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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
This is why the post-meeting recap email can be so valuable. People quickly forget the meeting but have so many remembered that they reconstruct a meeting that never happened.
From experience there's *huge* power in writing the recap. Many people never read it, and of those that do most do not want to get into the hassle of engaging in a did/didn't type of conflict, regardless of whether they were right or wrong.
Your experience of "interrogation school" (presumably as some part of law-enforcement job training?) sounds very positive and enlightened compared with the cliché depiction of aggressive leading questions we often see in films and TV. Unfortunately an encounter I once had with a drunk, off-duty police officer in the UK, who was absolutely determined to convince me I had committed an act of petty theft, and use that as grounds to start a physical fight, did suggest to me that his regular MO was much closer to the typical media portrayal of police interrogations as forcefully pursuing a conclusion that he had already leapt to without much evidence. I would like to think charitably that he was living out some "TV cop" fantasy in his spare time because he was forced to be so thorough and thoughtful in his everyday work; but I find that very hard to believe.
Off-duty cops are clueless, especially the drunk ones. A drug dealer friend once got a cop room mate for a couple years. That was hilarious and he would always pick us up if we were too drunk to drive, which we always made a fake scene about why a squad car was picking us up. Sometimes I miss my 20’s… nah, I don’t.
Basically the actor is given information to know, some background on the character, and the rest is improv.
So you’d get a couple of paragraphs explaining what the character was picked up for, etc.
The first steps was learning how to direct question. The actors would pretty much shut down if you did something wrong like try an approach or ask leading questions. And they wouldn’t respond for the rest of the session. The goal was to force it into our head that once someone is willing to answer us, don’t stop asking the right questions. During the test though, the actors would give you wrong information instead of shutting down.
Then we started learning of approaches. The actors goals here was much the same except this time their goal was to not give you information unless they felt like you deserved it. I’ll never forget this one time, I got baited into a religious discussion. It was so obviously a trap and I fell right into it. Didn’t get a single bit of information because I pissed off the guy for not knowing enough about his religion.
Most of the time the first bit is figuring out core motivation. Is the person motivated by power or emotion?, and then giving them that as a carrot or taking it away. So you are genuinely trying to get to know the person, and that person is stuck in a room with you so they don’t have any other choice other than not saying a word (the worst!!).
If it’s done right, you end up caring for these people to some degree. Even though you don’t want to because sometimes these people have done absolutely terrible things. It’s a rough job. It wasn’t until I became a parent and realized that emotion is similar to when your kid misbehaves. You love your kid, but the child has to be punished. So while your child is sitting in the corner, tears streaming down the face in shame and betrayal, you love them but have to teach them that there are consequences. It’s nearly the same emotions as that moment except every single day, all day.
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.
> 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.
This is somewhat related to eidetic memory (which the article points out is sometimes used interchangeably), you might find it a curious read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory
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
The Mandela effect (where people think they remember Nelson Mandela dying i prison) is likely because they confuse him with Stephen Biko, another South African anti-apartheid activist which died in prison. Biko was a cause celebre at the time, a movie was made and Peter Gabriel wrote a song about him.
> Other examples include memories of the title of the Berenstain Bears children's books being spelled Berenstein,[16][17] the logo of clothing brand Fruit of the Loom featuring a cornucopia,[18] and the existence of a 1990s movie titled Shazaam starring comedian Sinbad as a genie.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
If it's informed that you will be possibly disturbed by the experiment, I don't think so.
But if you agree to an experiment and wasn't told about it, then yes.
Imagine you sign up to a behavioural experiment, and they put you in front of a tv showing very disturbing images to see how you react, but wasn't told about it beforehand, I don't see how that could be considered ethical.
> 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.
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.
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).
Say you only have terrible, traumatic memories of extremely violent abuse throughout your entire life that is causing you such extreme issues that prevents you from leaving your room or interacting with anyone. Would you still prefer an accurate model of your life over a useful model of your life?
Inherently good doesn't imply inherently better than some alternative.
>Would you still prefer an accurate model of your life over a useful model of your life?
In the short term, absolutely. But I think my preference would be to work through the actual experience through different methods of therapy so that long term you aren’t forced to choose between reality and a functional existence. I don’t think the MIB eraser device is a good long term coping strategy.
>But I think my preference would be to work through the actual experience through different methods of therapy so that long term you aren’t forced to choose between reality and a functional existence.
Who is to say that therapy isn't just creating a useful model of your life?
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.
That's precisely how some of these therapists saw their jobs. There were interviews from some therapists who helped people recover memories where they said they didn't care whether the patient was actually abused as a child, so long as they came out of the sessions feeling better.
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'.
We're not arguing over the existence of God here. Sure, you can never truly prove a negative, but you can never truly prove a positive either. New evidence leading to exoneration (above and beyond a mere finding of "not guilty") is still a coherent and useful concept to anyone who isn't philosophizing their way up their own ass.
There could have been something like DNA evidence eventually showing a different perpetrator, or proof that he was in a different country when the alleged incidents occurred. The sort of thing that would make it instantly clear to any reasonable observer that the recovered memories did not reflect reality. I was primed to expect an eventual finding like that, but there wasn't one.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
That's surprising. I can understand mixing up memories; for example, remembering something you did but confusing the location of where it took place with that of another memory which took place in a different but similar location - But to actually recall doing something you've never done in a place that you've never been to seems like a whole different level.
I have a visual memory and so I always assumed that other people also relied on visual imaginary to recall past events. Now I'm wondering how can someone possibly recall any past event if they can't visualize it happening. Is the past just words and sentences that pop into your mind? How can you verify the authenticity of a memory from mere words? How can you be fully confident in your own memories if you can't scrutinize them from different angles in various levels of detail?
Having a "visual memory" has nothing to do with it. (Everyone who can see has visual memory, except possibly aphantasiacs, and it's generally the strongest of most people's memories.)
If you can imagine something happening in your mind's eye, then you can also see how your visual memory can be created. You're "seeing" something in your head that is not actually happening. This vision can turn into a memory. Heck, I have a recurring daydream that I have so often I can think of it as a memory.
There's no indication that any of the subjects in these various studies were not using visual memory, and the descriptions they used of their memories matched that.
Presumably it would be a mixture of existing images. A balloon ride seen in a movie, but with yourself inserted. The way one imagines a chimera, having seen its component parts.
And could personality and character traits predispose people to fabrication? For example, a person can imagine a scenario that never happened on the basis of a photoshopped photo, but why would one person confuse what is imaged with what is remembered while another person would not?
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.)
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.
The scary thing is that most of the people involved in manufacturing those scandals are still around peddling the same stuff. It remains marginal now, but I could totally see it making a resurgence on another moral panic wave in the future.
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.
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.
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?
I remember reading that article when it came out. I wasn't sure what to make of it then, still not sure now. They definitely sound like unusual people.
I'm less concerned about the lack of mention of that in articles which are otherwise treating them as complete quacks inventing abuse allegations against innocent people out of whole cloth.
I bet that victims of those therapists, who were falsely accused, put in jail or got they reputation ruined and life destroyed won't share your concerns.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lying and gaslighting are two different things. Gaslighting involves lying but is also about invalidating the victim's memory and feelings in an attempt to control them in some way. Telling a partner they look good is not generally gaslighting.
Lying isn't the same thing. In that moment, the man is just being dishonest. Later, if the wife brings up the incident and the man claims it both never happened and she constantly makes shit up like this, then yes he is gaslighting and is deeply unsafe.
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.
> 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.
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.
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”.
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.
Planting false memories is trivial. Most of what we believe was set in ways we don't remember by people we can't place. We do it with ideology all the time. These days we call it advertising and public relations.
Ask yourself how you know the things you believe, and if you can't attribute it to a specific, concrete personal and physical experience, treat it as absolutely suspect.
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.
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.
There’s also interesting research being done using brain scans to better understand the dissociative processes that are involved in trauma related memory.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I tend to agree, however depending on the size of fish and some other factors, many don't scare off very far. I don't think it's definitive.
(I'm an avid fisherman despite the dock fall!)
I'm not actually familiar with perch as an adult. I last caught one when I was maybe 8 years old. After googling, I believe they were "yellow perch" (caught in northern Indiana)
> I remember seeing fish I was used to catching (perch)
I think VooDooJuJu's sibling comment is correct, and jumping off from that, I wonder: do you, or did you, have dreams about that event?
This scene sounds something right out of cartoons I used to watch as a kid. I wonder if you added this scene in as part of a dream, and somehow your brain grabbed that experience and incorporated that into the memory node family.
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. One of the spookier things I’ve realized is that it’s perfectly possible to be like the main character from momento and manipulate what you believe about the past to change your behaviour in the present. I think to some degree that’s how talk therapy works.
The more deeply I think about this topic the more I lose my grasp on reality.
> The more deeply I think about this topic the more I lose my grasp on reality.
The past is clouded by faulty memory, but the present has crystal clear solidity to ground you through mindfulness. Maybe you can't recall or you misremember the contents of your original post, but you can be certain you're reading a direct reply to it's contents in the words you're reading at this very moment.
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.
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?
Swapping billets doesn't add up. Derren talked to Simon on the phone with instructions to sign it and make sure no-one steals or switches it, and Simon opens it on camera straight from his wallet. So to switch it someone must have met Simon, and either figured out or pushed the exact same envelope/pen/signature location that Simon used, then went and had someone forge some new note the exact same, and then met Simon _again_ and somehow switched it while somehow Simon is convinced that no one has had access. This also must have happened well before the show since they already had to setup the room with BMX bike.
I mean or he could have just paid Simon, the actor, to act surprised.
Given how suggestible people are one would expect the power of suggestion to show up elsewhere. For instance, the area of gender identity. Just like the "false memory" craze in psychology back in the 80's and 90's, today we have an army of psychologist / psychiatry / social services / (and yes, those who have identified themselves as trans something,) heavily invested in telling (young) people they are "a certain way." Someone may be searching for their identity and may not feel comfortable with the "standard" models but that doesn't mean the psy-industrial-complex is correct in saying "you are X". People are making impossible-to-reverse life-changing decisions based on the cheering section telling them "you are X," in the same way people were being sent to jail based on "repressed memories" implanted back then by the same industrial complex. There may be people who really are trans-x but it might be wiser counsel to wait for maturity before a person makes such a decision.
This is what I thought when I read this page too. I've been recently looking into what's being done to children and teenagers in the name of 'trans' and it's horrifying. Teenagers are being told the solution to their mental health problems is hormones and amputation of their reproductive organs, and many of them are regretting it.
There is NO ROOM for trends and fads in medicine. None.
But we're being told that scientific evidence and risk assesment are transphobic. I truly believe this to be the biggest medical scandal in decades, but speaking out about it will have you banned from social media, fired from your job, and lose your friends and family.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Consider text fiction. Like, reading a book. Just a few kilobytes is enough to create a plausible narrative. And my brain fills in the pictures, sounds, smells etc.
Manufacturing fake reality is trivial. Therefore it happens all the time.
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 :)
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]
187 comments in this thread (as of writing), 0 on thea original blog source. Someone should write a bot that tells a user "hey! Your post is being discussed on HN $here"
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?
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.
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.
I find this explanation to be the most compelling by FAR.
Humans are a social species, so we are hardwired to keep the peace as long as things are going well.
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.
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.
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".
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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?
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.
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.]
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.
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.
Saw that you got downvoted for your metaphor. I'm not surprised as HN is extremely defensive of porn, which I guess makes sense, sadly, given the demographics. But I wanted to go out of my way to say thank you for speaking against it.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
This is why the post-meeting recap email can be so valuable. People quickly forget the meeting but have so many remembered that they reconstruct a meeting that never happened.
From experience there's *huge* power in writing the recap. Many people never read it, and of those that do most do not want to get into the hassle of engaging in a did/didn't type of conflict, regardless of whether they were right or wrong.
Also the simple CYA aspect to it. A post-meeting email creates a solid, legally subpoenable if need be data point that you can refer back to.
What is “CYA aspect” ?
CYA = cover your ass
once upon a time it also meant Califoria Youth Authority, lol
Your experience of "interrogation school" (presumably as some part of law-enforcement job training?) sounds very positive and enlightened compared with the cliché depiction of aggressive leading questions we often see in films and TV. Unfortunately an encounter I once had with a drunk, off-duty police officer in the UK, who was absolutely determined to convince me I had committed an act of petty theft, and use that as grounds to start a physical fight, did suggest to me that his regular MO was much closer to the typical media portrayal of police interrogations as forcefully pursuing a conclusion that he had already leapt to without much evidence. I would like to think charitably that he was living out some "TV cop" fantasy in his spare time because he was forced to be so thorough and thoughtful in his everyday work; but I find that very hard to believe.
It was for HUMINT in the US military.
Off-duty cops are clueless, especially the drunk ones. A drug dealer friend once got a cop room mate for a couple years. That was hilarious and he would always pick us up if we were too drunk to drive, which we always made a fake scene about why a squad car was picking us up. Sometimes I miss my 20’s… nah, I don’t.
I am genuinely curious: how do you interrogate a trained actor?
Basically the actor is given information to know, some background on the character, and the rest is improv.
So you’d get a couple of paragraphs explaining what the character was picked up for, etc.
The first steps was learning how to direct question. The actors would pretty much shut down if you did something wrong like try an approach or ask leading questions. And they wouldn’t respond for the rest of the session. The goal was to force it into our head that once someone is willing to answer us, don’t stop asking the right questions. During the test though, the actors would give you wrong information instead of shutting down.
Then we started learning of approaches. The actors goals here was much the same except this time their goal was to not give you information unless they felt like you deserved it. I’ll never forget this one time, I got baited into a religious discussion. It was so obviously a trap and I fell right into it. Didn’t get a single bit of information because I pissed off the guy for not knowing enough about his religion.
Most of the time the first bit is figuring out core motivation. Is the person motivated by power or emotion?, and then giving them that as a carrot or taking it away. So you are genuinely trying to get to know the person, and that person is stuck in a room with you so they don’t have any other choice other than not saying a word (the worst!!).
If it’s done right, you end up caring for these people to some degree. Even though you don’t want to because sometimes these people have done absolutely terrible things. It’s a rough job. It wasn’t until I became a parent and realized that emotion is similar to when your kid misbehaves. You love your kid, but the child has to be punished. So while your child is sitting in the corner, tears streaming down the face in shame and betrayal, you love them but have to teach them that there are consequences. It’s nearly the same emotions as that moment except every single day, all day.
Just watch James Lipton.
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.
> 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.
>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 :)
This is somewhat related to eidetic memory (which the article points out is sometimes used interchangeably), you might find it a curious read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory
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
The Mandela effect (where people think they remember Nelson Mandela dying i prison) is likely because they confuse him with Stephen Biko, another South African anti-apartheid activist which died in prison. Biko was a cause celebre at the time, a movie was made and Peter Gabriel wrote a song about him.
The Mandela Effect is named for that false memory, yes, but it's more general. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_Effect):
> Other examples include memories of the title of the Berenstain Bears children's books being spelled Berenstein,[16][17] the logo of clothing brand Fruit of the Loom featuring a cornucopia,[18] and the existence of a 1990s movie titled Shazaam starring comedian Sinbad as a genie.
"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.
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.
That last part is a really good example to use for people who have switched countries.
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.
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.
Is it unethical to make someone feel disturbed? It doesn't seem particularly serious or disproportional to me.
If it's informed that you will be possibly disturbed by the experiment, I don't think so.
But if you agree to an experiment and wasn't told about it, then yes.
Imagine you sign up to a behavioural experiment, and they put you in front of a tv showing very disturbing images to see how you react, but wasn't told about it beforehand, I don't see how that could be considered ethical.
> 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
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.
To understand this better, read "Try to Remember", by Paul R. McHugh. Therapists can and do often cause false memories and do real damage.
> 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?
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.
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).
Say you only have terrible, traumatic memories of extremely violent abuse throughout your entire life that is causing you such extreme issues that prevents you from leaving your room or interacting with anyone. Would you still prefer an accurate model of your life over a useful model of your life?
Inherently good doesn't imply inherently better than some alternative.
>Would you still prefer an accurate model of your life over a useful model of your life?
In the short term, absolutely. But I think my preference would be to work through the actual experience through different methods of therapy so that long term you aren’t forced to choose between reality and a functional existence. I don’t think the MIB eraser device is a good long term coping strategy.
>But I think my preference would be to work through the actual experience through different methods of therapy so that long term you aren’t forced to choose between reality and a functional existence.
Who is to say that therapy isn't just creating a useful model of your life?
I would hope that it is, but is a more useful model based on reality rather than fabricated delusion.
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.
That's precisely how some of these therapists saw their jobs. There were interviews from some therapists who helped people recover memories where they said they didn't care whether the patient was actually abused as a child, so long as they came out of the sessions feeling better.
Like a false memory of a ride in a hot air balloon?
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'.
That would require proving a negative. I agree with your conclusion that nothing is truly proven.
We're not arguing over the existence of God here. Sure, you can never truly prove a negative, but you can never truly prove a positive either. New evidence leading to exoneration (above and beyond a mere finding of "not guilty") is still a coherent and useful concept to anyone who isn't philosophizing their way up their own ass.
There could have been something like DNA evidence eventually showing a different perpetrator, or proof that he was in a different country when the alleged incidents occurred. The sort of thing that would make it instantly clear to any reasonable observer that the recovered memories did not reflect reality. I was primed to expect an eventual finding like that, but there wasn't one.
> I can imagine feeling really disturbed should something like this happen to me.
It is happening to you, every single day, you just didn't know it before. You should be disturbed, that's the point.
> 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.
I think they mean “There’s no ethical way to do this without informed consent”
thank you this is what i meant.
it’s really interesting to me how unclear my original phrasing was without even knowing it.
But they failed with half the people. I wonder how many don't develop false memories like that?
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.
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.
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.
It was the parents who provided the photos and verified that the kid hadn't been on a balloon in the first place.
Plausible. But it'd still be an interesting research question in its own right. I wonder if it's related to hypnotic suggestibilify.
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.
Holy sh*t! Starting to run shasum across my photo library asap
But you must do that in your brain!
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.
That's surprising. I can understand mixing up memories; for example, remembering something you did but confusing the location of where it took place with that of another memory which took place in a different but similar location - But to actually recall doing something you've never done in a place that you've never been to seems like a whole different level.
I have a visual memory and so I always assumed that other people also relied on visual imaginary to recall past events. Now I'm wondering how can someone possibly recall any past event if they can't visualize it happening. Is the past just words and sentences that pop into your mind? How can you verify the authenticity of a memory from mere words? How can you be fully confident in your own memories if you can't scrutinize them from different angles in various levels of detail?
Having a "visual memory" has nothing to do with it. (Everyone who can see has visual memory, except possibly aphantasiacs, and it's generally the strongest of most people's memories.)
If you can imagine something happening in your mind's eye, then you can also see how your visual memory can be created. You're "seeing" something in your head that is not actually happening. This vision can turn into a memory. Heck, I have a recurring daydream that I have so often I can think of it as a memory.
There's no indication that any of the subjects in these various studies were not using visual memory, and the descriptions they used of their memories matched that.
You should check this out, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
Presumably it would be a mixture of existing images. A balloon ride seen in a movie, but with yourself inserted. The way one imagines a chimera, having seen its component parts.
What I'm interested in is the other half.
And could personality and character traits predispose people to fabrication? For example, a person can imagine a scenario that never happened on the basis of a photoshopped photo, but why would one person confuse what is imaged with what is remembered while another person would not?
I'm reminded of a Seinfeld episode;
"Jerry, just remember, it's not a lie if you believe it"
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.
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.
It's plausible that some volume of people had gone on a hot air balloon before and just not had pictures taken of the experience.
It was the parents who provided the photos and verified that the kid hadn't been on a balloon in the first place.
It's amazing that yours is the only comment even contemplating that.
What did the other half do?
They could tell by a few of the pixels that the photo looked shopped
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.)
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.
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.
The scary thing is that most of the people involved in manufacturing those scandals are still around peddling the same stuff. It remains marginal now, but I could totally see it making a resurgence on another moral panic wave in the future.
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...
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.
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?
I have been slowly remembering forgotten childhood events on my own as I get older. Not all negative or especially strong.
Haven't you had an experience when something triggers long forgotten memories? A physical object, a word?
Yeah but those weren't things I'd forgotten and was trying to remember. I just wouldn't have thought about them without the trigger.
I remember reading that article when it came out. I wasn't sure what to make of it then, still not sure now. They definitely sound like unusual people.
"She was paid large sums of money"
And therapists specializing on 'recovering' memories aren't?
I'm less concerned about the lack of mention of that in articles which are otherwise treating them as complete quacks inventing abuse allegations against innocent people out of whole cloth.
I bet that victims of those therapists, who were falsely accused, put in jail or got they reputation ruined and life destroyed won't share your concerns.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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).
I identify with this so much. Brains are weird.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
If gas lighting is a form of boundary violation, and I’m stretching here, could it be classified as mind-rape?
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.
No, there are plenty of ways to violate a boundary besides rape.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Lying and gaslighting are two different things. Gaslighting involves lying but is also about invalidating the victim's memory and feelings in an attempt to control them in some way. Telling a partner they look good is not generally gaslighting.
oh I'm sorry... if a man gaslights and tells his wife she doesn't look fat in that outfit...
Again, those are two different things.
Lying isn't the same thing. In that moment, the man is just being dishonest. Later, if the wife brings up the incident and the man claims it both never happened and she constantly makes shit up like this, then yes he is gaslighting and is deeply unsafe.
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.
> 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.
if you think about it in database terminology: would assigning a different value for the epistemic_status column cause the row to be deleted?
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.
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”.
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.
Planting false memories is trivial. Most of what we believe was set in ways we don't remember by people we can't place. We do it with ideology all the time. These days we call it advertising and public relations.
Ask yourself how you know the things you believe, and if you can't attribute it to a specific, concrete personal and physical experience, treat it as absolutely suspect.
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/
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...
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/
Welcome to the Antimemetics Division.
No, this is not your first day.
--https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
Heh took me a minute to get it.
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.
Depends on the memory surely, and who wants it erased from whom?
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.
The new show "The Terminal List" talks about it and uses such as a plot device (as a PTSD prophylactic).
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.
>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.
I tend to agree, however depending on the size of fish and some other factors, many don't scare off very far. I don't think it's definitive.
(I'm an avid fisherman despite the dock fall!)
I'm not actually familiar with perch as an adult. I last caught one when I was maybe 8 years old. After googling, I believe they were "yellow perch" (caught in northern Indiana)
Couldn't it be that his brain only fabricates that part of the memory, to fill in the blanks of panic period of being underwater?
I do think that my brain may have fabricated that part. It's the fishy part--pun intended.
I have never been picked up again by my scalp, so I think that's decent reason to believe the memory of the physical sensation is pretty accurate.
There's not a lot else to the memory.
> I remember seeing fish I was used to catching (perch)
I think VooDooJuJu's sibling comment is correct, and jumping off from that, I wonder: do you, or did you, have dreams about that event?
This scene sounds something right out of cartoons I used to watch as a kid. I wonder if you added this scene in as part of a dream, and somehow your brain grabbed that experience and incorporated that into the memory node family.
I don't recall having dreams about it, no.
The perch are one of the only fine details I have, which is interesting. That and the scalp sensation.
I don't remember falling, and I don't remember the aftermath. I'm sure it only lasted a few seconds.
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. One of the spookier things I’ve realized is that it’s perfectly possible to be like the main character from momento and manipulate what you believe about the past to change your behaviour in the present. I think to some degree that’s how talk therapy works.
The more deeply I think about this topic the more I lose my grasp on reality.
> The more deeply I think about this topic the more I lose my grasp on reality.
The past is clouded by faulty memory, but the present has crystal clear solidity to ground you through mindfulness. Maybe you can't recall or you misremember the contents of your original post, but you can be certain you're reading a direct reply to it's contents in the words you're reading at this very moment.
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.
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?
Swapping billets doesn't add up. Derren talked to Simon on the phone with instructions to sign it and make sure no-one steals or switches it, and Simon opens it on camera straight from his wallet. So to switch it someone must have met Simon, and either figured out or pushed the exact same envelope/pen/signature location that Simon used, then went and had someone forge some new note the exact same, and then met Simon _again_ and somehow switched it while somehow Simon is convinced that no one has had access. This also must have happened well before the show since they already had to setup the room with BMX bike.
I mean or he could have just paid Simon, the actor, to act surprised.
I find the explanation that he's acting to be an even better explanation.
To be clear, you're suggesting that's the case, but that's not suggested by anything in the video.
I'm suggesting, yes, as someone who was interested in magic tricks growing up.
Given how suggestible people are one would expect the power of suggestion to show up elsewhere. For instance, the area of gender identity. Just like the "false memory" craze in psychology back in the 80's and 90's, today we have an army of psychologist / psychiatry / social services / (and yes, those who have identified themselves as trans something,) heavily invested in telling (young) people they are "a certain way." Someone may be searching for their identity and may not feel comfortable with the "standard" models but that doesn't mean the psy-industrial-complex is correct in saying "you are X". People are making impossible-to-reverse life-changing decisions based on the cheering section telling them "you are X," in the same way people were being sent to jail based on "repressed memories" implanted back then by the same industrial complex. There may be people who really are trans-x but it might be wiser counsel to wait for maturity before a person makes such a decision.
This is what I thought when I read this page too. I've been recently looking into what's being done to children and teenagers in the name of 'trans' and it's horrifying. Teenagers are being told the solution to their mental health problems is hormones and amputation of their reproductive organs, and many of them are regretting it.
There is NO ROOM for trends and fads in medicine. None.
But we're being told that scientific evidence and risk assesment are transphobic. I truly believe this to be the biggest medical scandal in decades, but speaking out about it will have you banned from social media, fired from your job, and lose your friends and family.
https://twitter.com/BillboardChris/status/157708681237982003...
https://twitter.com/Lauren_Southern/status/15777557829550407...
https://twitter.com/isopodsocks/status/1576759512714731520?t...
https://twitter.com/TullipR/status/1536422535339941895?t=4tP...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Consider text fiction. Like, reading a book. Just a few kilobytes is enough to create a plausible narrative. And my brain fills in the pictures, sounds, smells etc.
Manufacturing fake reality is trivial. Therefore it happens all the time.
Original title: Sins of Memory
There's a typo in this title anyway. It's "is", not "us".
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 :)
Thanks. I noticed the typo, but for some reason couldn’t figure out the correct word.
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)
187 comments in this thread (as of writing), 0 on thea original blog source. Someone should write a bot that tells a user "hey! Your post is being discussed on HN $here"
I keep hearing about this effect.
I'm really starting to believe in it!
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?
You know the article is not serious when it starts with a quote.
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.
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...
I find this explanation to be the most compelling by FAR. Humans are a social species, so we are hardwired to keep the peace as long as things are going well.
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.
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.
4) We remember the event incorrectly, which is indistinguishable from 1) without outside corroboration
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".
> "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.
It's good to learn from this that your personal introspection isn't as dependable as you think it is. Introspection is a liar.
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.
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.
Material conditions is just one way of measuring quality of life. Not even the most important one, when it comes to hapiness
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.
Meh, I cited some non-material conditions too.
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”.
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?
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.
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.]
Your making my point far better than I could, thank you.
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.
Not sure if you're serious or joking? Surely the effort would be better spent to genuinely increase quality of life.
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.
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.
Saw that you got downvoted for your metaphor. I'm not surprised as HN is extremely defensive of porn, which I guess makes sense, sadly, given the demographics. But I wanted to go out of my way to say thank you for speaking against it.
Crutches are useful tools. We still produce and recommend lots of actual crutches every day for a good reason.
Don't think we use them as long term solutions over things like physiotherapy though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Can_Remember_It_for_You_Who...
Why do people act like the tiny slice of life where you're dying is a really important part
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.
Because for most people involved, the tiny slice of life where you're dying is the only thing they empirically experience.
I can't parse this sentence.
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.
The video game "To The Moon" and its sequels/related media explores this premise.
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...
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.
> we could always mandate euphoric drugs 24/7...
or a Buy Now button
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.
Yes, and this will be engineered by the... benevolent past generations which are already dead? The “zoomers”?
Modern medicine gives you an opioid instead on your death bed.