False memory

I don't think you and I have been on a hypecast other than like movie hypecasts.

Fucking watch False Memory.

False Memory, damn.

I would love to talk about that because holy shit, it's so fucking good.

It's a shame it's so difficult to watch.

It's a series where we take common psychology terms, phrases, myths, or ideas and give you the real research and the real science that you deserve so that you really know what's up, including some of the history as well.

And today, our target, the topic we are turning our attention to, is false memories.

This is one of the biggest questions in psychology, and we've had it for a long time.

Can we trust what we remember? How much of what we think happened actually did? False memories and their confusion with repressed memories, their use as a defense in legal proceedings has quite a long, very controversial, very painful history in the psychology space that I don't think a lot of people know about.

So today, I thought we'd spell out what they are, how they happen, and the critical research that we can use to show that false memories do exist.

And you actually likely have a few.

Plus, again, some of those big battles that have been fought that are very, very interesting over the identification or dismissal of the entire idea.

So any detail that it... gets added in, anything that you kind of accidentally create for yourself has to feel real.

I'm missing a lot of newer stuff.

I did snatch up the last three episodes of False Memory, though.

Hell yeah.

And, um, it's over.

Actually, it's reversed because I don't think Gibbs has seen any of this with his no soul angle.

Did you finish false memory? I did not.

I'm not caught up yet.

Then I won't talk anymore about it.

One study used an MRI to scan the brains of 21 participants as they experienced a lab-induced déjà vu.

Interestingly, the areas of the brain involved in memory, like the hippocampus, were not triggered as you would expect if the feeling was linked to, for example, a false memory.

Instead, the researchers found the active areas of the brain were those involved in decision-making.

They interpreted this result to mean that déjà vu could instead be a result of our brains being involved in conflict resolution.

With just a little suggestion, people will remember a specific memory of being lost in the mall as a child and being found by a kind old lady, despite the relatives confirming that that never happened.

This form of deja vu would be similar to the feeling when you can't differentiate between a dream versus something that actually happened.

Some scientists argue that deja vu is certainly related to false memory in the sense that it is a memory dissociation kind of effect.

It dissociates reality from your memory.

This is what happens in the ways that memory-related doubts can show up in OCD and how people often try to manage them by doing compulsions.

We have a false memory OCD, which is an OCD theme that shows up as a persistent doubt about whether something actually happened or not.

Compulsions can include mental replaying of events to try to feel more sure about what took place, or even searching again for proof, like I said, photos, text, footage, even going somewhere and searching for things.

In real event OCD, the theme is where intrusive thoughts latch onto an event that actually happened, but it distorts our perception of it.

It brings the person back into relationship with the future.

False memories can form when suggestion feels convincing.

The mind can create memories for events that never happened, especially when suggestion is repeated with confidence.

A person may be told that they were lost in a shopping center as a child, or that a certain detail appeared in a scene.

Right

... one of these alters, you can program it with false memories or screen memories, uh, that you don't understand actually didn't happen, um, because you're constantly living in two worlds at once.

And it's this very sad thing because, you know, unfortunately some of the accusations about us, [laughs] you know, it, it, without saying too much, um, seem to be, come from something like that.

It's so hilariously out there.

... wanting to target you to stop you from what you're doing, there's a susceptibility to that perhaps, so.

Right.

There was a big push for, like, "Oh, we'll just say all these people's real experiences were false memories, you know, and we'll label it and push that on the public so that no one takes them seriously, and then we can drug them and put them in a, in a psych ward," you know? So yeah, there's that too, and then Tyler, what you were saying is also, so those two things are, are both- Are both very real, yeah.

Yeah.

Since earning a doctorate in psychology at Stanford University, Loftus has published 22 books, including the award-winning Eyewitness Testimony and 500 scientific articles.

Her 30 years of research have focused on the misinformation effect, eyewitness fallibility, and the creation and nature of false memories.

Loftus has contributed her expertise to hundreds of high-profile criminal cases.

Dr. Loftus is a past president of the Association of Psychological Science.

In a list...

Yeah, in a list of the hundred most eminent psychologists of the 20th century, the journal Review of General Psychology placed Loftus at number 58, making her the top-ranked woman.

Uh, in the repressed memory wars, Dr. Loft- Dr. Loftus has been a visible and vocal defender of those victimized by false memories of childhood sexual abuse.

In her book, The Myth of Repressed Memory, with co-author Katherine Ketcham, uh, Dr. Loftus, uh, succinctly sums up her view of the false memory phenomenon, which she describes as a worldwide crisis.

Right

... one of these alters, you can program it with false memories or screen memories, uh, that you don't understand actually didn't happen, um, because you're constantly living in two worlds at once.

And it's this very sad thing because, you know, unfortunately some of the accusations about us, [laughs] you know, th- th- without saying too much, um, seem to be, come from something like that.

It's so hilariously out there, like, uh, you know, it's baseless and it-

So-

Right.

There was a big push for like, "Oh, we'll just say all these people's real experiences were false memories.

You know, we'll label it and push that on the public so that no one takes them seriously, and then we can drug them and put them in a, in a psych ward." You know? So yeah, there's that too, and then Tyler, what you were saying is also...