Good morning! ✨
Welcome to the 20th edition of the newsletter, in which we’ll be talking about memory in 200 words! (Approximately). Specifically, we’ll be talking about how memories can be malleable, how they can change shape, and seem like something else.
Since the 1970s, Elizabeth Loftus, an American cognitive psychologist has been studying memory. By “studying memory”, you might think, she studies how we try to remember things or why we forget them, but she actually does the opposite. She studies why we remember things that haven’t ever happened.
Through her experiments (completely ethical), it has been found that with the right kind of leading questions, you can actually make someone remember something differently, and with the right amount of misinformation and push, you can even plant an entirely false memory in someone’s mind.
To give an example of a false memory that Loftus herself experienced- at a party with family and relatives, the topic of Loftus’ mother came up. To give context, her mother had drowned in a pool when she was 14 years old. At the party, someone told her that Loftus herself was the one who found her mother first, to which Loftus denied and said that she hadn’t. She doesn’t remember who found her mother, but it definitely wasn’t her. The person who told her this insisted that Loftus was the one who found her.
On her way back home from the party, she kept thinking about this new piece of information. Slowly, she started to visualize it. Slowly she started thinking that maybe she really was the one who found her mother. She started to make sense of other facts in the light of this new piece of information.
Then, a week later, that relative called her up and told her that they made a mistake and that it wasn’t Loftus who found her mother, but someone else.
In this case, it seems that when you’re convincingly and confidently told something, you start to visualize it, start to feel it, and then that memory becomes your original version.
This one, again, is to warn you of the misinformation that is available everywhere. With the right amount of misinformation, leading questions, and assertiveness, memory can be distorted or even planted.
Woah. Seems like I should consider the possibility of me remembering something differently more often. What if some day dreaming or my usual imagining of alternate scenarios sometimes happen to take place of my actual memory? It's a little scary if there's no strong enough cues of the actual scenario.
True...this does happen often on small things in our daily lives...but how do we control this process. How do I differentiate on things that may be true or imaginary or made up.