[HN Gopher] False memory implantation in adults is easy ___________________________________________________________________ False memory implantation in adults is easy Author : thatmarkdykeman Score : 217 points Date : 2022-10-06 13:09 UTC (9 hours ago) (HTM) web link (brainpizza.substack.com) (TXT) w3m dump (brainpizza.substack.com) | samin17 wrote: | 167.71.198.211 | samin17 wrote: | Sablengtoto | barbariangrunge wrote: | Everyone already knows this is a real effect, but this article | doesn't really add anything to the conversation. It doesn't | detail how these "straightforward manipulations" happen, as | promised, and only links to a paywalled paper as evidence. I | wonder if the author read the paper or whether they are just | elaborating on the abstract? | BurningFrog wrote: | I keep hearing about this effect. | | I'm really starting to believe in it! | psychphysic wrote: | The memory implant topic has not interested me much but.. | | We might have worked out how to erase memories [0] (we already | had some idea how to block them)[1]. | | How do people not talk about this more!? | | [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24362759/ | | [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3692719/ | cwillu wrote: | Welcome to the Antimemetics Division. | | No, this is not your first day. | | --https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub | psychphysic wrote: | Heh took me a minute to get it. | boomboomsubban wrote: | Memory loss is one of the reasons | electroshock/electroconvulsive therapy isn't common, plus | people aren't overly keen to give themselves a seizure to erase | memories. | psychphysic wrote: | Depends on the memory surely, and who wants it erased from | whom? | aliqot wrote: | I can imagine scenarios where some painful or disturbing | memories would be a negative part of every day life, but I | worry that 'what is to be erased' is not necessarily one of | the parameters we can define clearly. | wing-_-nuts wrote: | My memory of my childhood is terrible. I just have little | 'flashbulb' memories, and they mostly seem to be of the worst | moments. I've read that recalling memories will change them, and | for some reason _those_ just happen to be the memories that come | to me late at night when I 'm trying to sleep. I often wonder how | those memories have changed in my mind as a result of me getting | stuck on them. I don't recall ruminating over those events in | childhood, so maybe they weren't as bad as I remember and my | negativity is slowly twisting them into something worse than they | actually were. | | I feel like I'm a little ungrateful because I have so few good | memories of that time and my parents couldn't have really been | _that_ bad. | pizza234 wrote: | > so maybe they weren't as bad as I remember [...] and my | parents couldn't have really been that bad | | Any possibility is on the table; and I think it'd be useful to | investigate in one way or another. Most of the people | experiences only one couple of parents, and there are no other | models to compare against, so the parental model can seem | normal/good independently of how it is. | | I've actually experienced the opposite case; I've always had | good memories of my childhood, but as adult, I've realized that | my parents were _very_ bad (not abusive, just bad parents). | number6 wrote: | I can relate. My parents weren't that bad but that are some | pretty nasty memories hanging around. | | And besides them nothing much other. | | I just try not to remember. | sharkweek wrote: | This is super common. | | It's very normal to remember the "bad" stuff (and turn them | into worse memories than they really were) because of how our | brains are wired to try and avoid said "bad stuff." | | All my earliest memories are traumatic in the sense that it was | something bad that happened in a very visceral way, e.g., being | stung by a bee in my back yard, falling off of a tire swing, | the basement door closing behind me and being locked in it for | maybe 30 seconds (but my memory is that it was forever). | | I had the same feelings as you but then in therapy learned how | normal it is and that helped a lot. | WanderPanda wrote: | For me it is the complete opposite, I only remember the good | memories and feel nostalgic all the time, thinking everything | was better and I was happier 1/2/5/10/15 years ago | f1shy wrote: | I have a mixture of good and bad ones. But the really bad are | completely gone. Once I was told about one day when my uncle | and other relatives ended in a "boxing match" after some | alcohol and discussion... and I have absolutely no memory about | it. After I was told many times, and with details, I seemed to | start remembering it... but I stoped thinking about it, | casually because of fear that those memories where implanted | and not real... | | From my childhood I have horrible holes in my memory... only | flashes here and there... but when I meet with school guys from | that time, they tell endless stories from them I do not | remember anything at all... sometimes I am the protagonist, but | I have no clue what they talk about. | chasd00 wrote: | This happens to me too, my wife will tell me about horrible | fights we had at the beginning of our marriage and i have | absolutely no memory of them. I think forgetting unpleasant | memories is a defense mechanism some people develop. | amanaplanacanal wrote: | I identify with this _so much_. Brains are weird. | mod wrote: | I always think about one memory I have that might not be true. I | was very young--3 years old--and I have relatively vivid (visual) | memories. But, it was a life-and-death circumstance, maybe that | matters. | | I fell off the dock while fishing. My dad was 20 or 30 yards | away. I remember being underwater, I remember the water being | stained green a bit, I remember seeing fish I was used to | catching (perch), and most importantly, I remember how it feels | to be lifted up by your scalp. My dad just grabbed my hair in one | hand and lifted me straight up out of the water vertically. You | would think it hurts, but it doesn't--at least at the weight of a | 3 year old. | | The event for sure happened, I'm just not convinced I didn't | create a specific memory later--maybe when I was 9 or 10. | VoodooJuJu wrote: | >I remember seeing fish I was used to catching | | This didn't happen. The second you splash into that water, | they're gone, far enough away from the crash at least that they | csn't be spotted by foggy vision in dark green water. | thatmarkdykeman wrote: | Original title: Sins of Memory | chris_wot wrote: | There's a typo in this title anyway. It's "is", not "us". | irrational wrote: | Thanks. I noticed the typo, but for some reason couldn't | figure out the correct word. | wongarsu wrote: | I didn't notice that typo (or more likely: immediately | corrected it in my mind and forgot about it by the time the | comments opened), so I'll just take that typo as a meta | commentary on memory; or maybe the submitter trying to create | a Mandela effect where different people remember the title | differently :) | n65463f23_4 wrote: | i think about this a lot with my kids. due to smartphones we have | thousands of pictures of their early life, so they "remember" all | these things that happened when they were 1 year old etc. because | theyve seen these pictures enough times they legitimately do | remember the picture at least and can recall the events, but im | sure without all the pictures they would have no memory of any of | it. | dilap wrote: | My earliest memories are definitely just "memories of memories" | at this point. Like I can remember-what-I-remembered more than | the memory itself. Not so different from remembering a photo, I | think. | spaetzleesser wrote: | I have even implanted false memories into myself. There was an | event in my childhood where I told my parents that my sister | hadn't told me something although she had. We discussed this | event almost 40 years later and I totally believed that she | hadn't told me. Only later I remembered "oh wait. She actually | told me but I lied about". | verisimi wrote: | This is interesting and I think you can heal past traumas with | a variation of this. | | So, if you remember a haunting event that you think may impact | you even today, but then play it out how you want it to (ie | vividly re-imagine as you would have liked it to be, or where | you respond as you would now) then your present mental | processing can be released from the malingering effects of the | trauma. | | This is the most powerful technique for mental healing I know. | xwdv wrote: | I've always felt like we need a more formal technology for | implanting false memories. In the millennial generation, many | people will probably live shitty lives and will never be able to | afford things such as a home, kids, travel or retirement. Perhaps | the humane thing to do would be to implant happy memories when | they are on their deathbed, so they could die peacefully | remembering the good times they were never able to achieve. | AlecSchueler wrote: | Not sure if you're serious or joking? Surely the effort would | be better spent to genuinely increase quality of life. | renewiltord wrote: | Well, genuinely increasing QoL requires me to convince a | large mass of people. Developing this technology only needs | progress against nature. The former problem is generally | intractable for me. | coldtea wrote: | That's like solving the problem of not having a meaningful | relationship (and sex) with watching porn. | | It's a substitute alright. It's also not a solution, just a | crutch. | TrevorJ wrote: | Pick 100 random people from 100 random times in history. | Millennials will have objectively better quality of life than | almost all of them. That isn't to say that we don't have a huge | number of problems that should be completely solvable, but good | grief, we need some perspective here. | coldtea wrote: | Material conditions is just one way of measuring quality of | life. Not even the most important one, when it comes to | hapiness | TrevorJ wrote: | I completely agree with you. However, I'm responding to the | OP's thesis which seems to be at least partially rooted in | a critique of material conditions. I definitely think | there's a deeper argument to be explored here around how we | can be one of the most materially rich societies in history | and also perhaps the least happy. | xwdv wrote: | Meh, I cited some non-material conditions too. | avgcorrection wrote: | Pick 100 random people from 100 different places of Earth. | The HN reader will (statistically) have the objectively most | inane future-optimism out of all of them, latching onto Elon | Musk tweets about colonizing Mars, democratizing technology | by way of the latest "decentralized" trend, thinking that | nuclear power + EV will solve climate change, just to name a | few. | | They will also have at least double the expected income of | whatever group they decide to harangue for not apprecating | their "quality of life". | jessaustin wrote: | How does this respond to parent, which didn't even mention | other generations, cavemen, medieval serfs, etc? Who really | benefits from this "perspective" you suggest? Not the | millennials under discussion, nor 99% of anyone else. _You_ | certainly don 't benefit from it, so why suggest it? | TrevorJ wrote: | Let me be more direct: suggesting that the life of the | average Millennial is so uniquely miserable that the best | approach is to give up trying to make things better, and | implant simulated memories is one of the most myopic, | selfish and self serving drivel I've heard in recent | memory. | jessaustin wrote: | Here you attempt to distract from the basic dishonesty of | your inter-generational "whataboutism" through critique | of something GP didn't suggest. GP's observations of the | present and near-future are discouraging, but they're | accurate. The cavemen and the serfs are not our | opponents; our opponents are alive right now. GP | speculated that we could be kinder to the dying | (seriously, that's what you're arguing against), but | didn't recommend surrender. | | [I had a suggestion for "action" here, but I deleted it | before posting.] | TrevorJ wrote: | Your making my point far better than I could, thank you. | pessimizer wrote: | I think it's supposed to explain that because the | hardworking and underpaid are better off than cavemen, they | will also obviously continue to be better off than cavemen, | so all problems are therefore tractable, and also currently | being solved. Also, that if you live better than a caveman | you should show some gratitude and stop complaining. | Something something Steven Pinker Dr. Pangloss. | kjkjadksj wrote: | Modern medicine gives you an opioid instead on your death bed. | AnimalMuppet wrote: | If we have such a technology, you think it will be used to | comfort the dying, rather than manipulate the living? Wow, are | you an optimist. | avgcorrection wrote: | Yes, and this will be engineered by the... benevolent past | generations which are already dead? The "zoomers"? | coldtea wrote: | Yeah, let's not fix problems, let's sweep them under false | memory carpet. | | But why go all that far? If we want people to be happy "in | their deathbed" or in life in general, we could always mandate | euphoric drugs 24/7... | chasd00 wrote: | > we could always mandate euphoric drugs 24/7... | | or a Buy Now button | xwdv wrote: | Don't we already do that? We give people phones and apps and | hyper stimulation to keep them as happy as possible. Go watch | TikToks of people pulling funny pranks or big tits bouncing | in your face for several hours and be happy. Or make videos | yourself and get rewarded with likes. | hirundo wrote: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Can_Remember_It_for_You_Who... | moondrek wrote: | The video game "To The Moon" and its sequels/related media | explores this premise. | spywaregorilla wrote: | Why do people act like the tiny slice of life where you're | dying is a really important part | NateEag wrote: | Because death is terrifying at a primal level that almost | can't be articulated. | | Anything that reduces the anticipated terror and misery is | seen as desirable. | | That's mostly what cryonics is about, by the way. It gives | hope at your moment of death that perhaps you'll come back | someday. | | Oddly enough religion is _not_ just about that, but it does | serve that purpose often. | r2_pilot wrote: | Because for most people involved, the tiny slice of life | where you're dying is the only thing they empirically | experience. | spywaregorilla wrote: | I can't parse this sentence. | NateEag wrote: | I think it's a convoluted invocation of the idea that | everyone is dying from the moment they are brought into | this world of struggle and entropy. | chiefalchemist wrote: | The brain is a strange and complicated instrument. It can be | fooled more easily than most of us want to know. | | The book "The Brain that Changes Itself" sites a number of | examples that often border on the bizarre. | | https://www.amazon.com/Brain-That-Changes-Itself-Frontiers/d... | WaitWaitWha wrote: | Steven Hassan's BITE Model is good resource for this. It is a | framework to identify authoritarian control, i.e. "brain | washing". The _information_ and _thought control_ sections are | specially relevant to memory implantation. | | https://freedomofmind.com/cult-mind-control/bite-model/ | zealtrace wrote: | My understanding is this kind of memory manipulation appears in | many studies and is fairly uncontroversial. Where this gets | problematic is in the natural tendency to extrapolate this to | other kinds of memory discussions, particularly around those of | childhood trauma. | | I found this paper gives a better sense of the terrain from that | perspective. | https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/ajp.156.5.... | | There's also interesting research being done using brain scans to | better understand the dissociative processes that are involved in | trauma related memory. | | https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.2... | | Either way, these kinds of studies can distract from the | underlying statistics, which indicate that if someone you know | tells you they suspect they were abused as a child, there's a | fairly good probability they're right. The CDC cites 1 in 4 girls | in the United States as being sexually abused, for example. | | https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/childsexualabuse/fast... | david422 wrote: | Check out this episode by mentalist Derren Brown | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEmCQzueyEQ where he sits down | with the actor Simon Pegg and - from the description - "Derren | convinces Simon Pegg that he wants a BMX bike for his birthday" | | It's really fascinating what happens - how malleable the human | brain is - and the video also goes through how Derren did it. | Worth a watch if that stuff is interesting to you. | _mhr_ wrote: | He's swapping billets and claiming the swapped billet is what | Simon originally wrote. Simon is amazed because he was just | told he would find himself confused, and he is, since the fake | billet is written in his handwriting (forged). Which is the | simpler explanation, sleight of hand and handwriting forgery, | or hypnotic memory implantation spanning several days? | karaterobot wrote: | I once described a few of my earliest memories to my mom, who | politely listened and then showed me the photographs that | implanted those memories in my brain. Of the five earliest | "memories" I have, two of them are based on pictures of me as an | infant, well before I could actually have formed memories. One of | them was a thing I'd never actually done, but there was a picture | of my _brother_ doing it as a kid. I 'd just seen these photos | years ago, and told a story about them happening to me which had | neatly and imperceptibly replaced my memory of them as | photographs. | | I wondered when that phenomenon stopped: could it happen to me as | an adult, even today? Almost certainly. Probably happens all the | time. | not2b wrote: | Yes, I thought I had an early memory of 2.5 year old me sad | because my tricycle broke, but it turned out that my father | took an 8mm film that included this (the solid rubber tire | split and came off), that we watched a number of times when I | was slightly older. It felt like a real memory, but it must | have been implanted. | faeriechangling wrote: | As somebody with recurring traumatic memories I wonder how many | of them are made up. I presume some are totally fictitious and | some are partially exaggerated meanwhile some actual traumatic | stuff has likely been memory holed. | | I mostly take it as a reason to not live in the past since you | can't even trust your memories to be real. | MomoXenosaga wrote: | It terrifies me thinking how many people got sent to jail over | just eye witness accounts. At least my country hasn't had the | death penalty since Napoleon. That is a small consolation. | bjt2n3904 wrote: | I read through their methods. I literally can't conceive how this | is possible outside of incredibly weak minded people, or extended | periods of physical and mental abuse. | pflenker wrote: | It's actually easy. Just meet up with old friends, talk about | ages long past and inject a meaningless, completely fabricated | detail into your version of the story. Wait a bit, then meet | again and do the same. Someone will bring up said detail and | others will agree to it, most likely not even remembering that | this detail did not actually happen and that they first heard | about it from you, only very recently. The crucial point here | is that they will actually remember it wrong. | bjt2n3904 wrote: | I've done this, though not intentionally. My friends puzzle | with me for a moment, until one of three things happen: | | 1) We remember the event correctly, | | 2) I realize that I confused it with something else, | | or 3) I/we decide all of our memories are too poor to recall | the event, and drop the matter. | | Edit: I've also had an employer press me quite hostilely | about an event we remembered differently, as well -- and we | were unable to reconcile with things like email. I simply | refuse to say something that isn't true, or affirm something | that I'm truly uncertain about. | cwillu wrote: | 4) We remember the event incorrectly, which is | indistinguishable from 1) without outside corroboration | bjt2n3904 wrote: | I'll agree this is functionally indistinguishable from us | remembering correctly, but we quickly veer into "if a | tree falls into the forest, and no one is there to hear | it" territory. Whatever claim you have that this happens | is as equally valid as my claim that it has not. | | However, in my thirty some years, never has anyone come | back to correct anything more than a minor detail. Not | something major like, "actually, we all got arrested that | night, we didn't get away". | pessimizer wrote: | > "if a tree falls into the forest, and no one is there | to hear it" territory. | | It's important to note that this version of reality is | the things don't matter if we don't notice them version. | We're always in that area when we're talking about | memory, until evidence one way or another shows up. | | Your confidence in your introspection could have create | false memories in your friends. I've certainly had | conversations with friends when someone thought they had | first hand experience of something they were just told | about and involved in a lot of conversations about. | Because in a group of friends, they could have been | there, they just happened to not be there _that night_. | | My mother tells me a story about a friend of hers who | lied about being raped because she came home very late | (and her father was abusive, and the excuse saved her | from him.) In discussions with my mother years later, it | became clear to my mother that she actually now believed | she was raped. Not simply _despite_ my mother 's recall | of how they walked around in the streets that night | trying to come up with a story to tell her father, but my | mother is actually in the false rape story and helped her | get away. | pessimizer wrote: | It's good to learn from this that your personal introspection | isn't as dependable as you think it is. Introspection is a | liar. | Kranar wrote: | I think you're likely closer to what's happening. The examples | look pretty trivial and inconsequential; implanting a false | memory of getting lost in a mall or having some ear infection | when they were a very young child. Most likely the participants | weighed arguing against these false memories versus not being | confrontational and going along with the study. | | Try implanting a false memory of something of consequence, like | a false memory that someone owes you 10 dollars or heck even 5 | dollars, and then let's see just how easy it is to implant | false memories into college aged students. | | Anyways, the actual study can be found here for free, and after | reading it over it's quite underwhelming. For example, the | study only says about 25% of participants ended up having false | memories implanted after three interviews. | | https://blogs.brown.edu/recoveredmemory/files/2015/05/Loftus... | photochemsyn wrote: | I think this could serve as a good description of what | 'gaslighting' refers to: | | > "Setting it up means: you need a good storyline, and you must | use (fake) social proof provided by trusted others during | conversation. The trusted others can be friends, parents, | authority figures; the to-be-implanted memory can be a | significant event - in the case below, a falsified criminal | event." | | One obvious defense againt this dark art is to simply not trust | anyone, ever - but this approach has consequent repercussions, | such as the inability to form normal social bonds with others (as | all social relationships entail a certain degree of trust). | | Possibly, a revival of 'memory palace' approaches, which involve | deliberately training and improving one's memory, would result in | built-in resistance to this kind of manipulation. | munificent wrote: | _> One obvious defense againt this dark art is to simply not | trust anyone, ever - but this approach has consequent | repercussions_ | | The other obvious giant gaping downside is that you lose access | to all of the _true_ information you will get from most people | who are not, in fact, bad actors. It 's like gouging out your | own eyes to save yourself from optical illusions. | mistermann wrote: | if you think about it in database terminology: would | assigning a different value for the epistemic_status column | cause the row to be deleted? | lostmsu wrote: | No, you just need to require proof proportional to the severity | of claims. | | E.g. no point in distrusting Alex on his account of eating | ramen for breakfast if it does not materially affect you. | bjt2n3904 wrote: | Precisely this! | | If you want to tell me that I forgot that I was arrested that | night, the response is a very blunt "provide convincing proof | that doesn't require me to trust you, or bug off". | | Being vigilant for fakes is very time consuming too. | Especially given some of the scam tricks, like "call the | fraud and abuse hotline at 1-800..." -- except that number | was provided by the scammer. | PuppyTailWags wrote: | I would like to push back against accepting gaslighting if it | doesn't appear to materially affect you at the time. You make | yourself vulnerable to being gaslit about how materially | affecting it can be to you. This is how abusers destroy the | identity of their victims over time, through continually | downplaying their harm and convincing the victim they are not | being injured. This makes it extremely hard for someone to | leave their abuser, because their psychological state has | been warped that being abused is the norm and therefore | there's nothing better than the abuse out there. | | If Alex is willing to lie and also gaslight someone about | breakfast, Alex isn't safe to be around. Especially for | someone who has been previously abused. | autoexec wrote: | I don't think anyone was suggesting you should still be | fine with Alex if you caught him manipulating you, only | that it's silly and pointless to be immediately distrusting | and demand a bunch of evidence when someone makes a claim | that doesn't matter. That is, be generally trusting of Alex | (and everyone else) as long as the stakes are low. | PuppyTailWags wrote: | That wasn't clear from your original post, sorry, it read | more to me that there is a level of gaslighting that is | generally acceptable. I think even if the stakes are low, | someone who lies and gaslights over low stakes is no | longer a low stakes scenario. | P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: | > If Alex is willing to lie and also gaslight someone about | breakfast, Alex isn't safe to be around. | | If a man lies and tells his wife she doesn't look fat in | that outfit, is he unsafe to be around? | | I know it's generational, but I really can't wait for | reasonableness to be vogue again. | PuppyTailWags wrote: | It's very hard to develop a built-in resistance to this kind of | manipulation, except for one very strong thing: people who are | likely to gaslight you are likely to not respect your | boundaries because gaslighting is a form of boundary violation. | | The other one is to have a robust support network of the kind | of people who respect your boundaries. Those behaviors are | correlated with identifying when someone is trying to gaslight | and warning you. This is particularly helpful when you are | already vulnerable due to poor social intelligence, trauma from | previous abuse, or otherwise in a vulnerable moment (tired, | inebriated, angry or upset, etc). | TheMightyLlama wrote: | If gas lighting is a form of boundary violation, and I'm | stretching here, could it be classified as mind-rape? | PuppyTailWags wrote: | No; additionally, the conflation of rape with all boundary | violation also makes it less likely for people who are | victims to identify when they're being abused because abuse | takes way more forms than sexual violence. Please consider | the implications of such. | ntonozzi wrote: | No, there are plenty of ways to violate a boundary besides | rape. | AstralStorm wrote: | I wonder how vulnerable are people with photographic or | otherwise eideitic memory. Perhaps even just very accurate as | measured on a memory test. | | It could be possible that you cannot really gaslight someone | about a thing they remember to never have happened. | PuppyTailWags wrote: | It's not about how well your memory works; it's about how | you can be convinced not to believe yourself. This extends | not just to what you remember but how you remember it. For | example, saying something extremely insulting or demeaning | and then acting extremely hurt when there's pushback and | accusing the person pushing back of malice and harm. This | strategy can often take someone offguard, especially if | they genuinely care for and want the relationship to remain | positive, being told that no, they are actually the party | that is causing drama/hurting others can really fuck up the | psyche _even if they remember that they were the ones | insulted_ , because the situation repositions that they are | the ones at fault for feeling hurt and their hurt feelings | are bad/should be suppressed to maintain the relationship. | bjt2n3904 wrote: | I think there's another defense, besides "trust no one". Two | facets: | | 1) A lack of complete or blind trust in "authority" figures | | 2) An ability to gradually decrease trust/accommodation, and | increase a tone that society would consider "impolite". | | I've spoken several times at various things like school board | meetings. Each time I've come with fire to spit, but when I | approach the podium it dies down. What I say doesn't change, | but my tone does. It's difficult to be impolite to people, but | it's sometimes necessary. I think this is a skill we've let | atrophy in the era of "be really nice to everyone". | | If I were being told, "no this did happen, your parents said it | did, keep trying to remember", when I was sure it didn't, my | distrust and tone would gradually change. My parents aren't | here. Objecting to what is being said demonstrates a lack of | trust in the researcher being truthful, not my parents. (This | would be significantly more difficult if my parents were | present and acting though.) | | It helps that I've read about the abuses of psychology -- with | things like lie detector tests, and in the Soviet Union. My | mistrust of "experts" is already quite low. | jtbayly wrote: | Try to Remember: Psychiatry's Clash over Meaning, Memory, and | Mind by Paul R. McHugh is a great book on this topic. It also | exposes the damage that many counselors do in this context. | btilly wrote: | False memories can have major legal consequences. See | https://www.wired.co.uk/article/false-memory-syndrome-false-... | for some examples. It was particularly bad some 30 years ago when | "recovered memory therapy" was popular. Which was a type of | therapy designed to create false memories, particularly of abuse. | The events remembered might be false, but the pain and trauma | from the memories was emphatically real. | | For me, personally, this was a source of frustration. I came from | a family with actual abuse. But when I went to read up on abuse, | the literature at that time was dominated by accounts from those | with "recovered memories". And what they described and went | through looked absolutely nothing like my experience. | | Since learning how easily memories can be implanted, I came up | with a simple litmus test to tell the false apart from the true | for sexual abuse. People with recovered memories have memories | that feel like they would expect. Very simple and stark emotions. | By contrast people who have been through abuse have much more | complex backgrounds that contain things that non-abused people | wouldn't expect. For example abused children do not look at | events with adult eyes and mark this as wrong. Instead at the | time children try to accept events as normal, and wind up with a | very confused picture of the world. | | For anyone who wants a picture of how it actually looks from a | child's eyes, I highly recommend my sister's book, | https://www.amazon.com/Singing-Songs-Meg-Tilly/dp/0929636627. (I | was the baby who winds up taken by "Richard" at the end of the | book.) | arbitrage wrote: | You are so right about the consequences of memory recovery. | | Shared contexts like yours have helped me over the years come | to terms with the fact that my memories are in fact _not_ | recovered (by which I mean 'recovered' in the problematic use | of the word you're describing). I've been torn about whether or | not "I made it up" for my entire life. The weird popular trend | of "recovered memory therapy" is/was real, and indeed muddies | the waters. | | Your litmus test resonates with me. I hope you read this and | know you've helped at least one person. I'm sorry you went | through what you did. | btilly wrote: | Yeah, the fact that so many people actually don't know | whether they were abused helps an abuser try to hide from | consequences through gaslighting. | MotherBruce wrote: | I'd be wary of putting too much stock in the conclusions of an | article which portrays Elizabeth Loftus as an impartial and | objective debunker of false memories, as this one does. She was | paid large sums of money to defend scores of men accused of | child sexual abuse, extrapolating from her experimental | demonstration that it is _possible_ to implant false memories | to the conclusion that this was _common_ and the true origin of | most recovered memories This conflict of interest somehow | always goes unmentioned in articles like the one from _Wired_. | | Many CSA survivors today now say that the obsessive focus on | "false memories" has been a significant obstacle to healing | from their trauma and being able to discuss it openly. | | https://twitter.com/mike_salter/status/1211442594821001216 | | https://www.thecut.com/article/false-memory-syndrome-controv... | btilly wrote: | I know well how strong feelings run on this. | | But there is zero experimental evidence that memories get | recovered, and lots of evidence about how easy it is to | create false memories. We have lots of cases where recovered | memories contradict objective evidence. Memories "recovered" | tie to the therapist more than anything else (one will | specialize in satanic rituals, the next in a series of | terminated pregnancies). And so on. | | Therefore I concluded decades ago that we should presume | recovered memories to be false unless there is specific | evidence otherwise. | | Now you say, _Many CSA survivors today now say that the | obsessive focus on "false memories" has been a significant | obstacle to healing from their trauma and being able to | discuss it openly._ But who are you counting as "CSA | survivors"? Those like myself whose memories were never | "recovered"? Or people who claim to have suppressed their | memories and then later "recovered" them? Because those two | groups have very different sets of experiences. And often | very different opinions. Particularly about the phenomena of | "recovered memories". | | Regardless of which definition you use, here is the most | important lesson that I learned about recovery. What actually | happened is not very important. The dynamics which enabled | the abuse, come from it, and with which we harm ourselves ARE | important. And these are things that exist and can be dealt | with in the present, with no regard to our unreliable | memories of the past. Indeed the act of dwelling on those | past memories brings grief and unhappiness, and elaborating | on them serves no useful purpose. | | Related, I learned the hard way that what feels good for me, | and what IS good for me, are often very different. As | https://www.amazon.com/Subtle-Art-Not-Giving- | Counterintuitiv... says in its backward law, _" Desiring a | positive experience is itself a negative experience; | accepting a negative experience is a positive experience."_ | Trying to place the blame for my problems entirely on an | external abuser, no matter how real that abuser is, becomes a | negative experience. By contrast accepting the ways in which | I have perpetuated the experience of being abused becomes a | positive experience. | | Therefore while publicly rehearsing the details of a person's | recovered memories may feel good in the moment, I firmly | believe that the act of doing so CAUSES trauma, and works | AGAINST healing. And indeed the belief that it is helpful is | due to incorrect theories about therapy - the same theories | by which false memories can wind up implanted. | IshKebab wrote: | I don't think it's outlandish to think that "recovered | memories" are most commonly false. Given everything we know | about memory that should be the null hypothesis. | | Has anyone ever even demonstrated that it is _possible_ to | "recover" memories? | belkarx wrote: | Excerpt from the wikipedia page that summarizes the relevant | experiments: | | Published studies The first formal studies using memory | implantation were published in the early 1990s, the most famous | being "The Formation of False Memories" (commonly referred to as | the "Lost in the Mall" study) by Loftus and Pickrell.[1] The | basic technique used in this study involved asking family members | of a participant to provide narratives of events that happened | when they were young and then add another event that definitely | had not happened. The participants saw these four narratives and | were told to try to remember as much as possible about each | event. Across a number of studies using memory implantation, | about 37% of people have come to remember parts of or entire | events that never actually happened.[4] | | Other studies have expanded on this paradigm by introducing | photos instead of narratives. Wade and colleagues found that 50% | of people came to remember details of a hot air balloon ride that | never happened, after seeing a manipulated photo depicting the | event.[5] Later it has been argued that photos by themselves do | not produce more false memories than narratives, but that both | methods have the power to successfully implant false memories.[6] | Real photos have also been found to increase the creation of | false memories. In a study by Lindsay and colleagues people were | shown a childhood photo from the same time period as the false | event. Seeing the photo resulted in more false memories, even | when the photos did not depict the actual event.[7] | | In a study with children 1999 Pezdek and Hodge found that it was | easier to implant a memory of a plausible event (being lost in a | mall) than an implausible one (receiving a rectal enema).[8] | Later follow up studies, however, show that the perceived | plausibility of a false event can be changed, making the false | event easier to implant.[9][10] Taken together, these findings | show that there are many factors that are important for the way | people remember events. | | Mazzoni et al. also suggest a model for the development of false | memories through suggestions which model includes 3 | processes.[10] The first process is to make people perceive the | event as plausible, the second is to make people believe it is | likely to have happened to them and the third step is to help | people interpret thoughts and fantasies about the event as | memories. Other factors influencing the likelihood of producing | false memories include imagining the events and making a source- | monitoring error, specifically reality monitoring.[11] | | Legal case A real life example of memory implantation occurred | during the criminal case against Paul Ingram. Ingram was accused | by his daughters of recurring sexual abuse in their childhood. | Ingram denied all allegations at first but after being | interviewed by police and therapists he came to remember multiple | instances of abuse. | | Sociologist Richard Ofshe considered this confession a result of | suggestive questioning and decided to test his theory. He told | Ingram about a made-up scenario and said it was another | accusation made by his children. Ofshe asked Ingram to try and | remember as much as possible about this new event. Ingram could | not recall anything straight away but after thinking about it for | some time came up with a written confession where he described in | detail what had happened. His children confirmed to Ofshe that | the event had never actually happened; Ingram had created an | entirely false memory of an event after suggestions from Ofshe. | Ofshe considered this successful memory implantation evidence of | Paul Ingram's suggestibility and in his opinion it questions the | accuracy of Ingram's other confessions.[12] | | (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_implantation) | SamBam wrote: | In another study, family members of research subjects provided | the experimenters with childhood photos of the subjects, and the | experimenters photoshopped one image into a hot air balloon ride. | [1] | | Over the course of a few interviews where the subjects tried to | recall memories related to the photos, half of the participants | developed clear, or partially clear, false memories of the hot | air balloon, despite it never having happened, and adding | invented details that they truly believed. When the photos were | revealed to be faked, many of them were flabbergasted, having | convinced themselves that it had happened. | | 1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03196318 | mattpallissard wrote: | I'm reminded of a Seinfeld episode; | | "Jerry, just remember, it's not a lie if you believe it" | Sharlin wrote: | One of my favorite ev-psych hypotheses is that humans evolved | to be so good at lying to themselves so that they could | believably lie to _others_. | 77pt77 wrote: | This is where evopsych starts getting too close to | psychoanalysis, and therefore bullshit. | | Humans have this tendency to use some tool way beyond its | realm of applicability. | bombcar wrote: | The Mandela effect is likely a variation on this. | | Our memories are _much worse_ than we think they are. Anyone | who has ever dealt with eyewitness testimony knows this, and | that 's immediate memory. | pessimizer wrote: | "The Mandela Effect" was a literal psychic medium saying that | some people lived in a different dimension in their earlier | lives, and also the weirdest excuse for people who didn't | care about South Africa or Apartheid to explain their lack of | knowledge about what happened there after the got the basics | in grammar school. | TallGuyShort wrote: | That may be how the term was coined, but that is not the | common usage in my experience. Simply Googling 'Mandela | Effect' will yield many examples of widespread | misconceptions and false memories that you can easily | verify with a few peers. Just because one explanation is | implausible doesn't mean the effect isn't real. False | memories are pretty common. | | I've noticed that I can vividly recall experiences in other | countries but my memory has altered itself to match the | side of the road I'm currently used to driving on, and have | confirmed this experience with others. | mc32 wrote: | The Mandela effect is a form of false memory and often | involves confabulation. This often happens with people | discussing movies and misattributing actors or scenes to | contemporary but different films or actors, etc. It also | happens with real life events. | niom wrote: | The root cause is impressionable subjects accepting priors | from questions into the set of priors used to reconstruct | memories. Formulating good questions that contain as few | priors as possible is difficult, and the reaction of the | interrogator to the subject's response will reveal additional | priors. Most interrogators are probably not really all that | invested into getting as close to the subject's ground truth | anyway and are simply looking to by-and-large confirm a pre- | established narrative. | withinboredom wrote: | In interrogation school, you learn how NOT lead a subject | to the answer you want to hear, but to try to get at what | they believe is the truth (what did you do? Who did you do | it with? Who else did it with you? When did you do it? When | else did you do it? Where did you do it? Where else did you | do it? How did you do it? What else did you do... and | repeat). If you can ask these questions without asking any | yes/no questions, congrats, you've got the basics of | interrogation. Now just construct a timeline in your mind, | keep track of subtle inconsistencies to come back to, and | you've got more of the basics down. | | Interrogations during school (with trained actors) we had | to extract 80% of the information and write a report on it | containing 90% of the information we extracted, with no | notes, up to several hours after the interrogation. | | Interestingly, I learned how to "tag" memories as authentic | (so I could write about them later) which has had | interesting implications later on in my life. | Thiez wrote: | Not all interrogation approaches are like that. For | example, the Reid Technique is nothing like you describe, | and would probably be exceptionally good at implanting | false memories (and is known to lead to false | confessions). | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_technique | withinboredom wrote: | This isn't an approach (that's a specific term in | interrogation), this is Direct Questioning. There are | many approaches but I wasn't talking about them here. | Approaches are used to gain rapport and trust with people | who would rather see you dead. | | You use direct questioning once you've succeeded at your | approach, when you lose trust, or when you're not trained | properly on approaches because you can fuck it up pretty | bad. | oidar wrote: | > Interestingly, I learned how to "tag" memories as | authentic (so I could write about them later) which has | had interesting implications later on in my life. | | Do tell. | withinboredom wrote: | I write meeting notes after every meeting, including | details on participants disposition, what was discussed, | potential misunderstandings, etc. I usually don't share | these. | | Anyway, occasionally someone will "bring up" a meeting | detail later on and be confused by it. This isn't | malicious, but sometimes it can be so far from what was | actually discussed that people question their own | memories and something slightly different arises from the | ashes. I used to point out what was actually discussed, | but I learned that doesn't usually come across that well | (you're now questioning a teammate's memory and aptitude, | and requires a bit more delicate politics than I care to | involve myself with). These days, I just sit back and | watch it play out. It's pretty rare-ish. | bumby wrote: | Our memory is not like a video recorder that captures | details. Instead of focusing on details, it tries to gather | the gist of events and we (sometimes creatively) fill in the | gaps with details. | | But there are people with true photographic memories who | faithfully remember exact details. I think it was the book | _Subliminal_ where the author discusses how these people | often struggle to put those details into a larger contextual | understanding. They get the details but miss the gist. | wahern wrote: | > But there are people with true photographic memories who | faithfully remember exact details. | | The traditional notion of photographic memory is being able | to recall any and every aspect of a scene upon a single | viewing. But in countless experiments where a researcher | asks the subject about some obscure detail, nobody has ever | been able to demonstrate this--i.e. they may have happened | to spot a particular detail, but keep iterating the | experiment and they regress to the mean. | | To memorize something, a person has to focus their | attention on the object such that they can draw | associations--inside the scene, outside the scene, etc. | Perhaps this can indeed be subconscious. "Conscious" and | "subconscious" are such nebulous words, and people's | experiences of them so varying, that disputing that it | could be done subconsciously requires a degree of certitude | I don't think anybody (scientist or otherwise) could | rightly possess. | | There are indeed people with ridiculously amazing memories, | including astounding visual fidelity. But it's misleading | to say that it's "photographic". These people aren't | glancing at a scene, blinking their eyes, and committing | the whole thing to memory like a camera. Rather, their | brains seem to be adept at scanning and drawing an | incredible number of associations between visual elements | and objects within the scene, but never the _entirety_ of a | sufficiently complex scene unless given a commensurate | amount of time. And in fact, it turns out that with | sufficient effort and practice many if not most people can | begin to exhibit such astounding feats of memory. | | > I think it was the book Subliminal where the author | discusses how these people often struggle to put those | details into a larger contextual understanding. They get | the details but miss the gist. | | Perhaps you're referring to the fact that people who | exhibit extraordinary episodic memory (i.e. like the | stereotypical autistic savant who can remember what they | ate on any prior date, though most aren't autistic, AFAIU) | usually have normal or sometimes deficient semantic memory. | Note that episodic memory isn't the same thing as visual | memory. Visual memory can be both episodic and semantic-- | e.g. if you're a visual-spatial thinker. | bumby wrote: | > _Perhaps you 're referring to the fact that people who | exhibit extraordinary episodic memory_ | | This is exactly it. Thanks for clarifying and explaining | the distinction. I won't use "photographic memory" in the | colloquial sense anymore :) | jonny_eh wrote: | There are also those with near-perfect memory that use | those memories to create elaborate, poetic, and hilariously | long YouTube videos about nostalgia: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=779coR-XPTw | WanderPanda wrote: | Holy sh*t! Starting to run shasum across my photo library asap | f1shy wrote: | But you must do that in your brain! | wongarsu wrote: | Just print out the shasum output and hide it somewhere | where you might come across it by chance a couple years | later. When you rediscover it, check it against the current | shasum output to see if someone manipulated your photo | library (and thus your memory). | | At least that's how Hollywood would do it. | injb wrote: | What did the other half do? | bityard wrote: | They could tell by a few of the pixels that the photo looked | shopped | thakoppno wrote: | That study seems somewhat unethical to me. There's no way to do | this without informed consent and I can imagine feeling really | disturbed should something like this happen to me. The result | is interesting but I have difficulty understanding the lens | bio-ethicists applied designing and approving this. | daniel-cussen wrote: | 77pt77 wrote: | > I can imagine feeling really disturbed should something | like this happen to me | | Stop making shit up. | | If anything these people are as guilty as the researchers. | Swizec wrote: | > I can imagine feeling really disturbed should something | like this happen to me | | Now realize that this can happen with therapy. As your | therapist helps you deal with trauma, some of it can be false | memories. | | Like in that case where a woman became convinced her dad | molested her as a child. It was later proven that he did not | and she was likely never molested at all. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramona_false_memory_case | | edit: I mis-remembered (ha!), it was later _judged_ that the | father didn 't do this, but you can't prove a negative so | that's the best we'll ever get | sparky_z wrote: | Where's the part in that article where it was proven he did | not? There was certainly a miscarriage of justice, but it | sounds like everything still ended in a he-said-she-said. | From your description, I was expecting an eventual proof of | innocence and didn't see it. There's even a quote from the | jury foreman insisting that the verdict shouldn't be | interpreted the way you're interpreting it. | thakoppno wrote: | That would require proving a negative. I agree with your | conclusion that nothing is truly proven. | jtbayly wrote: | To understand this better, read "Try to Remember", by | Paul R. McHugh. Therapists can and do often cause false | memories and do real damage. | Silverback_VII wrote: | > can and do often cause false memories and do real | damage. | | False memories are almost always viewed as negative and | certainly not desirable but what if you could use this | effect for what you want to achieve? | | False memories as way to engineer your past and improve | your own life? | bckr wrote: | This was my thought as well. Increase self-efficacy by | emphasizing successes. Increase happiness by emphasizing | joys. | | Since it's clear our memory is already false to a | considerable degree (or holographic rather than | photographic, if you like), and since memories/beliefs | have an outsized influence on our | feelings/thoughts/behaviors/actions, this seems like a | great opportunity for, er, "ethical self exploitation". | | Hacking, if you will. | | I'm certain there are many methods for doing this very | thing. | bumby wrote: | Isn't having an accurate model of reality considered an | inherent good? | | Is being delusional somehow good as long as it leads to | preferred outcomes? Seems questionable to me and rife | with potential bad incentives. | cstrahan wrote: | If the false memories are constrained to sentiment, then | I think it could be alright. I've become quite | disillusioned with many things over the years; this | disillusionment only serves to bum me out. If I could | rewrite some of the few pivotal experiences that have me | feeling this way, I would immediately benefit: I'd have | more fulfillment in what I do and my disposition would | benefit from looking forward to things as I used to. | | On the other hand, one could imagine expunging useful | negative feedback and being worse off (e.g. less socially | adapted, lacking in character, etc). | jonny_eh wrote: | Like a false memory of a ride in a hot air balloon? | nonrandomstring wrote: | Or, at the risk of a Schizoid Embolism, becoming an | adventure hero who saves a mutant Martian race from an | evil slave owning corporation and restores the 'Blue Sky | Over Mars'. | [deleted] | Tarq0n wrote: | Is it unethical to make someone feel disturbed? It doesn't | seem particularly serious or disproportional to me. | GuB-42 wrote: | > There's no way to do this without informed consent | | Do you mean _with_ informed consent? | | Sometimes, such experiments can work even with informed | consent. As in: "we will show you some pictures of your | childhood, some of them may be fake" and you can still be | convinced by the fake picture. Just like the placebo effect | can work even when the patient knows he is given a placebo. | LeonB wrote: | I think they mean "There's no _ethical_ way to do this | without informed consent" | Jensson wrote: | But they failed with half the people. I wonder how many don't | develop false memories like that? | some_random wrote: | I suspect that the failures had more to do with the people | not being vulnerable to this particular memory than them not | being vulnerable to memory implantation. For example, if your | parents had trouble putting food on the table day to day the | idea that they managed to buy a hot air balloon ride for you | is obviously absurd. | hackerlight wrote: | Plausible. But it'd still be an interesting research | question in its own right. I wonder if it's related to | hypnotic suggestibilify. | f1shy wrote: | May well be the case. The susceptibility to hypnotic | suggestions depends on the receiver and the giver of the | suggestions, and who the relation between the two is. | Maybe in some cases there was, for some reason, more | trust in the person showing the fotos, and in other cases | less. | | Would be very interesting to know. | withinboredom wrote: | How did they know the subjects had never been in a hot air | balloon before? I'd apparently been up in one as a child, | but didn't remember it until I went up in one as an adult | (verified with parents fwiw). So it's certainly possible | some percentage of subjects may just needed a trigger and | had actually been up in a balloon before. | bumby wrote: | But that wouldn't explain that _exact_ implanted memory. | If you went up as a 5 year old, that shouldn't impact a | false memory drawn from a picture of when you were 20. | [deleted] ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-10-06 23:00 UTC)