How Our Brains Trick Us - False Memories

Continuing along our "how our brains trick us series", we come to the existence of false memories.  Now this one is really good, because we all think we can trust our memories.  I mean, we use eye witness testimony as evidence in court, right?  So our memories must be really solid.

Hahahahaha, no way!

Our brains can, and will, create their own false memories.  Consider the results K. A. Wade, M. Garry, J. D. Read, and D. S. Lindsay from the University of Victoria in Canada and Victoria University in New Zealand show in their paper from 2002, "A picture is worth a thousand lies: Using false photographs to create false childhood memories".

For each test subject, they put together a collection of real photographs depicting events like birthdays and family outings from the time the subject was about four years old with one doctored photograph of the subject taking a hot air balloon ride with one of his or her parents.

A real image of the subject and a parent was inserted into a photograph of a hot air balloon, creating the false image used in the study done by K. A. Wade, M. Garry, J. D. Read, and D. S. Lindsay.

The researchers then interviewed the subjects about the events shown in the photographs.  Fifty percent of the subjects came up with partial or complete descriptions of the fabricated hot air balloon ride.  When revealed to them that the picture had been false, a fact confirmed by multiple family members, many of the subjects were incredulous that their memories had been wrong.  But all it took was a little prodding to get them describing how the wind felt on their faces, what the buildings on the ground looked like from so high up.  And they believed what they were saying.

This was a follow up on another study completed in 1995:  "The Formation of False Memories", by Elizabeth Loftus and Jacqueline Pickerell.  After telling their subjects that they had once been lost at a mall and asking the subjects to remember and explain what they felt during the situation, about 30% of the subjects came up with narratives.  About something that never happened.  So while the visual aid of the doctored photo helped jog false memories in a larger percentage of subjects, just suggesting that some event occurred in childhood is enough to get our brains to decide that it really did happen.

That's fairly terrifying if you ask me.

But not as terrifying as the first time you went on a roller coaster and it got stuck at the top of the hill.  Wasn't that just awful?  Waiting there, not knowing when you would get down, staring down at all the other carnival goers wandering about with their ice cream cones as if absolutely nothing was wrong?

While it is unsettling to think of childhood memories as modifiable, it is more disturbing to think about some of the more serious areas where we depend on memory.  I already mentioned judicial testimony.  What about criminal interrogations?  Therapy sessions regarding child abuse?  If just asking somebody a question can potentially prompt false recall of false past events, can we make good decisions based on the results of such sessions?

Now, I'm not saying that all of our memories are false and there is a whole big conspiracy going on to implant fabricated histories in our minds so we don't know what has really been happening to us throughout all of our lives.  But we should know what follies our brains are capable of so we can better judge the information presented to us by other people's and our own memories.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to mod my tin foil hat so it's memory-tampering proof too.