Reinforcing false memories

[Marc]

ABC has an article on False Memories. Now it discusses how using real photos can be used to help in the formation of false memories. The photos give the mind something to work with in building the false memory

ABC article (http://abcnews.go.com/sections/SciTech/DyeHard/false_memory_dyehard_040414-1.html)

Only 27.3 percent of the students without photos "remembered" the Slime story. But a whopping 65.2 percent of those who were shown a class photo recalled even precise details about putting that awful stuff in the teacher's desk, and getting chewed out for it.

False memories are a special interest of mine. The phenomenon crosses many paranormal claims (ufo abduction, past lives, satanic ritual abuse, and just plain old false memories of abuse), and is actually the basis of Scientology.

[CFLarsen]

Originally posted by Marc
False memories are a special interest of mine. The phenomenon crosses many paranormal claims (ufo abduction, past lives, satanic ritual abuse, and just plain old false memories of abuse), and is actually the basis of Scientology.

(cough)

[Marc]

Originally posted by CFLarsen

(cough)

Are you comming down with a cold? Better take something for that nasty cough of yours.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Claus, "(cough)" is just a bit too terse, even for us sound-bite lovers.

~~ Paul

[hawkins_anderson]

Originally posted by Marc
ABC has an article on False Memories. Now it discusses how using real photos can be used to help in the formation of false memories. The photos give the mind something to work with in building the false memory

False memories are a special interest of mine. The phenomenon crosses many paranormal claims (ufo abduction, past lives, satanic ritual abuse, and just plain old false memories of abuse), and is actually the basis of Scientology.

False memories are believed by weak minded people. Most people are weak minded because if the majority of people on the planet were not weak minded, then the world would not be in its current state of regression. People remember things as they would like for them to be and not for what they actually are in the real world. Anyone showing another person a photograph and telling them that they were there but not there and they believe them is total crap. This is the difference between the have and the have nots in the world.

*I am a member of the Ministry of Information. If you look at this screen long enough, you will remember begin to relax and remember the amount of money you owe me. You will remember the time we went out to the pool hall and I had to pay for you. Don't you remember that I lent you money last Saturday? Yeah, that's right. That girl was hot. You bought her a drink and needed a little extra money to pay for her drink because we both know your broke as hell. I need the money now if you've got it.";)

[CFLarsen]

Originally posted by Marc
Are you comming down with a cold? Better take something for that nasty cough of yours.

Originally posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos
Claus, "(cough)" is just a bit too terse, even for us sound-bite lovers.

So much for my ability to plant thoughts in Marc's brain. I was hinting, in a subtle way, that Marc pen an article about FM for SR.... ;)

[!Xx+-Rational-+xX!]

Dreaming = False Memories !

[RichardR]

This reminds me about the Harvard researcher Susan Clancy, who designed a memory experiment in an effort to prove or disprove the validity of repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. You can read about it here (http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2002/10.31/09-clancy.html)

Clancy wanted to test to see if some people were more prone to making up memories than others. She guessed that there was a category of people who are prone to create false memories and who might demonstrate this tendency when given a standard memory test. Her strategy was to present a list of semantically related words, like ''candy,'' ''sour'' and ''sugar,'' to those who purported to have recovered memories. Then she would test their recall of those words. On the test, she would throw in words that weren't on the list but were like the words on the list -- ''sweet,'' for example. Her hypothesis was that these people would be especially inclined to ''remember'' seeing the word ''sweet'' -- in effect creating a recollection out of a contextual inference, a fact from a feeling.

She found that the recovered memories people had a higher incidence of false memories than non-abused and non-recovered memories people. A control group of people who had certainly been abused, and who had always remembered the abuse, did not "remember" the words that were not there, any more than people who had not been abused. So the data strongly supported her hypothesis. But she received a lot of hate mail, due to the nature of the subject. So she decided to test her theory another way, only this time not on false memories of abuse, but on false memories of something she thought everyone would agree was false. So she recruited subjects whose memories were, in her opinion, patently false - alien abductees. Her experiment showed that alien "abductees" were also more prone to false memories than the control group.

She tested 11 subjects, ran them and a control group through a battery of tests and collated the data, which demonstrated, in her view, that ''individuals who are more prone to develop false memories in the lab are also more likely to develop false memories of experiences that were only suggested or imagined.''

The funny thing is, she got a lot of criticism from alien abductees "researchers" such as Dr. John Mack who believe that alien encounters are real, and from her Harvard Medical School colleagues who believe that traumatic memories are routinely repressed.

[Explorer]

This research is useful, but it stretches the case a little too far for me, when we compare confusion over simple word retrieval(like "sweet" with "sugar" - the target word) with traumatic "recovered" memories of experiences such as sexual abuse and alien abduction.

[RichardR]

Originally posted by Explorer
This research is useful, but it stretches the case a little too far for me, when we compare confusion over simple word retrieval(like "sweet" with "sugar" - the target word) with traumatic "recovered" memories of experiences such as sexual abuse and alien abduction. How do you explain the differences between the three groups:

- recovered memories people

- non-abused and non-recovered memories people

- people who had been abused, and who had always remembered the abuse

And how do you explain how this result was replicated with a completely different group of people – alien "abductees" / a control group of non "abductees"?

[bpesta22]

Hey, I have a few pubs on the false memory topic.

The first is the best thing I've ever published.

o Pesta, B., Murphy, M., & Sanders, R. (2001). Are emotionally charged lures immune to false memory? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27, 328-338.

Link to article:

http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/~pgsa/Course%20Readings/Memory%20&%20Emotions/Pesta,%20Murphy,%20&%20Sanders%20(2001).pdf



o Pesta, B., Sanders, R., & Murphy, M. (2001). Misguided multiplication: Creating false memories with numbers rather than words. Memory & Cognition, 29, 478-483.

[bpesta22]

Originally posted by bpesta22
Hey, I have a few pubs on the false memory topic.

The first is the best thing I've ever published.

o Pesta, B., Murphy, M., & Sanders, R. (2001). Are emotionally charged lures immune to false memory? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 27, 328-338.

Link to article:

http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/~pgsa/Course%20Readings/Memory%20&%20Emotions/Pesta,%20Murphy,%20&%20Sanders%20(2001).pdf



o Pesta, B., Sanders, R., & Murphy, M. (2001). Misguided multiplication: Creating false memories with numbers rather than words. Memory & Cognition, 29, 478-483.


p.s. look at the appendix for the first article. I actually got some people to have false memories for the dirty words.

[CFLarsen]

bpesta22,

Hard to read, the font is fuzzy. Something went wrong when you created the PDF.

If you can find better versions, can I have them for SR? :)

(That will put the pressure on Marc to come up with something better - nothing like a little competition among the hungry writers, eh? ;))

Edited to add: Shucks, the pages are just scanned?? Sheeesh...

[pgwenthold]

Originally posted by CFLarsen
bpesta22,

Hard to read, the font is fuzzy. Something went wrong when you created the PDF.


It gets better after the first page

[bpesta22]

Hey CF.

I didn't do the pdf -- found them on the net like that.

Feel free to use whatever you like, though the APA owns the copyright on the article.

B

Originally posted by CFLarsen
bpesta22,

Hard to read, the font is fuzzy. Something went wrong when you created the PDF.

If you can find better versions, can I have them for SR? :)

(That will put the pressure on Marc to come up with something better - nothing like a little competition among the hungry writers, eh? ;))

Edited to add: Shucks, the pages are just scanned?? Sheeesh...

[CFLarsen]

Originally posted by bpesta22
Hey CF.

I didn't do the pdf -- found them on the net like that.

Feel free to use whatever you like, though the APA owns the copyright on the article.



Okies, better check with them.

[Luciana]

Originally posted by RichardR
She guessed that there was a category of people who are prone to create false memories and who might demonstrate this tendency when given a standard memory test.

Along those lines, Richard, I also wonder if some people, being so suggestionable (is that a word??) would be more prone to feeling the effects of placebos? That being so, wouldn't that have an effect (even minimal) in the evaluation of drugs, if, for example, a control group has an unusual amount of suggestionable people? Many traits are selected upon forming a control group (age, weight, past medical history, if applicable, everything else being random). If the "level of suggestionability" (now I invented) is not being taken in consideration, how could it affect the evaluation of the efficacy of new drugs?

[Explorer]

Richard R said:

"How do you explain the differences between the three groups:

- recovered memories people

- non-abused and non-recovered memories people

- people who had been abused, and who had always remembered the abuse

And how do you explain how this result was replicated with a completely different group of people – alien "abductees" / a control group of non "abductees"?"

Difficult to answer those questions without full knowledge of the results and techniques of the test. Were they double blind tests by the way?

I believe that a far more meaningful test technique would have been to use sample sound videos relating a story line. This would have then covered more areas within the brain of each subject from the groups, and provided a more easily identifiable and representative potential "false memory".

The initial word tests can only be considered a useful precursor to more sophisticated techniques that surely now must follow before an unchallengable proof of the hypothesis is achieved.

[CFLarsen]

Originally posted by Luciana Nery
Along those lines, Richard, I also wonder if some people, being so suggestionable (is that a word??) would be more prone to feeling the effects of placebos? That being so, wouldn't that have an effect (even minimal) in the evaluation of drugs, if, for example, a control group has an unusual amount of suggestionable people? Many traits are selected upon forming a control group (age, weight, past medical history, if applicable, everything else being random). If the "level of suggestionability" (now I invented) is not being taken in consideration, how could it affect the evaluation of the efficacy of new drugs?

I think you are on to something. This might actually explain why people experience placebo. AFAIK, we don't know today why placebo works at all. Only that it does.

This could be it.

[RichardR]

Originally posted by Explorer
Difficult to answer those questions without full knowledge of the results and techniques of the test. Were they double blind tests by the way?

I believe that a far more meaningful test technique would have been to use sample sound videos relating a story line. This would have then covered more areas within the brain of each subject from the groups, and provided a more easily identifiable and representative potential "false memory".

The initial word tests can only be considered a useful precursor to more sophisticated techniques that surely now must follow before an unchallengable proof of the hypothesis is achieved. I agree the experiments need to be replicated by someone else, with more subjects, and (ideally) different protocols before they should be considered anything like "proof". As it stands they are interesting results that should provoke more studies.

[bpesta22]

Originally posted by RichardR
I agree the experiments need to be replicated by someone else, with more subjects, and (ideally) different protocols before they should be considered anything like "proof". As it stands they are interesting results that should provoke more studies.

I tried seeing if false memory sensitivity varied by how hypnotically susceptible one was.

So, we had low and high hypnotics, before and during hypnosis.

I didn't find anything interesting though.

[RichardR]

Originally posted by Luciana Nery
Along those lines, Richard, I also wonder if some people, being so suggestionable (is that a word??) would be more prone to feeling the effects of placebos? That being so, wouldn't that have an effect (even minimal) in the evaluation of drugs, if, for example, a control group has an unusual amount of suggestionable people? Many traits are selected upon forming a control group (age, weight, past medical history, if applicable, everything else being random). If the "level of suggestionability" (now I invented) is not being taken in consideration, how could it affect the evaluation of the efficacy of new drugs? A quick search turned up this paper: (http://www.ahcpub.com/ahc_root_html/hot/archive/2003/ama062003.html)
If someone responds positively to a placebo, that should not be viewed as a negative evaluation of the patient’s intelligence or any other characteristic. However, what has been demonstrated is that the extent of the placebo effect is influenced by certain factors in patients, such as their attitudes towards their health, their doctor, or their treatment, and how suggestible they are. So it's possible. And we now know the word is "suggestible". ;)

[Dragon]

Originally posted by bpesta22
Hey, I have a few pubs on the false memory topic.
On the topic of pubs, a few of them have given me false memories.

[pgwenthold]

Originally posted by Dragon

On the topic of pubs, a few of them have given me false memories.

They usually just gave me false optimism, especially in terms of picking up women.

[MoeFaux]

Oh, the recovered memory people are so evil. It's such an awful thing, and ruins so many people's lives. It's so sad.

I'm even sympathizing with Michael Jackson now, after his newest accuser said he remembered he was molested after recovered memory therapy. So, so sad.

[davefoc]

bpesta said: I tried seeing if false memory sensitivity varied by how hypnotically susceptible one was.

So, we had low and high hypnotics, before and during hypnosis.

I didn't find anything interesting though.

I had the same question when I was reading through this thread. I wonder if one would find a correlation between alien abductees and hypnosis susceptibility.

As to the fuzziness of the pdf: The thing is just a scanned in image so the letters will be fuzzy. All letters are fuzzy to me given my presbyopia, but these letters are fuzzy even for non-presbyopes.

[plindboe]

Seeing RichardR's avatar I'm reminded of another study concerning false memories.

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/DyeHard/Dyehard010627.html

About one-third of the participants who had read the phony ad featuring Bugs said they either remembered, or at least knew, they had indeed met Bugs at Disneyland and shaken his hand. Or foot, as the case may be.

But here's the rub. Bugs Bunny wouldn't be caught dead at Disneyland. He belongs to Warner Brothers.

[CFLarsen]

Bugs Bunny wouldn't be caught dead at Disneyland.

Actually, it's the only way Bugs Bunny would be caught in Disneyland..... :D

[Ratman_tf]

Originally posted by plindboe
Seeing RichardR's avatar I'm reminded of another study concerning false memories.

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/DyeHard/Dyehard010627.html



Because it bears pointing out...

A series of events, with details and physical interaction is falsely remembered. Not just a word or image, but a complete interaction.

[sweetkb713]

Originally posted by Ratman_tf

A series of events, with details and physical interaction is falsely remembered. Not just a word or image, but a complete interaction.

Has that ever happened to you?

I dream very vividly, and I always have. Sometimes I have trouble remembering if something that happened when I was a kid was a dream or reality.

The mind is really amazing.

[Bikewer]

In one of his many books, (alas, I forget the title) Stephen Jay Gould relates how he found that two of his cherished childhood memories were false.

In one, he recalled strolling to the tennis courts nearby his Grandpa's house, and sitting there for long discussions while watching the tennis players.

In another, a childhood trip west, he recalled seing the approach to a big mountain (Shasta? Renier? hehe- I can't remember either)
as they motored along.


Only in later life did he find out that there were no tennis courts near his grandfather's old home, the nearest one was miles away. In fact, they had gone to a nearby park, which had no tennis courts whatever.
In re-creating the trip West for his own family as an adult, he was shocked to learn that the cherished view of the mountain did not exist, it wasn't visible from the roadway at all!