False memories or how to manipulate the truth

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

Apparently, Orwell was right: whoever controls the present is truly capable of dominating the past. As frightening as it is to realize this, in our day the work of the Ministry of Truth is not a sophisticated fantasy, but just a matter of technique and political will.

Our memory lives its own separate life, which does not always coincide with reality. Who has not caught himself thinking that any story from the past over time becomes overgrown with an incredible amount of detail, and its different versions cease to converge? And it's not just our natural propensity for bragging and arrogance. Part of the culprit is our own memory. In truth, we can't even be sure that our memories really belong to us.

It sounds depressing, but it is. Recently, a team of American scientists published an article on the implantation of false memories. They conducted a corrosive mega-analysis, collecting in it almost all the available scientific information about the introduction of fake memories. The output was a grandiose generalization of eight independent review articles, each of which considered data from a variety of scientific papers.

The result is discouraging. In almost half of the cases (46, 1%), scientists were able to plant false memories in the memory of the test subjects. The subjects to one degree or another agreed with the stories about events from their lives, which in fact never happened. And often the test subjects even described fictional situations in detail.

We are accustomed to believing that memory is the most constant and intimate thing that we own. Objects, faces, events appear and disappear. But we are sure that all the experienced moments will be recorded in memory, like the scenes of our childhood in the video archive of our parents. If we want to return to the past, we just need to remember it. This is where we deceive ourselves. In fact, “remember” may not differ much from “invent”, and the implantation of false memories from the outside has long been a matter of technology.

The illusion of memory

Hardly anyone in the world knows more about the phenomenon of false memories than University of California professor Elizabeth Loftus. Over 40 years of research into memory mechanisms has made her the leading expert on false memories in the world. An exciting and vivid description of her scientific journey can be found here.

In one of her first academic papers, Loftus studied the influence of the nature of a question on a person's memory of what happened. So, if, after watching a video with a car accident, viewers were asked how fast the cars that were smashed into each other were moving, viewers gave a higher estimate of the speed compared to those who heard that the cars collided or hit). The very form of how we access memory influenced its reproduction.

Around the same time, Loftus began acting as an expert on the veracity of testimony in court hearings. To date, Loftus has participated in over 250 court cases. In the course of this difficult work and parallel experiments on volunteers, she became convinced that eyewitness testimony can be influenced by a variety of circumstances. The information contained in the memory was easily mixed, confused and displaced by the newly arrived one.

It turns out that memory is dynamic, and, influencing our decisions, it itself is easily distorted under the influence of new impressions and experiences. Even just thinking about the past, we change our memory of it. Having fallen into pompousness, one can even say that it does not at all look like a stone with a carved relief (as is commonly thought), but like a soft pliable clay that crumples at every touch. That being said, as we just learned, one of the most powerful means of introducing false memory is our own imagination. The line between "remember" and "invent" is vanishingly thin.

Perhaps the most exciting phase in Professor Loftus's career began in the early 1990s. During this time, she became interested in the suspiciously numerous cases of lawsuits for sexual harassment. Often, the accusatory side was women who suddenly remembered a crime that happened in their childhood - many years, or even decades ago.

The most interesting thing was that a large part of these memories occurred at the reception of the psychotherapist. Could the influence of psychotherapy provoke false memories? Loftus began her investigation.

It turned out that psychotherapists were required to ask patients about childhood trauma associated with violence, and popular psychology books cited entire lists of potential symptoms typical for victims of child molesters. If the possible victim did not remember the very fact of what happened, she was asked to imagine how and under what circumstances she could be harassed.

Here the clue could also be hidden. The lion's share of memories of sexual abuse may simply have been implanted into memory through reading books, visiting psychotherapists, or specialized self-help groups. Loftus had only to confirm this guess experimentally: to try to introduce a false memory into the consciousness of a person herself.

Memories Architect

For the 5th day in a row, Chris describes in detail his childhood memories in a diary. He is 14, but his notes are detailed and painstaking. Now he writes about how, at the age of 5, their family, as usual, went shopping in the mall.

Chris stepped aside from his parents and was lost. "Oh, so I got into trouble …" - flashed through my head. Crying in horror, he was sure he would never see his family again. The boy stood in tears until an elderly man found him. The good stranger was bald, but he looked "really cool": he was wearing a blue flannel shirt and glasses glittered on his nose. The old man took him to his mother, who was already preparing to give a thrashing to the unlucky offspring.

Needless to say, Chris never got lost in the mall? And the tough old man with glasses didn't really exist. But the teenager did not cheat, filling in his diary in the evenings. He truly believed in what he was describing. It's just that Elizabeth Loftus's team was the first to conduct an experiment to implant memories.

Before conducting the now classic experiment, the researchers enlisted the full support of the subjects' relatives and received from them all the necessary information. During the experiment itself, each participant was offered several true stories and one false - about how, at the age of 5, he got lost in a shopping center and was found by an elderly man who took him to his parents.

Further, the subject had to write down his memories of the above episodes for several days, trying to reproduce what happened in as much detail as possible. At the end, each participant went through an interview with the researcher. 29% of the subjects falsely recalled an episode that had never happened to them in a shopping center.

It seems that Professor Loftus has come up with the perfect recipe for implanting a false memory. You must first gain access to the person’s personal information, as well as enlist their trust or the help of those people whom they trust. Then bring in the memory itself and stimulate the subject's imagination in every way. The dry fact itself will become overgrown with details over time and will most likely become a memory. Looking closely, you can see that this whole scheme is very reminiscent of the cunning plan of the hero DiCaprio from the Oscar-winning blockbuster.

A childhood memory of being lost in a shopping center is generally neutral and mundane. But what about exceptional and emotionally unpleasant events? It turned out that they are also well implanted in memory, the main thing is to convince the subject that what happened to him is a completely ordinary phenomenon. In one of the following works, Loftus competently selected the texts of mystical content, and as many as 18% of naive Florentine students confirmed that they saw a demon possessed in childhood.

But still, the very battering effect was achieved using a bunch of all the described techniques and fake photographs. Yes, scientists do photoshop too! In a 2002 study without Professor Loftus, a group of psychologists from Canada and New Zealand convinced people that they rode in a hot air balloon as a child by showing them fake photographs. 50% of the experimental subjects (half!) In one way or another agreed with the fact of their flight in the basket.

In the footsteps of the Ministry of Truth

Thinking about the topic of false memories, it is simply impossible to ignore the question of the authenticity of the story. The already familiar Elizabeth Loftus did not succeed in this either. Even if the memory of deeply personal events is so easily falsified with the help of photographs, then what can we say about social events, the memories of which are constantly grinded by the millstones of the mass media! Surely false evidence will easily distort the memory of historical events. However, this still remained to be proved.

In her 2007 work, Loftus and colleagues used photographs of two high-profile political events: the 1989 Tiananmen Square riots in Beijing and the Roman protests against the 2003 Iraqi war. In the first case, the famous photograph was taken of a lone rebel blocking the path of a tank column. Sitting down at the computers, the scientists added crowds of demonstrators to the canon scene, standing on either side of the technology. In the photo of a Roman peaceful demonstration, a couple of radical-looking thugs in bandages on their faces and gas masks were inscribed in the crowd.

44% and 45% of those polled admitted that they had seen freshly fabricated photographs from Beijing and Rome, respectively. But the scientists did not set out to study the gullibility of the test subjects. The main part of the study was an assessment by volunteers of the number of insurgents in Tiananmen in the spring of 1989 and the level of violence in Rome at the 2003 rallies. In both cases, the forgeries worked flawlessly: people who viewed the falsified footage spoke of a larger number of protesters in Beijing and an extraordinary intensity of confrontation in Rome, relative to those who got the original photos.

Apparently, Orwell was right: whoever controls the present is truly capable of dominating the past. As frightening as it is to realize this, in our day the work of the Ministry of Truth is not a sophisticated fantasy, but just a matter of technique and political will.

Time continuously transforms the present into the past: galaxies are flying away from the center of the universe, water flows, smoke melts in the wind, a person is aging. Time determines the direction of all physical processes, and modern mankind does not know the principles that allow to reverse its course.

It seems that only one thing in the world can at least partially withstand time. This is our memory. But, as we can see, its accuracy is not absolute and for some reason depends on a monstrous number of conditions, and most importantly - on our own imagination. But we'll talk about this next time.