Unusual properties of memory: false memories

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

How many of those memories stored in your head are actually true? Can we trust others when, it turns out, we cannot fully trust ourselves? And, most importantly, how to get to the bottom of the truth, if we are inclined to blindly believe and defend the fake constructs of our memory? We are publishing a translation and adaptation of an English-language article by Erika Hayasaki, Associate Professor of Literary Journalism at the University of California, in The Atlantic on False Memories.

One afternoon in February 2011, seven UCLA researchers sat at a long table across from 50-year-old Frank Healy, taking turns asking him about his extraordinary memory. As I watched them interact, I taped a conversation about a day that one of the researchers randomly named: December 17, 1999.

These are all the very special details that memoir writers, historians and journalists crave as they comb through other people's memories to present their true stories to the world. However, any such work is always accompanied by a warning that human memory is error prone. And now scientists have a full understanding of how unreliable it really can be: even people with extraordinary memories are susceptible to the phenomenon of "false memories".

In an office near the campus of the UCLA Center for the Neuroscience of Learning, where Professor James McGow discovered the first person with a highly developed autobiographical memory, is Elizabeth Loftus, a scientist who has researched for decades how false memories are formed: all those times when people, sometimes quite vividly and confidently, they remember events that never happened. Loftus has found that false memories can lodge in someone's head if a person is exposed to misinformation immediately after an event, or if they are asked suggestive questions about the past.

As our memories become more permeable to error and distortion, how much can we trust the stories that we unconditionally believe in throughout our lives?

As McGow explains, all memory is colored by life experience. When people remember, “they are reconstructing,” he says. looks like the truth."

The PNAS study, led by Lawrence Patihis, was the first to test people with highly developed autobiographical memories for false memories. Typically, these people can remember the details of what happened on each day of their life, starting from childhood, and usually, when these details are verified using journal entries, videos or other documentation, they are correct 97% of the time.

In the study, 27 people with this type of memory were shown a slide show: in the first, a man stole a woman's wallet, pretending to help her, in the second, a man hacked into a car with a credit card and stole one-dollar bills and necklaces from it. Subjects were later given two stories to read about these slideshows, which deliberately contained misinformation. When people were later asked about the events from the slideshow, subjects with excellent memories pointed to false facts as true about as often as people with normal memories.

In another test, subjects were told that there was news footage of the United 93 plane crash in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, although there was actually no actual footage. When asked if they remember that they had seen these frames before, 20% of subjects with highly developed autobiographical memory and 29% of people with ordinary memory answered “yes”.

When I interviewed Frank Healy about what he remembered about his visit to the University of California two years and nine months earlier, he was right about a lot, but not all.

He recalled that Wednesday, February 9, 2011 was a significant day for him. He was thrilled to become a member of the UCLA campus memory study. From childhood, he made mental notes that he remembered decades later, but Frank did not always know how to use his memory for something worthwhile.

Sometimes his memories were more a curse than a gift. His mind was filled with so many details at the same time that he missed information in class or his parents got angry when he didn't hear them. Healy did not reveal his unique abilities to his classmates until 8th grade, when he decided to showcase his memory at a talent show.

As Healy got older, he realized that painful events that happened 20 or 30 years ago would always come back to him with the same emotional intensity as if he lived them over and over again. But he learned to live with negative memories, give them a positive connotation, and even wrote books about his experiences of living with a phenomenal memory.

Recalling that day at UCLA, Healy told me that he could re-imagine McGow with the left lens of his glasses fogging up. He described a long table, a nondescript room, and me sitting to his left.

This is typical for all people: the stronger the emotion associated with the moment, the more likely it is that those parts of our brain that are involved in memory will be activated.

As McGow said, you won't be able to remember every commute, but if you witness a fatal accident during one of them, you probably won't forget it. The memories that remain with us are colored by emotions. And this is important for our survival: the animal goes to the stream, where it is bitten by the tiger, but survives. Now the animal knows that it is better not to go to that stream anymore.

At the end of the memory test, McGow asked Healy, "What would you like to ask us?" Healy wanted to know how the research results would be used.

In 2012, researchers released a report based on interviews with Healy and other people with superior memories, which showed that they all had stronger white matter that binds the middle and front of the brain than people with normal memory.

When I spoke to Healy and told him that the research he was involved in found erroneous memories in people with excellent memories, he was disappointed that his memory could actually be as malleable as that of the average person.

All these discussions got me thinking about the journalism I do and teach.

Over the years, I interviewed witnesses to the 9/11 attacks and rushed to the scene to get comments from witnesses to a catastrophic train crash or shooting massacre. It seems logical that the people I spoke to remembered these shocking, emotionally charged events well. But even they can be unreliable.

In 1977, Flying magazine interviewed 60 eyewitnesses to a plane crash that killed nine people and had different memories. One of the witnesses explained that the plane was "heading straight for the ground, straight down." Still, the photographs showed that the plane hit the ground at an almost flat angle.

For journalists, “wrong memory” is definitely a problem. But how can you protect yourself from it?

There is no absolute guarantee that everything in non-fictional narrative is absolutely true, “but it is your responsibility as a writer to get as close to the truth as possible by collecting as much evidence as possible,” says Richard E. Meyer, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. and the author of essays. He encourages everyone who wants to write their memoirs to tell others about it and see how often they will be wrong about what they remember.

A true story is always filtered through how the narrator understands it

Storytelling shapes meaning and order in our existence, which would otherwise be just chaos overflowing with anxiety. This is one takeaway that enthusiasts can take into account when contemplating the intersection of stories and memories. There is harmony in both.