False Memories of tragic and happy events
Over at Strange Attractor, my pal Mark Pilkington points to two articles on the fascinating subject of false memories. The first is a piece in yesterday's Guardian stating that four out of 10 people surveyed in a new study claim to have viewed footage that simply doesn't exist of the 7/7 bombings in London three years ago. A previous study by the same researchers, led by University of Portsmouth psychologist James Ost, reported how people distinctly remember seeing footage of the Princess Diana car crash. No such footage of that event exists either. From The Guardian:
The (7/7) study shows how prone people are to "false memories", which the researchers say police and social workers must take into account when evaluating witness testimony or "recovered" memories of childhood abuse.Another similar study from 2001 at the University of Washington addressed good false memories rather than bad ones. From Daily University Science News:
"Taken as a whole, this is further evidence that our memories are not perfect," said Dr James Ost, a psychologist at the University of Portsmouth. "They are not like a videotape you can rewind and replay for perfect recall. Because of this, memory alone is not reliable enough to form the basis of legal decisions."
Study shows how false memories rerun 7/7 film that never existed (The Guardian)
About one-third of the people who were exposed to a fake print ad describing a visit to Disneyland and how they met and shook hands with Bugs Bunny said later they remembered or knew the event happened to them.
The scenario described in the ad never occurred because Bugs Bunny is a Warner Bros. cartoon character and wouldn't be featured in any Walt Disney Co. property, according to University of Washington memory researchers Jacquie Pickrell and Elizabeth Loftus.
"Fake Memories Easily Created" (UniSci.com)
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The second article shows just how subtle the process is.
It has to fit the subjects preconceptions, meeting Freddie Kruger in Disneyland would have been rejected out of hand by most people, but bugs bunny it fits our image of what Disney should provide.
It's quite easy to see how working with a therapist could create an environment which is ripe for all kinds of extrapolation.
i read this report on mulberry st.
'Remebering Satan' is a fantastic book about recovered memories and, you know, THE DEVIL!!!!!!
Also the Christian Right in the '80's and "ritualized child abuse" I suggest reading it during the day.
Are these false memories, or false beliefs? The word "memory" is tossed around quite loosely. But if you examine what the people are saying, it may be that they are claiming they saw the footage but have no actual memory of it. They describe the details that they believe are factual elements, but do they in fact have a memory of sitting on their couch and watching those details? Probably not. They have beliefs, not memories.
I left out an important word in the second sentence:
"claiming they saw the footage but have no actual memory of it"
should read
"claiming they saw the footage but have no actual memory of seeing it"
The distinction being, they have beliefs about what they saw, and can describe details about what the footage was, but they have no memories of having seen the footage.
This happens a lot more than you'd think. I'll bet any of us can think we remember things from our childhood or infant years, but really, are you sure? How many times have those life-changing moments and hilarious anecdotes been repeated to you?
JFK, Jr. even admitted to not knowing whether he remembered waving the American flag at his father's funeral. He said he'd seen the video clip so many times that he didn't know what from his youth was real or just told to him anymore.
#3/4: Read the first article. They distinguish between people remembering they saw Bugs bunny (ie the "sitting on the couch, watching TV version) and knowing they saw Bugs, like knowing that someone must have cut your umbilical chord, despite not remembering it.
And they had subjects reporting either memories or knowledge or both of going to Disney world and shaking hands with bugs bunny. They didn't break down the proportions between the two different kinds of false memory, but they appear to have had both.
Funny, I just watched Waltz With Bashir, and there's a scene where the main character's therapist explains a study into false memories.
It went something like this: A bunch of people were shown photographs from their childhood. Among them was a fake, with their image put into a carnival scene. The majority "remembered" the carnival, those who didn't were shown the photo again and then most of them then claimed to remember. Those who "remembered" even created entire stories around it - "It's so vivid now! I remember going with my family that day, we bought a baloon..." etc..
This goes back to the movie "Psycho" in which people swore they actually saw a knife entering flesh in the infamous shower scene.
Never happened though. No such footage.
Now, what would be more interesting to me is what sort of person does not have false memories. Is there anything held in common with people who didn't remember the nonexistent event? Right handed, left handed, education level, occupation, religion, etc...
And contra wise, that's the data correlating people most likely to have those false memories?
This reminds me (really) of an episode of This American Life that was animated by Chris Ware, here. Some guy remembers an event vividly, yet he has proof it never happened.
Derren Brown talks about the process of creating false memories in his book Tricks of the Mind.
For example: Say there's a coin trick that involves passing a coin from his right hand to his left, and then disappearing; in reality, the coin remained in his right hand the entire time. Standard stuff.
The false memory version: He starts to do the trick. He actually passes the coin into his left hand. He shows you the coin in his left hand. Then he interrupts the trick; he goes off on a brief tangent about some other topic.
Now he starts the trick again. He shows you the coin in his right hand, appears to pass it to the left, actually palms it in his right, and poof: the coin's gone.
But that's impossible - you SAW it in his left hand! You saw the glint, and you heard the sound it made against his ring. Which is true; you did, and you did. Only not when you thought you did.
oops, wrong link....
there you go!
Your Honor, the jury, the defendant is innocent.
The victim's story is in fact a fake memory. Our expert witness here just explained us what a fake memory is and the jury can now see how not only is it possible but also very probable that the victim's story, as well as stories of her children about victim's cash being taken from her at gun point at her own home by the defendant while victim's children were ordered to lie down on the floor - are all in fact fake memories.
I hereby ask that a search warrant be issued to search for the missing money at the victim's home. Although the defendant has prior burglary and larceny convictions he has served his time in correctional institutions and completely redeemed himself before society. It is our turn to look at this gentleman and ask ourselves - is he telling the truth? Did he spend that night at his mother's home? Did the victim in fact tell her story based on the memories and recollections that were faked and made up by her brain?
Your Honor, the jury, defense rests.
It's been my opinion for quite some time that most folks are full of shit, so full of shit that they actually start believing their own bullshit. I'm sure false memories occur, but I'll bet you anything that a good chunk of false memories started out as pure fiction out of whole cloth, generated in the mind of an insecure person.
And if I'm not being clear, some folks who say "I remember seeing footage of Diana's crash" started saying it to appear cool or in the know, and then eventually they either married themselves to the lie or they actually started believing it.
#6, I was not addressing the Bugs Bunny experiment. That experiment is old and well-known; it was done by the discredited researcher Elizabeth Loftus. Loftus pulls down ~2 mil per year testifying at court trials about how memory is unreliable. She's too invested, and her academic record is far too spotty for my tastes.
I was addressing the new story, which at least on the surface appears to be an honest, free-of-bias study.
I've got a twin sister, and we fight constantly because a certain memory will have happened to one of us, but BOTH of us will swear it happened us (whoever it talking), but obviously only happened to one or the other. (i.e. one time one of us sniffed pepper spray- she says I did it, i say she did it!) It gets vicious some time, how hard we will fight for our version of the memory to be right, but obviously one has to be wrong, yknow?
I also vividly remember distinctly being able to fly as a kid. Who wants to bet that it actually happened- but i swill swear i could!
Suffice it to say- this article doesn't surprise me one bit!
I was under the impression that most experts agree that eyewitness accounts are the worst possible evidence in court. Unfortunately, juries believe them more than verifiable evidence like DNA.
I was six or seven in about 1963. We'd moved from California when I was three, and I resented the fact that my sisters remembered Disneyland and I didn't. I found a souvenir pencil one day and declared that it was mine. Of course, they challenged this statement, so I backed it up. "Yogi Bear gave it to me," I said, "at Disneyland."
Strangely enough, this assertion was met with skepticism.
As a huge nerd, I'm genuinely disappointed that, apparently, none of the study participants scoffed at the very idea that Bugs Bunny would be found at Disneyland.
You know... I once thought I had a false memory. It didn't 'fit' in the grand scheme of things, even though it felt real and seemed real, and I could remember it clearly. Because it didn't make sense, however, in the bigger scheme of things... I discounted it, believing that it must just be a vivid dream that keeps coming back and that I've started remembering as 'real', rather than something than actually happened.
Later on down the track, my mother sat me down (in a carpark for a mall across town, of all places) to tell me a few things about what had happened at one point when I was a child... and I started recounting it back to her, complete with details like 'It was a mint-green weatherboard house with a white picket fence and roses', with her confirming each thing I'm saying as I go.
The mind is rather a funny thing... we convince ourselves that things are real, convince ourselves that other things are not... we cope, we deal, and we explain things so that they fit in, because it doesn't make sense otherwise. If there is a picture of you at a carnival, then you must have gone to a carnival, yes? We distrust our own minds and fill in the gaps with anything available... and then even believe it ourselves.
I'm a big cartoon nerd - there's no WAY the Bugs-at-Disneyland would have caught me. Disney sucks ;-)
This is familiar to anyone who's worked in stock footage research. Two of the most common requests of this kind are 1) Khruschev banging his shoe on the podium at the UN, and 2) the "famous" shot of people watching a 3D movie. Except that there's no footage of either. Yet you try telling people that. "But I've seen it a million times in documentaries!"
How often do you appear in view in your own memories as a separate character? I guess photography has a lot to answer for... I can remember moving house in 1963 when I was about five, and I know I knew what was going on, but when I search for a visual memory all I see are the b&w photos my father took. Which has me in them.
I've actually thought about the possibilities of fake memories before, but if a certain memory of mine is fake, I would be rather distraught. And I can't verify this memory because no one else was around when it happened. Hmmm...
I think there a people still in jail convicted of sexual child abuse on the testimony of "recovered memory" witnesses. Prosecution of ritual Satanic child abuse rings were all the thing twenty years ago. There are probably a few hold-out believers still looking for the alleged secret tunnels on the old site of the McMartin Day Care school at Long Beach, CA.
The only real "ring" is a large number of social worker/therapists who subscribed to recovered memory theories that have been thoroughly discredited. Many of them, happily, were later hit with law suits. It's a tawdry tale of well-meaning, ill-educated quacks causing great damage and suffering.
I swear this has been posted already.
When Mom took me from California to Colorado, I was almost three. I have some memories of the train trip -- I was most impressed by the toilets. You push a pedal on the floor, and WHOOSH! it all goes right out the bottom of the train.
By the time I was in grade school, I decided I must have imagined that. Nobody would be so irresponsible as to design a system that dropped excrement and all like that. It must go into tanks or something, I figured.
Later on, of course, I found out I'd been right the first time. Dumperoonie.
False/ impossible memory stories are commonplace among drunks. One boozer I knew swore w/ misplaced indignation that he'd watched the JFK shooting *on TV* the day it occurred.
He claimed it had been "...very depressing. They kept showing it over and over again."
I called BS, mentioning the Zapruder origin of the only known footage- got nowhere convincing him. (Pre-internet days, then.) He ended up sliding into his own sub-reality shortly after that, anyway.
With the significance of today's date we naturally also have to address the area where false memories are used extensively and intentionally. To how many people the government's story of September 11, 2001 is like a real memory and 'celebrating' today as Patriot's Day would be funny if it would not be so sad. A very eloquent but angering account can be found at 'Support our Troops.'
Salvador Dali's autobiography comments extensively on false memories, IIRC he would paint them.
Jeff@21, there's no footage of those but there are photos, and when shown on tv, some might call the still so presented "footage".
This makes me think of the episode of South Park where Mr Garrison wrote the really gay romance novel. After years of quoting it at inappropriate moments for maximum hilarity, I had changed and added a few lines to make it way more gay. Totally on accident. Then recently I saw the actual episode and was amazed by how very different it was from my memory.
I recall a related study that basicly ripped apart the strength of eye witness testimony in criminal cases... Sadly, other than showing that eye witness testimony should be treated as being far less certain than it is, I don't remember anything else about it.
There was a recent study - posssibly in Japan but soneone was doing a thesis about it in NZ - where they used some technology to set things up so that two people tought they were watching the same short film but actually saw different events. Then they had them talk about what happened. About 75% (I think) of the subjects had memories of the film influenced by the other person.
When you think how important memory is to your image of yourself and how you start influencing your memory from the moment it hits your senses - you can see how people turn out how they do.
Anyone remember the infamous "Whale Thread" on IMDB? I would love to have an archived print-out of that!
From the article: "They are not like a videotape you can rewind and replay for perfect recall."
That is exactly how my memory works, and until I met my boyfriend (who also has eidetic memory) about a year ago, I had no idea that this was not how everybody's memory worked. To say I was surprised is a massive understatement, but it certainly explained a few things.
The downside, of course, is that unpleasant experiences are hard to forget, and I relive them with most of my senses when I recall them. Combine that with my overblown sense of guilt, and I find myself still feeling bad about things like accidentally implying my friend was fat after a visit to the mall 17 years ago when we were freshmen in high school. What I really want to learn is how to let go of stuff like that.
So the mind control satellites do work!
Now I don't know if my memories are real or not. ::cries::
"You only thought you voted for a Democrat, when you actually voted for a Republican. Easily explained actually by the phenomenon of false memories. Now take these pills and call me in the morning."
Yes, when I said above that Dali painted his false memories, I meant that he realized them in his paintings and other works.
Thereby removing their "falsehood", and purging them of their status as mere "memories" (false ones at that).
Read all about Dali's false memories in his Autobiography:
http://www.amazon.com/Diary-Genius-Autobiography-Salvador-Dali/dp/B000UTJQ2Y/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1221259155&sr=8-4.