "bangs."

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I always have trouble embedding videos, so maybe one of you folks and take care of that for me.