The Malleability of Memory

Discussion in 'Discussions' started by Haldurson, Feb 14, 2013.

  1. Haldurson

    Haldurson Member

    http://doubtfulnews.com/2013/02/dont-trust-what-you-know-you-saw/

    I had another related topic about being fooled by what you see, but it's even worse than that. Your memory changes based on the context of when you try to recall it. It's almost as if parts of your memory get created by the process of recollection. But the important part to take away is that your brain is not a movie camera. So EVEN IF (and that's a big if) your sensory input of an incident are without error (you had no distractions, the incident was your primary focus, and so on), your memory can be greatly in error.

    I saw a fascinating, and yet deeply scary film on Nova, where this film crew followed around a psychologist as he visited and interviewed people around the country, asking questions about alien visitations, and UFO abductions. You could actually see how people went from not remembering anything more than sleep paralysis to having highly detailed stories of abductions, all clearly stemming from the very leading questions by the psychologist. The film maker was very clever in leaving out any kind of narration or music or anything like you usually see on the horrible network television 'news' magazine stories. So the only conclusion you could come to was that this psychologist was creating an actual epidemic of people feeling fear and horror that they were being persecuted by aliens, that they were molested, probed, and so on. It was virtually every person he visited that was left with that feeling. And yet this so-called professional person had no clue of what he was doing and was in complete denial that he was actually turning these otherwise functioning members of society into paranoid wrecks.

    I'm not sure what the moral implications are for PBS being involved in the film but It was extremely disturbing to see it happen.
     
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  2. Aegho

    Aegho Member

    I recently saw something about how bad memory is on TV... probably on Discovery. The test subjects had all watched the same movie, then they were quizzed on the movie, separately. In the quiz, they had a false display of what everyone else had said(which was of course wrong), and in something like 70% of the questions they picked the wrong answer, conforming with this false information that the others had also picked this choice. Then a week later they were re-quized, without the false information, but they still picked the wrong answers. Their memory of the event had been molded by the previous quiz, where they had been duped into picking the wrong answer.
     
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  3. Haldurson

    Haldurson Member

    I read one possible explanation that the way memory works is that instead of remembering an incident, we remember a small number of associations with that incident, just enough to get an impression of it, and that later on when asked to recall it, we reassemble the incident via those associations, which may have changed via new experiences. (I can't really explain it the way I first heard it, my memory being so bad and all ;).

    One thing that this made me think of was studying for difficult exams in College. Imagine how much work it was to keep track of a whole trimester's (or quarter's) worth of information for a midterm exam. How much of that memory turned out to be accurate when taking the exam? If the subject makes sense to you, and there's a logic to it in your brain (ie. already clear associations) then it is a WHOLE lot easier than when a subject is difficult for you and DOESN'T make a complete picture in your mind.

    Now take that the other way, where you have some incident and you AREN'T working to remember it, it's just something that happened -- it may be tied to emotions, but still, you not thinking 'Well, let's keep going over this in my mind now because It's going to be on my midterm'. In fact, it may be something unpleasant that you specifically DO NOT want to go over and over with in your mind. Also, it may not form a logical picture in your brain, as you only have an imperfect view of the incident. For example, you may hear a gunshot, and turn to look. Well you didn't actually see the gunshot, but you saw one person holding a gun, and your brain is telling you that that someone just shot a gun. It may turn out that what you heard was NOT a gunshot, but a car backfiring, or it could have been someone else shooting. And maybe you focused on the gun, and not the face of the person with the gun and maybe the face was really too far away to see details. So now your brain is filling in those details for you, even though they are not part of the original incident. Suddenly you are thinking that the guy had a mustache, or was a young man or a man with features you remember from a billboard that you also wrongly associate with the incident.

    There's all sorts of other things that cause problems with eye-witnesses. For one thing, it's been shown that people tend to remember faces better that are similar to themselves or people they are familiar with. The old phrase 'they all look alike to me' is actually based on a real psychological phenomenon, where details are better imprinted when the face follows more familiar patterns (eg. race). Non-familiar features can be a blur in ones memory.

    BTW, there are also lots of problems with forensic science (mostly that the methods are invented, and don't follow actual scientific principals). For example, it turns out that partial fingerprints are more of an art than a science, so the conclusions that law enforcement makes from them ban be wrong. Furthermore, they can result in many MULTIPLE matches, depending on what they are given to compare to, and the people making those matches tend to assume that, well it's a fingerprint, so whatever match you make is going to be correct, so there's no need to look for more matches. Fingerprints, one of the mainstays of forensic science that people have depended on forever, turns out to be extremely weak as evidence goes, simply because they are far too often blurred, or partial or distorted by the shape and/or texture of a surface. That stuff you see in CSI is nonsense. In fact so much that you see on a cSI program is just wrong -- they may be practices that real forensic 'scientists' use, but they are incredibly unscientific, and we've been learning a lot recently, that they have lead many times to wrongful conviction or conclusions.

    Note that despite finding problems with various forensic evidence, much of it that has been shown to be wrong is still legally admissable in most locales.

    http://www.bu.edu/sjmag/scimag2005/opinion/fingerprints.htm
    http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100813367
     
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  4. Haldurson

    Haldurson Member

  5. Daynab

    Daynab Community Moderator Staff Member

    This is sorta related, but I regularly (maybe once every other month) get "déja vus", where I dream a situation, and then sometimes later it happens and when it does, you really feel weird, like you're in the matrix almost.

    I've already read about them, that they are a type of false memories but damn, they feel real sometimes. Especially when you dreamt of a situation that isn't really plausible (like playing a game you'd never heard of at that point).
     
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  6. Null

    Null Will Mod for Digglebucks

    Does this mean anything? It's really not modifying memories at all, and is by far the most rational route one could take. Yeah memory is bad but is it bad that people accounted for that?
     
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  7. Aegho

    Aegho Member

    Their memories changed to conform with what they were told were the common view. Meaning our memories are malleable through peer pressure, and it also helps explain some of the mass delusions and madness of crowds. People are extremely easy to manipulate, especially in large groups. Stand on a busy street and point up somewhere at random, and eventually people will think they saw something, and point it out to others, and soon enough you'll have a group of people convinced they saw it.
     
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  8. Haldurson

    Haldurson Member

    Alone, the first part of it probably shows more about how what people believe they know is influenced by those around them. (a subconscious peer pressure), But it's the second part of the test, where the person is interviewed a week later, is what establishes that what you are talking about is a false memory. It's either a false memory, or everyone is sustaining an irrelevant lie over the course of a week for no particular reason.

    It's already known that the brain can fill in details that were never actually seen, even without someone suggesting them. That it's possible to knowingly or unknowingly manipulate memories, therefore, is hardly a surprise, and can be demonstrated (the Nova episode that I mentioned, with the psychiatrist had people convinced that they had been abducted by aliens, is one of the most shocking examples I know of, but it opens so much more up for question. We don't want to believe that what we KNOW 100% that we saw is not actually what happened. But that can easily be the case. That's the whole point of the Doubtful News article I linked above. We all know that eye-witness testimony is inherently faulty, but at the same time, we don't want to believe that we, ourselves, can make similar mistakes.

    We already know that people can experience optical illusions, what's so different about taking that to the next step, of believing that what we saw was real, and yet not actually being real. Our brain is smart enough to fill in details not only in memories but also in observations that make logical sense to us, which can then be incorporated into memories. Here's an example of the opposite, of the brain actually excluding something:
     
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  9. Bohandas

    Bohandas Member

    This is a bit of a non-sequitur, but "The Malleability of Memory" would make a great title for a surrealist art piece.
     
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  10. Essence

    Essence Will Mod for Digglebucks

    I love that selective attention test. The first time I encountered it, I actually missed the point the second time through, when I knew what I was supposed to be looking for. Stupid balls.
     
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  11. Haldurson

    Haldurson Member

    Given all of this, it seems amazing that we can function at all at times lol. That should be where research should be going -- how do you avoid these kinds of mistakes, because despite all of the ways our brain can lie to us, makes mistakes, and give us the wrong information, we still CAN operate vehicles and (mostly) understand movies and build computers and so on (so long as you focus and don't try to do two things at the same time).

    That selective attention test I think is an excellent demonstration of what you can miss while you are concentrating on doing something else. People say 'don't text and drive' but the reality is that even with a hands-free device, talking on a cell phone while driving has been shown to be just about as dangerous as driving drunk. And I think this demonstration shows precisely why that is. (as an aside, it was either Freakonomics or Super-Freakonomics that tried to show that it's actually more dangerous to walk drunk than to drive drunk -- at least more fatalities occur walking home from the bar drunk. So really you shouldn't do either).
     
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  12. Haldurson

    Haldurson Member

    I debated whether to post this here, or in the movies thread, but I decided on here instead:
    http://doubtfulnews.com/2013/03/my-amityville-horror-movie-available-this-month/

    The relevance is that one of the people commenting in the trailer is Elizabeth Loftus, the scientist speaking in one of the videos I linked above. It seems like this might be worth seeing, if only because at least one actual scientist is involved, rather than only the 'usual suspects' (ie. amateur ghost hunters, spiritualists, and so on). It's unusual when any story like this is covered with even a modicum of skepticism, so at the very least, I want to keep an eye out for this movie.
     
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