1970-01-01 02:00:00
Has it ever happened to you that you perfectly remember leaving your keys in a certain place, so that if they aren’t there, it’s because someone took them, only to discover that they were in your pocket the whole time?
Or have you ever heard a friend tell you something that happened to you and their story was very different from what you remember?
These experiences leave us somewhat disturbed. But they occur frequently and sometimes we don’t even notice them.
“Everyone has false memories all the time, even those who believe they have the best memory in the world,” says psychologist Julia Shaw, from University College London.
Shaw refers particularly to autobiographical memory, “the memories of our lives that are often accompanied by a footnote titled ‘multisensory components’: remembering how you felt, what you knew, how you saw yourself, how you dreamed… with strong emotions” .
“These [lembranças] are much more complex than [recordar] an event,” Shaw explained to the program Life Scientificand the BBC.
To remember an event — for example, “on September 11, 2001, there was an attack on the Twin Towers in New York” — you don’t need to access many places in the brain.
But, when we relive an experience of our own, it is necessary to connect all the parts of the brain responsible for the different sensations, forming a large and complicated network of neurons.
Shaw warns that memories are not the exact record of the past, as we would like to imagine. According to her, scientific studies have confirmed, more than once, that the way we remember is inevitably defective and usually has little relationship with events that can be verified.
Identity crisis
“We are our memory, we are this immense museum of inconstant shapes, this lot of broken mirrors”, said Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). He managed to understand very well that memories are dynamic, changing and imprecise realities.
But if “we are our memory” and it is so unreliable… are we lies?
In a sense, yes. But the fact that we can never be sure that what we remember is right shouldn’t worry us, according to the expert on false memories.
“I think it’s a really important insight into how our brains work,” explains Shaw. “And ultimately, our brains don’t simply exist to record the past perfectly and reliably. It’s there to navigate the present and think about the future.”
“These wonderful, creative things are great for solving problems, they allow us to be smart, they creatively recombine information gathered from the past and put it together in ways we’ve never done before, to create a new story, a new solution or a new idea.”
“That’s what it’s adapted for, and therefore things like false memories are a byproduct of this incredible intelligence capacity,” says the psychologist.
Shaw describes memories as undried clay dolls. “Every time you pick up a piece again, you remodel it and potentially make another one that’s very different from the last one.”
“You remove and add parts, because you forget some or borrow memories from other people, or from other sources,” she explains. “What’s intriguing about the memories is that we don’t have access to the original version, but only the one we made last time.”
Intriguing or disturbing?
Perhaps both… and perhaps as much as the experiments developed by Shaw and other experts in this field.
Memory implant
Shaw became known for an experiment that was part of her doctorate. She demonstrated how a group of students create false memories.
We’re not talking about small details. The students ended up describing how, just a few years earlier, they had attacked people or been attacked by an animal — events that had not actually occurred.
But they didn’t do it alone. Shaw induced them to think this way in just three sessions. She used information provided by the volunteers’ parents to implement the memories.
After gaining his trust, she would say, for example, that her parents had told her that when they were 14, they attacked someone with a gun and the police were called.
“Then it would introduce real-life details, like ‘your friend Alan was there’, and say that it happened where they lived at the time,” explains Shaw. “It’s enough to make someone think ‘maybe it happened’.”
Then she offered to help them remember what she knew could not be remembered. And she guided them in imagination exercises.
“In the end, the amount of details they provided me far exceeded my expectations”, says the psychologist.
And that wasn’t all: “a staggering 70% of participants in our study created false memories of illegal activities. From a purely scientific point of view, it’s exciting,” she highlights.
And from a human point of view?
After all, she led a group of volunteers to go through weeks of very unpleasant memories, only to later reveal that they had been deceived.
The psychologist highlights that the study “went through extensive ethical approval, which was natural because it was a major manipulation.” And she guarantees that, after she explained to the participants what the study was about, “most felt relieved and none of them were outraged — or, at least, they didn’t tell me.”
From his point of view, “it was a great learning experience.”
“Our memories are influenced by people, usually unintentionally, all the time,” explains Shaw. “Therefore, I believe it is convenient to teach people to be aware of this and understand how this process works.”
Why was the study done?
“I wanted to study something called criminal thinking,” she explains. “I’ve always been interested in the ‘normal’ brain, not so much the pathologies, but how ordinary people can become delinquent.”
That’s why Shaw wondered if he could get people to plead guilty to crimes they hadn’t committed.
“Not just that they said they did it, but that they really believed it,” she says. “The answer is: yes, it is possible.”
This is a manifestation of the fragility of “the curtain that separates our imagination from our memory”, as the most prominent psychologist in this field, Elizabeth F. Loftus, who carried out similar experiments, wrote.
In the dock
The North American Psychological Association considers Loftus one of the most outstanding psychologists of the 20th century. She contributed to changing the notion that was dominant until a few decades ago, that our memories were literal representations of past events, stored in a kind of mental library.
Loftus has written dozens of books and claims the opposite, that “our representation of the past is a living, changing reality.”
“It’s not a place back there that keeps everything in stone, but a living being that changes shape, expands, shrinks and expands again — an amoeba-like creature,” she says.
Memories are not reproduced, but rather reconstructed.
In addition to offering fascinating insights into how the mind works, research into the science of memory has had repercussions on criminal justice, which relies heavily on the statements of witnesses and suspects.
Few psychologists have been more influential than Loftus in revealing how standard procedures in this field can contaminate memory.
The language used to describe an event can change the way it is remembered. Therefore, leading questions can distort the statements of suspects during police interrogations and even the reports of witnesses for the defense or prosecution.
This possibility means that experts like Loftus and Shaw are often called upon to examine evidence in court cases.
“Almost always, we are hired by the defense, not because we want to, but because of the nature of our work”, highlights Julia Shaw. “Because questioning someone’s memory has the capacity to introduce reasonable doubt.”
In most prosecution systems, the prosecution’s evidence must be beyond reasonable doubt to validate a criminal conviction.
If, at any stage of the process, applying the science of false memories, possible manipulations are detected that could generate distorted, altered details or even fully implanted memories, “we give the warning signal”, according to Shaw.
She highlights that understanding how fragile and misleading our memories are helps avoid miscarriages of justice.
It appears to be beneficial, but many people wonder whether questioning someone’s memory in court could make it even more difficult for victims of sexual offenses to testify.
Several trials of high-profile defendants have hired Loftus as a defense witness and appear to justify this concern, including the trials of Bill Cosby, the Duke lacrosse players in the United States accused of rape in 2006, and Harvey Weinstein, among others. .
It is clear that the presumption of innocence always prevails and that everyone deserves the right to defense.
But in cases of abuse, which often involve one person’s word against another, it is particularly difficult to see how the science of memory can question the memories of victims who are forced to relive that moment.
“We need to be very careful and not consider that memories are not sufficient evidence. This is not the case,” highlights Shaw.
“If we couldn’t rely on memories, our legal system would collapse and certain types of offenses would never be convicted.” The key, for the specialist, is to “educate the public”.
“I always advise that if it happens to you or if you are a witness to something important, you record it outside of your brain,” says Shaw. “You need to understand how your memory can change so you can preserve it as much as possible.”
Listen to the episode of the BBC Radio 4 program “The Life Scientific” (in English), which gave rise to this report, on the website BBC Sounds.
This report was originally published here
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