Have your parents told you that funny anecdote so many times when you were little that you don't know if you really remember yourself or have heard it so many times? If so, you probably have a false memory .
What are false memories?
Our memories They are not always true There are some that occur after having seen a photograph, that they have told you an anecdote or, even, after having imagined a story.
It is not something that we invent , but we really believe it happened either because they told us about it or because we lived it differently.
This is something scientifically proven.Elizabeth Loftus did it in 1994 an experiment showing was able to convince a quarter of the participants that they were lost in a mall when they were little.
Baptized as " shopping center technique ”, The researcher made var The people would read memories about their childhood prepared by their own close relatives.One of these memories was false and he claimed that the participant had lost himself in a mall when he was 5 years old.
Loftus asked to try to remember that done in his own words and 25% said he could remember what happened at the mall and even provided details about that day.
Similarly, another test was developed similar in 2002, it was possible to make half of the participants believe that they had flown by balloon in childhood after teaching them manipulated photographs in which they appeared performing this activity .Even, one of them told that he had seen his school and his mother on the ground from the air taking the picture.
How are false memories made?
«The reason for that memories are so malleable is simply that there is too much information to absorb, explains psychologist Kimberley Wade.
«Our prescriptive systems cannot notice absolutely everything in our environment.We receive information through all our senses but there are gaps .So when we remember an event, what our memory does is fill in those gaps with what we know about the world »he clarifies.
That is, when the brain receives information from our senses, it selects which one to keep and which to dispose of, depending on whether it will be useful or not in the future, but when you want to complete all the memory, uses invented information that may be influenced by our emotions.This is what it does that two people who lived the same situation, tell it in a completely different way.
" I've been studying memory for more than a dec ada, and it still seems incredible to me that the imagination can deceive us so that we think we did something we never did and urge us to create such compelling illusory memories, ”says Kimberley Wade.
adults are more prone to create false memories than children while people with more memory are less likely to confuse their memories.
False memories and justice
In the world of justice, witnesses are one of the most important elements when condemning a suspected criminal or not, but What happens if the witness has false memories?
This is exactly what worries Christopher French, of the University of Goldsmiths in London, who claims that there is a lack of awareness about the unreliable memory in justice.
"Although within psychology it is a well-known and widely accepted notion by anyone who has studied the bibliography in this regard, it is not known more generally in society," explains French.
«There are still people who believe that memory acts like a video camera, as well as people who accept the Freudian notion of repression, which suggests that when something terrible happens, the memory is pushed into the depths of the subconscious »Anade.
One of the most striking cases occurred in 1990, in the United States, when a young woman of 19 He was called Holly Ramona after his father Gary Ramona sued for half a million dollars because, supposedly, he had raped her when she was a child.
This accusation came after Holly went to a psychotherapist to solve problems of depression and bulimia.The therapist told her that most cases of bulimia were related to experiences of sexual abuse during childhood and subjected her to hypnosis sessions to recover her lost memories, among those that supposedly contained the episode of the violation.
Finally, Holly's father was able to prove that l The psychotherapist had implanted false memories in his daughter's memory.Justice condemned the therapist with a fine of $ 475,000 for repairing damages and bad professional practices.
In fact, in The United States has created the Innocent Project (The Innocent Project) with a list of all the people who have been acquitted after obtaining the annulment after incorrect identifications occurred by eyewitnesses.
These witnesses stated that they were in shock or under a lot of pressure , which caused them that confusion, so now the statements are taken to closed door and in a professional manner.
On other occasions, false memories are also generated as a way to defend ourselves against a traumatic event , to replace a memory that we scary.
These false memories act in our brain without us noticing, showing that it is not an infallible machine as we thought.
If you liked this article you might want to take a look at Is it possible to remember past lives?
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