Well…they could be. It turns out that our memories are not as reliable as we’d like to believe.
We catalog and store what we see and do everyday. We discard useless information and try to hold onto useful information (though that may suddenly be very difficult during exam period). This whole process is associated with three major steps: encoding, storage and retrieval.
Let’s say you see someone flip on their bike. You process the information that you see, hear and feel, selecting that is most important and filter out the distractions. You then store this information in a memory so that you can recall and describe this event on demand. This seems like a journal. You make an entry and you can read it back any time you want, just the way you wrote it. However, just recalling a memory will change it.
Car crash image used in Elizabeth Loftus’ study
Source: TED Talks
This effect can even be exploited to create false memories. In a study done by false memory expert Elizabeth Loftus, she was able to successfully implant false memories in participants. A car crash involving a blue car was shown to participants. After providing half the participants with information that suggested the car was white, much of them later remembered that the car was white. In fact, just using the words smash to describe the crash rather than hit caused participants to falsely remember broken glass at the scene.
Childhood memories have also been manipulated. In the study mentioned above, a memory of being lost in a mall was successfully planted in participants. Another study planted an animal attack memory into 77 participants. In both cases, these “memories” became more and more detailed every time the participants retold the memory. At the end of studies, the false memories were rated by the participant as reliable and as vivid as the real memories.
Source: SalFalko on Flickr
Okay, you can plant memories in people. Cool idea for a movie, but how is this signifiant in real life? A lot of criminal convictions are based on witnesses. False memories have often led to false convictions. Victims have identified wrongly innocent people as perpetrators and have landed these people in jail. These convictions are pretty common, in fact, in recent study looked at 300 innocent people that spent up to 30 years in prison, 3/4 of these were due to faulty eye witness memory.
There is another exploit for false memories. Some have suggested to exploit this property for good: implant warm fuzzy memories about vegetables into children so that they eat health. Unethical? Maybe.
– David Ng
One response to “Memories are Lies!”