🧠 The Fragile Stories We Tell Ourselves: Unraveling Memory’s Perfect Imperfections

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You think you know your past. That argument with your partner last week, the taste of your grandmother’s pie from childhood, the exact moment you heard about 9/11. 

These memories feel like Polaroids, crisp and unchanging, tucked safely in the album of your mind. But what if I told you they’re more like half-finished sketches, redrawn every time you glance at them? 

What if your brain is an unreliable narrator, quietly editing the story of your life?

Memory Lane: The Perfectly Imperfect Ways We Remember

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Transcript

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Welcome to the Deep Dive. Today, we're diving deep into something we all rely on, something incredibly personal, yet, well, surprisingly fallible, our memory. The book Memory Lane by Sierra Green is our roadmap for this exploration. And it really challenges the idea of memory as like a perfect recording. Yeah, it does. And it reveals why its imperfections are actually pretty fundamental to how it works. Absolutely. Our mission today is to extract those unexpected insights about how our memories operate, you know, every single day. That's right. The listener shared excerpts from Memory Lane. And what immediately grabs you is how it shifts your perspective. I mean, we instinctively feel our memories should be accurate, right? Like some kind of detailed archive. Totally, like a video replay. Exactly. Exactly. But the research paints a picture of something far more active and dynamic, a system that's, as the book beautifully puts it, perfectly imperfect. Okay, perfectly imperfect. I like that. And it's those imperfections we really want to unpack today and, you know, understand their significance in our lives. Yeah. Right. Let's really get into that. So the book starts by kind of hitting us with this idea that our memory isn't a perfect record. Which, honestly, it almost feels wrong to hear that. It does, doesn't it? Why isn't it? Like, what's the benefit of not remembering everything perfectly? Well, think about it from an evolutionary standpoint. Perfect recall. I mean, remembering every single tiny detail of every single moment, that would be an unbelievable drain on our brain power. Right. Overload. Total overloads. It would be like trying to run every single app on your phone all at the same time. It just wouldn't work. Okay. Instead, memory has evolved to be incredibly efficient. It focuses on storing what's most likely to be important for our future. You know, for survival, for learning, for making decisions. To forgetting is actually helpful. Letting go of the irrelevant details is actually a crucial part of that efficiency. It's a feature, not a bug, essentially. Okay, so it's a trade-off then. Efficiency and relevance over just perfect accuracy. That makes a lot of sense, actually. And the book also introduces this concept of... of memory being reconstructive. What does that mean? Like in practical terms for how we remember things. Yeah, so imagine each time you recall an event, you're not just pulling up a finished file, like clicking open on a document. Right. Instead, you're actively rebuilding it. You're piecing it together from fragments of information that are stored. Rebuilding it every time. Pretty much. Oh, yeah. And the fascinating thing is that this reconstruction process, it's essential. It allows us to integrate new information we might have learned since the event happened. Oh, okay. So you can update it. Exactly. Update our understanding. And even imagine future possibilities based on those past experiences. It's not a passive playback. It's an active recreation. So the key insight isn't just that memory changes, but that this rebuilding process is actually useful. Yes. It allows us to learn and adapt, even if, you know, it comes at the cost of that perfect, unchanging accuracy we sometimes think we have. Okay. But here's where it gets maybe a little unsettling for me. If we're constantly rebuilding, reconstructing. doesn't that inherently open the door for errors, for distortions? It absolutely does. And that's a huge part of the research. But the book makes a really important point here, right? Especially when we talk about things like, say, eyewitness testimony. That's a vital point to emphasize. Really vital. Yeah. While the science clearly shows memory isn't infallible, this research should never be used to automatically dismiss the accounts of crime victims. Right. That's crucial. The vast majority of the time, our memories are reasonably accurate, and victims are no more susceptible to memory errors than anyone else is. The ethical considerations in this field are absolutely paramount. Good. Yeah. And it's crucial that findings about memory's imperfections aren't twisted to undermine someone's lived experience. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. Now, the book takes a little step back and looks at how we've tried to understand the mind throughout history using different metaphors. Can you give us a quick snapshot of some of those? Yeah, it's fascinating how the sort of prevailing technologies of an era often shape how we conceptualize the mind. Like what? Well, in the 19th century, with the rise of hydraulic systems, thinkers like Freud likened the mind to a system of psychic energy needing release like steam pressure. Okay, I remember that. Then, in the early 20th century, behaviorism was big, focusing on observable behavior. And the telephone switchboard became a popular metaphor. A switchboard. Yeah. Envisioning the brain as this complex network, just relaying stimuli and responses like connecting calls. It really shows how our understanding is always evolving, often tied to our latest tech. It's almost like we're always trying to find the latest gadget to explain what's going on inside our heads. Pretty much, yeah. So the book then lays out a basic structure for how we think about memory now, starting with the big distinction between short-term and long-term memory. Can you break that down simply for us? Sure. The fundamental split is between short-term memory, which is often called working memory now. Working memory, okay. And long-term memory. Think of working memory as the mental workspace where you hold and actively process information for just a short period. Like remembering a phone number just long enough to dial it. Exactly that. Or, you know, remembering the beginning of this sentence so the end makes sense. It's more than just holding info. It's where we actively do things mentally, like follow conversations or mental math. Right, okay. Long-term memory, on the other hand, that's where we store information for much longer periods, you know, minutes, hours, years, a lifetime potentially. Okay. And within long-term memory, there are different types of information stored, right? The book talks about procedural and declarative memory. Exactly. Procedural memory is our memory for how-to skills. Things we know how to do automatically, often without conscious thought. Like riding a bike or typing. Perfect examples. Riding a bike, playing an instrument you know well. These members are often implicit, meaning we just do them. It can be surprisingly hard to put into words. Yeah, try explaining how to tie your shoes without actually doing it. Exactly. It's much easier to just do it. And interestingly, consciously trying to think about how you do these automatic skills... can sometimes actually mess you up, make you perform worse. Okay. So that's procedural. What's declarative? Declarative memory is our memory for facts and events, things we can consciously recall and, well, declare, stuff you can talk about. And that one has its own two branches, right? Semantic and episodic. These sound really key. They are. They're really important distinctions. Okay. Semantic memory is our general knowledge of the world. Facts, concepts, language stuff that's detached from a specific time or place you learned it. Like knowing Paris is the capital of France. Or what a dog is. Precisely. Or that 2 plus 2 equals 4. You know it, but you probably don't remember the exact moment you learned it. Right. Episodic memory, and this is really the heart of what the book explores, is our memory for personal experiences. those specific episodes from our lives. So like what I had for dinner last night. Yes. That's a classic example. Episodic memories are rich in context where you were, who you were with, what you felt, maybe the taste, the sounds. It's the tapestry of our personal past. Gotcha. So episodic memory is what lets us mentally travel back in time, kind of re-experience moments. Yeah. Now, the book highlights a specific part of the brain, the hippocampus, as being crucial for forming these new memories. Yeah, the hippocampus. It's deep in the medial temporal lobe. Think of it as maybe the brain's initial filing clerk or librarian for new declarative memories, especially episodic ones. Filing clerk. Okay. It's responsible for initially coding or indexing these new experiences, but... into a format that can eventually be stored as long-term memories elsewhere in the brain. And its crucial role became really clear through the case of Henry Mollison, right? Oh, absolutely. H.M.'s story is, well, it's foundational in memory research. Tragic, but incredibly informative. Can you remind us what happened in his case and what it really taught us? Sure. H.M. had severe debilitating epilepsy. Before the surgery? Mostly, yes. His childhood, his life up to that point, was largely intact. But he essentially lived in a perpetual present moment afterwards. He couldn't create new lasting memories of people he met, things he did, facts he learned. Wow. As he famously described it, it felt like waking from a dream. Every day is alone in itself. He couldn't hold on to new experiences for more than a few minutes. That's incredibly poignant. It is. But his case provided groundbreaking, really undeniable evidence for the hippocampus' essential role in consolidating new long-term memories. It showed memory wasn't just one single thing. Right. So the hippocampus helps us encode new memories. But what happens when we bring those memories back to mind later? The book talks about memory reconsolidation. What's going on there? Ah, reconsolidation. This is a really fascinating and relatively newer area of understanding. It turns out that when we retrieve a memory, it doesn't just get passively read out. Okay. The act of retrieving it actually makes the memory trace temporarily unstable again at the neural level. Those synaptic connections that represent the memory become labile or changeable. for a brief period. So bringing it up makes it fragile again. In a way, yes. And while it's in that fragile state, it needs to be re-stabilized or re-consolidated to persist. And here's the crucial part. During this re-consolidation window, the memory can actually be modified. Modified? How? Well, new information can be incorporated or the emotional tone might shift. or inaccuracies can creep in and become part of the restored memory. So wait, every time I remember something, I might be changing it slightly. That seems to be the case, yes. Think about that barbecue example. If you recall it and mistakenly remember Sarah handing you the burger instead of John, that incorrect association can actually become stronger, more embedded in the memory trace. Each time you recall it that way, it gets reconsolidated with the error. Wow. It's almost like our memories are living documents that we're constantly, maybe unknowingly editing. That's a great analogy. The book uses a Lego metaphor, right? Like you take the model apart to look at it, and when you put it back together, maybe you swap a brick or add one you found nearby. Yeah, I like that. And this idea of constantly rebuilding our memories, it connects to another concept in the book schemas right exactly schemas are um like mental frameworks or blueprints we develop based on our past experiences they represent our knowledge about typical events situations objects people so like i have a schema for what usually happens at a restaurant Or a birthday party. Precisely. You have expectations. Menus, ordering, food arriving, paying the bill. These schemas are built up over time, stored as interconnected neural networks, likely involving the hippocampus and cortex. And how do they help with memory? They help enormously with efficiency. When we encounter a new event, say another birthday party, we don't have to process every single detail as if it's completely novel. Right. You can fit it into the pattern. Exactly. We can fit it into our existing birthday party schema. This helps us understand what's going on, encode the information more easily, and importantly, reconstruct the memory later by filling in typical details. Ah, so schemas help us fill in the gaps when we're remembering. They do. They do. Which is mostly helpful, but it can also lead to errors if the specific event deviated from the typical schema or if we mistakenly fill in a detail that wasn't actually there. And these schemas can have a really powerful influence on what we even notice and how we store information in the first place. The wash and clothes study illustrates that perfectly, doesn't it? it. It's a classic demonstration. In that study, people read this really vague passage about a series of actions, doing things with materials, putting them in piles, et cetera. Okay. And they found it really hard to understand and remember. But if they were told beforehand that the title was washing clothes. Activates the schema. Exactly. Suddenly the passage made sense and they remembered it much better. The title activated their laundry schema, providing a framework. And what if they got the title after reading it? didn't help nearly as much, which really shows that the schema influences how the information is initially encoded and stored, not just how it's retrieved. Our expectations and prior knowledge heavily shape what we take in. So our brains are constantly trying to make sense of the world by fitting new information into these existing patterns or schemas. Okay. Now let's look at the fascinating extremes of memory. The book discusses highly superior autobiographical memory, or HSM. Right. HSM. What can we learn from people who seem to remember almost every detail of their lives? It sounds like a superpower. It certainly seems that way on the surface. HSM is characterized by this exceptional ability to recall, often with incredible accuracy, that's a great way to remember. specific details about personal events from their past, often linked to specific dates. Like they know what they did on, say, every October 4th? Pretty much, yeah. Jill Price was one of the first individuals studied extensively. She could recall immense detail about seemingly minor moments from decades ago. She even enjoyed testing herself, apparently. Wow. But the book mentions downsides. It's not all good. Apparently not. For many with HSM, the memories are often described as being involuntarily triggered, constantly flooding their minds. It can be overwhelming, difficult to control. Like a nonstop movie reel of your past. Something like that. Price herself described it as a burden, saying it sometimes drives me crazy. It really highlights that our normal capacity for forgetting, for letting go of details, probably serves a really important function for our mental well-being. Yeah, maybe forgetting isn't such a flaw after all. It's a powerful reminder that there can be too much of a good thing, even with memory. Now on the other end of the spectrum, the book touches on various forgetting biases. Can you tell us about some of the ways our memories seem to be biased towards forgetting certain things, maybe things that make us look bad? Huh. Yes. There seems to be some of that going on. Research has uncovered some interesting biases. For instance, in studies using games like the Dictator Game, where people decide how much money to share, participants often later recall being more generous than they actually were. especially those who felt they hadn't quite lived up to their own moral standards. It's like a little memory touch-up to feel better about themselves. So, self-serving, forgetting. Seems like it, yeah. Another fascinating finding is about negative feedback. We tend to forget negative feedback about traits we believe are fixed and unchangeable. Like, I'm just not good at math. Exactly. Exactly. But we're more likely to remember negative feedback about traits we think we can change, maybe because that feedback is useful for improvement. Interesting, like the serenity prayer, almost forgetting what you can't change. Sort of, yeah. The takeaway is that our memories aren't neutral recorders. They seem to actively work, often unconsciously, to protect our self-image, manage our emotions, sometimes at the expense of pure factual accuracy. It seems like our memories are not just about accurately recording the past, but also about shaping our present sense of self, which, okay, this brings us to a really critical question. If our memory is as fallible and biased as this research suggests, why are we often such unreliable eyewitnesses? This seems huge. It is huge. This is a really crucial area with significant real-world implications. Right. especially in the legal system. When you look at the work of the Innocence Project, their findings are staggering. They've shown that eyewitness misidentification played a role in something like 70% of wrongful convictions later overturned by DNA evidence. 70%. That's shocking. Cases like Jennifer Thompson and Ronald Cotton come to mind. Exactly. A tragic, powerful example. Thompson was absolutely devastatingly certain that Cotton was her attacker. Her confidence was high, but she was wrong. And he spent years in prison based on that memory. Over a decade. Until DNA proved another man, Bobby Poole, was the actual perpetrator. It starkly illustrates just how unreliable eyewitness testimony can be, even when the witness is completely sincere and confident. conviction doesn't equal accuracy. So what's going on? What are some of the underlying cognitive things that make eyewitness memory so tricky? Well, there are several key factors. One big one is attention, or rather inattention. We talked about schemas guiding attention, but there's also just the limit of focus. You mean we just don't notice stuff? We miss a lot. There's inattentional blindness, Our failure to notice something obvious, sometimes right in front of us, if our attention is focused elsewhere. Like the invisible gorilla experiment. That's the most famous example. Or studies where people walking across a campus completely miss a clown riding a unicycle because they're focused on their walk or their phone. A unicycling clown. Seriously. Seriously. Only about half noticed it in one study, and even fewer if they were on their phone at the time. Then there's change blindness. Yeah. where we fail to notice changes in our environment or even in people we're interacting with. Like what kind of changes? Studies where researchers asking for directions are swapped out with a different person during a brief interruption, like when movers carry a door between them. And people don't notice the person changed. A surprising number don't. Yeah. Especially in visually cluttered environments. Our attention is inherently selective. It's generally good. It helps us focus on the task at hand. Right. You need to focus. But the consequence is we miss a lot of peripheral details. And our expectations about how much we think we see and notice often far exceed the reality. So we're only really processing a small fraction and then our brains are maybe filling in blanks based on those schemas we talked about. Exactly. Schemas influence encoding, but also retrieval. the classic war of the ghosts study showed this beautifully people read a native american folk tale quite different from western story structures and when they retold it later the stories became shorter more conventional details were changed to fit their own cultural schemas canoes became boats seal hunting became fishing supernatural elements often got dropped We impose order based on our preconceived notions, which can lead us astray when recalling specific events. Okay, so attention is limited. Schemas fill gaps. What else? The book also delves into this idea of source confusion getting mixed up about where our memory came from. The Donald Thompson case is just wild. It is a truly remarkable and cautionary tale. Donald Thompson, a psychologist in Australia. Who studied memory, right? Yes, ironically. He was actually being interviewed on live television about the fallibility of eyewitness memory around the exact time a woman was raped in her home. Oh, wow. Later, the victim confidently identified Thompson as her attacker. He was on TV. He had an airtight alibi. He was literally on TV. It turned out the victim had been watching his television appearance shortly before or during the assault. She correctly remembered seeing his face, vividly. But she completely misattributed the source of that memory. She thought she saw him during the attack, not on TV. Exactly. A profound case of source confusion. Her memory for the face was accurate. But the context was disastrously wrong. That's terrifying. Can this happen easily? It seems it can. Surprisingly easily. Especially perhaps with children, as some studies suggest they're more prone to source monitoring errors. But even adults. Think about President George W. Bush's accounts of learning about the 9-11 attacks. His story changed, didn't it? His recollections of how and when he saw the first plane hit the tower varied in different interviews. His initial account mentioned seeing it on TV before leaving for an event, but footage wasn't actually available then. It likely suggests source confusion, remembering seeing the footage later, but misremembering when he saw it. So even major emotional memories aren't immune. No. It really underscores that just because a memory feels vitted or important doesn't guarantee we know precisely where it originated. It's a humbling thought. And then there's the basic challenge of simply recognizing faces accurately. We rely so heavily on eyewitnesses identifying suspects from lineups or photos. How good are we actually at that? Well, it's surprisingly difficult to test our real-world ability because we rarely get definitive feedback if we recognize someone correctly or not on the street. Right. But studies using things like mock missing person alerts... show pretty low identification rates, even when the target person is nearby. And laboratory studies show it's challenging. Is confidence a good indicator? If someone is really sure. Under ideal laboratory conditions, good lighting, long viewing time, and media tests, there can be a reasonable correlation between confidence and accuracy in facial identification. Real life isn't ideal lab conditions. Exactly. Real world conditions are rarely pristine. stress, poor lighting, brief exposure, delays. All these factors dramatically reduce accuracy, and the confidence accuracy relationship often breaks down. And what about identifying someone multiple times, like from photos, then a lineup? Repeated identification procedures can actually be problematic. While it might increase the likelihood of a witness picking someone, it doesn't necessarily increase the chance of picking the correct person. How come? The first identification attempt, even if it's tentative or mistaken, can actually distort the witness's original memory of the perpetrator. They might start remembering the face from the photo array rather than the face from the crime scene. Like Jennifer Thompson becoming more confident over time identifying Ronald Cotton. That's a potential factor, yes. Her memory might have unconsciously shifted towards Cotton's face through repeated exposures and identification procedures, strengthening her incorrect confidence. And we can't forget the cross-race effect, right? Right, the own race bias. Right. We are generally much better, more accurate at recognizing faces of people from our own racial group compared to faces from other racial groups. Is that genetic? No. The evidence strongly suggests it's a product of experience and exposure. Studies of individuals adopted cross-racially show the bias can be reversed based on the faces they grew up primarily interacting with. So it's about familiarity. It seems to be, yeah. There might be a critical period in childhood for developing expertise with different face types. Meta-analyses confirm it's a robust effect, higher correct identifications, and lower false identifications when the witness and suspect are the same race. Wow. Wow. So many factors undermining eyewitness reliability, even with honest witnesses. OK, moving on. The book talks about how new information we encounter after an event can actually change our memory of the original event. This is the misinformation effect. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Because memory is reconstructive and susceptible to reconsolidation, it's also vulnerable to being updated or contaminated, sometimes unintentionally, by information encountered after the event occurred. Like talking to other witnesses. That's a common way. Gillian, the author, mentioned staging a handbag theft in a lecture. The students' memories were likely influenced afterwards by questionnaire wording, seeing lineup photos, and maybe even just chatting with classmates about what they thought they saw. So subtle stuff can change things. It can. Yeah. But it can also be influenced much more directly through leading questions and suggestive information. And this is where the pioneering research of Elizabeth Loftus really comes in, particularly her studies on car accidents. Can you remind us how those experiments showed the power of suggestion? Loftus' work in the 70s was absolutely groundbreaking. Yeah. In one famous study, she showed participants films of car accidents and then asked them questions about what they saw. The critical manipulation was the verb used in the question about speed. Some were asked how fast the cars were going when they contacted each other. Others were asked how fast they were going when they hit speed. bumped, collided, or smashed into each other. And changing that one word mattered. Hugely. Participants who got the word smashed gave significantly higher speed estimates than those who got contacted. Wow. And even more strikingly, a week later, those who heard smashed were more than twice as likely to falsely remember seeing broken glass at the scene, even though there was no broken glass in the film. Just from that one word, smashed. Just from that one word, it implanted a false detail. Other studies showed even subtle wording like asking about the broken headlight, implying there was one, versus a broken headlight, made people more likely to falsely remember seeing one. So asking about a non-existent barn could make people remember a barn. Loft has found exactly that in another study. Suggestive questions can create memories for things that weren't there. And these effects aren't just fleeting. They can persist over time. And this kind of suggestibility, it can have really serious consequences, can't it? Like in the phenomenon of internalized false confessions, the book mentions the case of Billy Wayne Cope. That's a deeply disturbing example. Cope was accused of murdering his young daughter. He initially denied it hundreds of times during intense police interrogation over several days. But he confessed eventually. Yes. After being falsely told he'd failed a lie detector test, he'd actually passed, investigators suggesting he might have blacked out or repressed memories of the event, he eventually broke down. And he came to believe he did it. He gave multiple detailed confessions, even participated in a crime scene reenactment. He seemed to genuinely believe at that point that he must have done it, even though he had no actual memory of it. Later evidence pointed elsewhere. That's horrifying. It highlights how highly suggestive coercive interrogation techniques can, in some cases, lead vulnerable individuals to internalize guilt and confabulate false memories for crimes they didn't commit. It really underscores the need to treat memory carefully, like forensic evidence. Absolutely. Absolutely. Memory is susceptible to contamination, just like a physical crime scene. Investigators need rigorous procedures like avoiding leading questions, recording interviews properly to minimize the risk of altering a witness's or suspect's memory. And this misinformation isn't just in interrogations, right? It happens in court, too. Oh, definitely. Cross-examination techniques often involve leading questions designed to challenge a witness's account, but they can also inadvertently introduce memory errors. One study with trainee lawyers found that suggestive questioning led a high percentage of participants to change their answers about previously witnessed events. And what are bait questions? That's an investigative tactic where police might mention fabricated evidence to a suspect, assuming a guilty person will try to explain it away, while an innocent person will deny it. Does it work? Or does it backfire? Well, a mock jury study found that jurors exposed to these date questions, even if told they were false, were actually more likely to later falsely remember the fabricated details themselves. Warnings didn't seem to help much. Misinformation is sticky. Wow. And this links to things like push-pulls in politics or fake news, doesn't it? Yes. There's a direct link. Yeah. Studies have shown that asking people hypothetical questions about fictional scandals involving politicians can make them more vulnerable to later accepting related fake news stories about that scandal as true. They start to remember the fake news as real. Some participants did, yes. They even confabulated details about where and when they supposedly encountered the fake news story. And crucially, they were often completely unaware that the initial push-pull question had influenced their memory. It's quite alarming how easily external suggestions can shape our internal landscape, our memories.

The book then moves into what is perhaps one of the most unsettling areas: 28:30

building entirely false memories, remembering things that just... never happened at all. This is where the line between memory distortion, changing details of a real event, and outright fabrication becomes really blurred and, frankly, quite controversial. The McMartin preschool case is mentioned as a stark example. It is a really disturbing case from the 1980s. It started with one mother's report of potential abuse of her son, but escalated dramatically during the investigation through highly suggestive interviewing techniques used with the children. But was there any proof? Despite extensive investigations, digging up the schoolyard, no physical evidence was ever found to corroborate these claims. It became a textbook example of how confirmation bias and suggestive questioning can potentially generate widespread, detailed, but ultimately false allegations. especially in vulnerable populations like young children. And this relates to the debate around recovered memories of abuse. Yes. That's another complex and highly charged area. It refers to cases where adults, often during therapy, develop memories of childhood abuse that they previously had no recollection of. So memories suddenly appearing years later. Exactly. While many instances of delayed disclosure involve continuous memories that were simply difficult to talk about, the controversy centers on cases where the memories seem to emerge only after suggestive therapeutic techniques, like hypnosis or guided imagery, are used. And some of these recovered memories have been challenged. Yes. In some high-profile cases, individuals later recanted their recovered memories, or independent evidence emerged showing the alleged events were impossible. For example, the accused person was demonstrably elsewhere. This led to intense debate between memory researchers highlighting suggestibility and victims' rights advocates emphasizing the reality of suppressed trauma. It sounds incredibly difficult. It is. It's crucial to emphasize, as the book does, that this discussion focuses specifically on memories formed only after suggestive techniques are employed. Corroborating evidence is much less likely in those specific circumstances. It absolutely does not aim to disbelieve the majority of complainants who have consistent memories. Okay. So, experimentally, how have researchers shown that entirely false memories can be created? The Lost in the Mall study is probably the most famous one. Right. The Loftus and Pickerel study from the mid-90s. It's become iconic. They recruited participants and, with the help of their families, created booklets describing several true childhood events for each participant, plus one entirely fictional event. Which was? The fictional event was a plausible scenario, getting lost in a shopping mall for an extended period around age five, being frightened, and eventually reunited with family. And what happened when they asked people about these events? In interviews, participants were encouraged to recall details about all the events. Yes. for the false lost-them-all event about twenty five per cent of the participants came to remember it often providing specific details and expressing confidence even though it never happened twenty five per cent believed a completely fabricated childhood memory that's what the original study found it was considered powerful existence proof that you could implant relatively rich false memories for plausible autobiographical events in adults were there criticisms yes the original study had a small sample size and the criteria for what counted as a false memory were perhaps a bit vague however it's been replicated yes many variations have been done since a large direct replication published recently by murphy and colleagues found similar though slightly lower rates initially but the rates increased across multiple interviews Mock jurors in that study also believed that a significant percentage of the fabricated events had actually happened. So the basic finding holds up. Adults can form these rich false memories. It seems they can, yes. And they can be quite convincing both to themselves and to others. How does this happen? How do we come to believe something happened when it didn't? Do these false memories feel different? That's the tricky part. Often they don't feel significantly different. This comes back to source monitoring errors, difficulty distinguishing the origin of our mental experiences. Like confusing a dream with reality, Phoebe in Friends thinking she dated Cameron Diaz. Huh, exactly like that. We have trouble tagging whether a mental image came from perception, imagination, a dream, or hearing a story. True memories often have more perceptual details, sights, sounds, spatial context, and just sort of feel more real. But imagination can sometimes feel real too. It can. There's a phenomenon called imagination inflation. If you repeatedly imagine doing something, especially something plausible, You become more likely to later believe you actually did it. The imagined event starts to feel familiar, maybe picks up some pseudo details and gets mistaken for a real memory. So just thinking about something can make it seem like it happened. Under the right circumstances, yes. Associated memory processes also play a role. If you witness a bag snatching, your brain might automatically activate related concepts like struggle or push, even if you didn't actually see a push. Later, you might misremember seeing the man push the woman because it fits the overall schema of the event. So our memory system's flexibility, its ability to link ideas and imagine, is also its Achilles heel. That's a great way to put it. The very adaptiveness of our memory system, its ability to generalize, fill in gaps, allow mental time travel and imagination, is what makes it vulnerable to these kinds of errors. Dramatic, fully false memories are probably rare in everyday life, but the potential is there. It's a tradeoff, then. A perfectly accurate, rigid memory system might hinder our ability to plan, be creative, and adapt flexibly. False memories are maybe just a normal, if sometimes unsettling, byproduct of being human. I think that's a fair summary of the current understanding. Yes. OK. So who is susceptible to these false memories? Is it everyone? Or are some people more vulnerable than others? We probably all like to think we wouldn't fall for it. Huh. Yes. That's a common bias, thinking we're less susceptible than the average person. But research generally shows that a significant portion of people, maybe 20%, 40% in many misinformation or false memory studies, experience these kinds of memory errors. Even people with amazing memories, like the HSM individuals. Interestingly, yes. Studies have shown that even individuals with highly superior autobiographical memory are susceptible to memory distortion from misinformation. Having a generally strong memory for real events doesn't seem to fully protect against incorporating false details. So it's not just about having a good or bad memory overall. It seems not entirely. Memory distortion appears to be a natural byproduct of the reconstructive nature of memory itself, making it somewhat unavoidable for everyone. However, there is mixed evidence suggesting some factors might correlate with susceptibility. Like what? Age? Age does seem to play a role. Our general memory abilities tend to improve through childhood and adolescence, peak maybe in our mid-20s, and then gradually decline in later adulthood. Susceptibility to misinformation kind of follows an inverse pattern. So, hiring kids and older adults? Generally, yes. Young children are known to be more suggestible, and susceptibility to misinformation seems to increase again in older adulthood, perhaps starting around the mid-50s, potentially linked to declines in frontal lobe functioning involved in source monitoring. What about cognitive ability? Does being smarter help? There's some evidence for that. people with higher general cognitive abilities, particularly better working memory capacity, the ability to hold and manipulate information, tend to show somewhat greater resistance to memory distortion. Why would that be? Possibly because they're better able to keep the original memory and the conflicting misinformation separate in their minds, compare them, and detect the discrepancy. And what about thinking style, like analytical versus intuitive? Yes. That's another area being explored. Some research suggests that people who tend to engage in more analytical, deliberate reasoning, rather than relying on quick, intuitive gut feelings, might be less susceptible to memory errors, including falling for fake news. They might be more likely to critically evaluate the source and plausibility of information. But you said the evidence is mixed, and these are small effects. Yes, that's important. While these individual difference factors exist, their impact on susceptibility is generally quite small. Higher intelligence or better working memory might reduce the risk, but it certainly doesn't eliminate it. And group differences absolutely don't mean that any specific individual within a group is immune or guaranteed to be susceptible. Right. So we all have these inherent vulnerabilities. Yeah. Now, the book also briefly touches on whether one side in a conflict, say an accuser versus an accused, is inherently more prone to memory error. What does the research suggest there? That's a really important question, especially in legal contexts. While a lot of memory research is focused on witnesses and victims, there's actually very little evidence to suggest that individuals on one side of a dispute are fundamentally more prone to memory distortion than those on the other side. So defendants aren't necessarily less reliable than accusers or vice versa. There's no inherent reason based on memory science to assume so. some studies have tried to create analogous situations using things like the prisoner's dilemma game and they found that both the person who felt wronged the victim analogue and the person who did the wronging the perpetrator analogue were equally susceptible to misremembering details of the game interaction when exposed to misinformation later So it suggests the accused might be just as likely as the accuser to misremember details. That's the implication, yes. It really underscores the importance of considering the potential for memory errors in all parties involved without assuming one side has a monopoly on accurate recall. And of course, confirmation bias plays a role for everyone. We're all more likely to notice and remember information that aligns with our existing beliefs or our side of the story. That's a really crucial point for fairness, isn't it? Okay, let's shift gears slightly and talk about the powerful influence of emotion on our memories. We've all heard of flash bold memories, those super vivid recollections of big surprising events. What are they exactly and are they as accurate as they feel? Right, flash bold memories. There are those incredibly vivid, detailed, and confidently held memories we often have for the circumstances surrounding learning about a major, surprising, and emotionally significant event. Like where you were when you heard about 9-11, or maybe the start of the COVID lockdowns. Exactly. Those are classic public examples. But they could also be for highly personal events like a car accident or receiving major news. They feel almost like a photograph was taken, hence flashbulb capturing the moment with exceptional clarity. And our confidence in their accuracy is usually extremely high. But is the confidence justified? Are they actually more accurate? That's the fascinating twist. Despite that powerful subjective feeling of vividness and certainty, decades research have consistently shown that flashbulb memories are not immune to forgetting and distortion. They change over time, just like ordinary memories do. Really? Even for something like 9-11? Yes. Studies that track people's memories for 9-11 over months and years found significant inconsistencies in the details they recalled where they were, who told them what they were doing, even while their confidence in those recalled details remained incredibly high. So the feeling of remembering is strong, but the memory itself isn't necessarily accurate. Precisely. Emotional intensity seems to boost our confidence in the subjective vividness of the memory, but it doesn't guarantee its accuracy or make it resistant to the normal processes of forgetting and reconstruction. Wow. So those memories that feel so incredibly real and indelible might not be the perfect snapshots we think they are. How else does emotion interact with and shape our memories? Emotion plays a really complex and multifaceted role. There's Gordon Bauer's semantic network theory, for instance, which suggests that emotions are nodes in our memory networks linked to related concepts and memories. So feeling happy might trigger happy memories. Exactly. Experiencing an emotion can activate related nodes, making it easier to recall memories associated with that same feeling. This leads to phenomena like mood congruent memory. Which is? We often remember information better when our mood at the time of retrieval matches our mood when we first learned or experienced it. If you learn something while happy, you might recall it better later when you're happy again. Okay. And emotions shape schemas too, right? Yes. Early life emotional experiences can contribute to forming core beliefs or schemas about ourselves and... and the world, sometimes maladaptive ones like negative self schemas and depression, or schemas related to threat in anxiety disorders. These schemas then influence how we interpret and remember ongoing experiences, often in a bias confirming way. And we even misremember our past emotions. You do. Research shows we tend to misremember how we felt in the past in a way that aligns more closely with how we feel now. Our current feelings can kind of rewrite our emotional history. Like after an election, maybe remembering being less upset than you actually were if your side lost, but you feel OK now. Exactly like that. Studies tracking political emotions have shown precisely that kind of retrospective bias, and then there's hindsight bias. Uh, the I knew it all along effect. Right. After we know the outcome of an event, we tend to overestimate how predictable it was. We misremember our initial uncertainty and feel like the outcome was inevitable. We often reconstruct our memory of the past to fit the known present. Does stress affect memory, like in a crime situation? It's complicated. Generally, moderate levels of emotional arousal and stress seem to enhance memory consolidation for the central aspects of an event, likely due to hormones like adrenaline and cortisol acting on brain regions like the amygdala and hippocampus. That's why significant emotional events are often well-remembered. But high stress, like being attacked. Very high levels of stress can actually impair memory encoding and retrieval, especially for peripheral details. This can lead to less accurate eyewitness identification and fewer reported details about the context. Is that related to weapon focus? Yes. That's a classic example of attentional narrowing under high stress or arousal. Attention becomes highly focused on the most threatening element, like a weapon leading to better memory for the weapon itself, but significantly poorer memory for other details, like the perpetrator's face or clothing. Loftus did famous studies showing this with a gun versus a checkbook. It's a really complex interplay then. Emotion strengthens some aspects, biases others, and high stress can impair recall. And the author, Gillian, notes that even knowing all this doesn't make you immune, right? Ah, yes. She shares a personal anecdote about misremembering how bad her morning sickness was during her first pregnancy when contemplating a second. We all do it. There's even speculation that forgetting the pain of childbirth might be a functional memory error to encourage reproduction, though the evidence there is mixed. So even memory experts forget or misremember. Absolutely. These memory distortions are pervasive, a fundamental part of how our minds work. As Samuel Johnson famously quipped about second marriages, it can be the triumph of hope over experience. Sometimes rewriting our emotional past might even help us move on. That's a fascinating thought. Now, the book touches briefly on memory in our digital world, which unfortunately we don't have the full excerpts on today. But we do see very clearly how these flawed human memories can have significant effects on our actual behavior in the real world. Absolutely. Our memories, imperfect as they are, form the bedrock of our understanding of the world. They guide our daily choices, our major life decisions, our beliefs, our attitudes. So when those memories are faulty or based on misinformation, the consequences can be quite significant, sometimes deeply disconcerting. The link between fake news, false memories, and behavior seems particularly relevant today. Extremely relevant. Right. The book mentions the devastating impact of the fraudulent link claimed between the MMR vaccine and autism back in 1998. Despite being thoroughly debunked and retracted, that misinformation took root in public memory, led to false beliefs, and caused measurable drops in vaccination rates, resulting in preventable outbreaks of measles. A powerful example of how false information may be solidified into false memory or belief drives behavior. Tragically, yes. And more recent studies on COVID-19 misinformation show similar patterns. Exposure to fake news stories about the pandemic led a significant minority of participants, around 25 percent in one study, to later report false memories of having encountered those specific fake stories before. And did that exposure change their intended behavior? The study found small but potentially significant effects, maybe around 5, 10 percent, on people's stated intentions regarding certain health behaviors mentioned in the fake news. like using contact tracing apps or consuming certain foods. Even small effects, when scaled up across a population, can have major public health consequences, as the MMR example shows. And it's not just health, right? Memory distortion affects other decisions, like voting. Yes. A study around the Irish abortion referendum found the participants' justifications for their vote changed quite significantly over time. When asked later, they often selected reasons they hadn't originally given and omitted reasons they previously said were important, suggesting their memory for their own decision-making process was altered. Wow. And you can even implant false memories about food preferences. There's research showing that, too. Suggesting to participants that they had a negative childhood experience with a specific food, like getting sick after eating egg salad. Yeah. Yeah. itemed around 35% of them to form a false memory or belief about that event. And crucially, this implanted memory actually led them to report a reduced preference for eating egg salad later on. So you can change people's eating habits by implanting a false memory. The potential seems to be there, at least in a lab setting. It really highlights the powerful link between our recollections, real or false, and our subsequent actions. Which leads to some pretty serious ethical questions about memory manipulation, doesn't it? Absolutely. A survey mentioned in the book found people had really mixed views on the ethics of deliberately implanting memories, even positive ones. There were significant concerns about deception and the potential for abuse like influencing voting behavior or even things as fundamental sexual orientation. It touches on identity itself. Exactly. As one survey respondent put it, memories are what makes us individuals. If you take that away and implant false memories, that person will lose sight of who they really are. Our autobiographical memories, even if not always perfectly accurate, are profoundly linked to our sense of self and how we navigate the world. It's really eye-opening to see how these seemingly subtle quirks and flaws in our memory can have such a profound impact. The book concludes by briefly raising some of those really important ethical questions that arise when we start questioning, studying, and maybe even manipulating memory. Yes. As researchers in this field, we approach these questions with a deep sense of responsibility. The science of memory, like any science, involves research, data, analysis, but the subject matter, people's personal histories, is incredibly sensitive. Questioning someone's memory isn't trivial. Not at all. It's a serious matter. Cases like the Jane Doe case involving recovered memories, where Elizabeth Loftus testified as an expert, or the case of the Navy lieutenant accused based on recovered memories, really highlight the high stakes and the real-world consequences involved in these debates about memory accuracy and and suggestibility. So ethical research practices are key. Absolutely paramount. Minimizing risk, ensuring fully informed consent, maintaining confidentiality, getting rigorous ethical approval. These are non-negotiable standards. And what about memory experts in legal settings? They often testify for the defense, right? Does that mean they don't believe victims? That's a common misperception, but it's generally not the case. Memory experts are usually called to explain the general science of memory, how attention, stress, suggestions, schemas, etc. can affect recall for anyone. It's crucial to remember that the potential for memory unreliability applies to all parties, witnesses, victims, defendants. It's about the process, not about disbelief. That's an important clarification. Are there tools being developed to help with accurate recording? There are efforts. The book mentions Julia Shaw's Spot 2 chatbot, for example, which aims to provide a secure, time-stamped, structured way for people to record accounts of misconduct or harassment, potentially reducing some of the issues with delayed recall and contamination. Interesting. So as we wrap up our deep dive into memory lane, what are the absolutely crucial takeaways you'd want our listener to really hold on to from all this? I think the biggest one is this. Memory is not a perfect recording device. It's fundamentally a reconstructive process. It's imperfect, yes, but it's also incredibly adaptive. Perfectly imperfect, as you said earlier. Exactly. And it's so-called flaws, things like inattention, the way schemas shape recall, source confusion, our suggestibility to misinformation. These aren't bugs in the system. They're inherent features of how it functions. And these features have real consequences. Huge consequences. From the reliability of eyewitness testimony in court, to the formation of our personal beliefs, our biases, and ultimately how we behave in the world. And looking back, what were some of the most surprising or unexpected insights for you that jumped out from the book's research? For me, the sheer extent of inattentional and change blindness is always startling. How much we miss. Also, the relative ease with which plausible false memories can be implanted even in adults is quite sobering. And the fact that our confidence in the memory, especially those really vivid flashbulb ones, is often a poor guide to its actual accuracy. That disconnect is fascinating. Plus, the power of our unconscious biases and schemas in shaping what we remember and how profoundly false information can ripple out to affect behavior. So what's the relevance of all of this for you, our listener, in your day-to-day life? Why should you care about these imperfections? Well, I think understanding these fundamental aspects of how memory works can really help you become more aware, maybe more humble about your own memory's limitations. And maybe less judgmental of others' memory lapses. Perhaps, yes. It encourages a healthy dose of critical thinking when evaluating past events, whether your own recollections or accounts from others. It helps you understand the potential for distortion is always there. Okay. And finally, a provocative thought to leave everyone mulling over. Go for it. Given this understanding of the inherent imperfections, the biases, the malleability of our memories, how does it change the way you view your own personal history? the stories you tell yourself about your life and the world. What responsibility do we have knowing this to critically evaluate our own recollections and the information we consume, recognizing that our memories while deeply personal might not always be the objective truth. That's a deep one to ponder. Definitely food for thought. Thanks for joining us for this deep dive.