“People like to tell tales,” you start your article about new research on making sense of witness accounts (“Backwards and Forwards,” September 3, 2011). Even when information is patchy, they do their best to spin it into a “credible yarn.” As psychologists have long known, this has little to do with deceit. The brain simply tries to make sense of fragmentary information. “Although such behavior is natural and normal,” you point out, “it is a nuisance for the forces of law and order when they are trying to find out what happened during an incident by taking statements from witnesses.” Which is why police forces in many countries are currently asking witnesses to say what they saw in reverse order. Carol Dando of Lancaster University has shown that this practice actually makes things worse, as witness recall drops. To wit, it is difficult to get around the old brain. Come to think of it, people not only like to tell tales, but they also like to hear good ones. This research can thus be of some value to writers, including those who specialize in crime stories. Tales people like to hear have an order that “creative” writers had better understand. The reverse order, much loved by quite a few among them, is too creative by half.