[HN Gopher] False memory implantation in adults is easy
___________________________________________________________________
False memory implantation in adults is easy
Author : thatmarkdykeman
Score : 217 points
Date : 2022-10-06 13:09 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (brainpizza.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (brainpizza.substack.com)
| samin17 wrote:
| 167.71.198.211
| samin17 wrote:
| Sablengtoto
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| 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?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I keep hearing about this effect.
|
| I'm really starting to believe in it!
| psychphysic wrote:
| 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/
| cwillu wrote:
| Welcome to the Antimemetics Division.
|
| No, this is not your first day.
|
| --https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
| psychphysic wrote:
| Heh took me a minute to get it.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| 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.
| psychphysic wrote:
| Depends on the memory surely, and who wants it erased from
| whom?
| aliqot wrote:
| 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.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| 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.
| pizza234 wrote:
| > 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).
| number6 wrote:
| 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.
| sharkweek wrote:
| 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.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| 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
| f1shy wrote:
| 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.
| chasd00 wrote:
| 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.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I identify with this _so much_. Brains are weird.
| mod wrote:
| 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.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| >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.
| thatmarkdykeman wrote:
| Original title: Sins of Memory
| chris_wot wrote:
| There's a typo in this title anyway. It's "is", not "us".
| irrational wrote:
| Thanks. I noticed the typo, but for some reason couldn't
| figure out the correct word.
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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 :)
| n65463f23_4 wrote:
| 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.
| dilap wrote:
| 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.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| 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".
| verisimi wrote:
| 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.
| xwdv wrote:
| 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.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Not sure if you're serious or joking? Surely the effort would
| be better spent to genuinely increase quality of life.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| coldtea wrote:
| 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.
| TrevorJ wrote:
| 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.
| coldtea wrote:
| Material conditions is just one way of measuring quality of
| life. Not even the most important one, when it comes to
| hapiness
| TrevorJ wrote:
| 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.
| xwdv wrote:
| Meh, I cited some non-material conditions too.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| 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".
| jessaustin wrote:
| 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?
| TrevorJ wrote:
| 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.
| jessaustin wrote:
| 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.]
| TrevorJ wrote:
| Your making my point far better than I could, thank you.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Modern medicine gives you an opioid instead on your death bed.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Yes, and this will be engineered by the... benevolent past
| generations which are already dead? The "zoomers"?
| coldtea wrote:
| 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...
| chasd00 wrote:
| > we could always mandate euphoric drugs 24/7...
|
| or a Buy Now button
| xwdv wrote:
| 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.
| hirundo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Can_Remember_It_for_You_Who...
| moondrek wrote:
| The video game "To The Moon" and its sequels/related media
| explores this premise.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Why do people act like the tiny slice of life where you're
| dying is a really important part
| NateEag wrote:
| 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.
| r2_pilot wrote:
| Because for most people involved, the tiny slice of life
| where you're dying is the only thing they empirically
| experience.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I can't parse this sentence.
| NateEag wrote:
| 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.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| 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...
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| 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/
| zealtrace wrote:
| 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...
| david422 wrote:
| 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.
| _mhr_ wrote:
| 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?
| karaterobot wrote:
| 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.
| not2b wrote:
| 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.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| 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.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| 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.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| 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.
| pflenker wrote:
| 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.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| 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.
| cwillu wrote:
| 4) We remember the event incorrectly, which is
| indistinguishable from 1) without outside corroboration
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| 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".
| pessimizer wrote:
| > "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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's good to learn from this that your personal introspection
| isn't as dependable as you think it is. Introspection is a
| liar.
| Kranar wrote:
| 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...
| photochemsyn wrote:
| 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.
| munificent wrote:
| _> 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.
| mistermann wrote:
| if you think about it in database terminology: would
| assigning a different value for the epistemic_status column
| cause the row to be deleted?
| lostmsu wrote:
| 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.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| 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.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| 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.
| autoexec wrote:
| 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.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| 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.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| > 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.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| 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).
| TheMightyLlama wrote:
| If gas lighting is a form of boundary violation, and I'm
| stretching here, could it be classified as mind-rape?
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| 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.
| ntonozzi wrote:
| No, there are plenty of ways to violate a boundary besides
| rape.
| AstralStorm wrote:
| 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.
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| 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.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| 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.
| jtbayly wrote:
| 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.
| btilly wrote:
| 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.)
| arbitrage wrote:
| 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.
| btilly wrote:
| 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.
| MotherBruce wrote:
| 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...
| btilly wrote:
| 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.
| IshKebab wrote:
| 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?
| belkarx wrote:
| 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)
| SamBam wrote:
| 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
| mattpallissard wrote:
| I'm reminded of a Seinfeld episode;
|
| "Jerry, just remember, it's not a lie if you believe it"
| Sharlin wrote:
| 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_.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| "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.
| TallGuyShort wrote:
| 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.
| mc32 wrote:
| 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.
| niom wrote:
| 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.
| withinboredom wrote:
| 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.
| Thiez wrote:
| 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
| withinboredom wrote:
| 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.
| oidar wrote:
| > 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.
| withinboredom wrote:
| 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.
| bumby wrote:
| 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.
| wahern wrote:
| > 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.
| bumby wrote:
| > _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 :)
| jonny_eh wrote:
| 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
| WanderPanda wrote:
| Holy sh*t! Starting to run shasum across my photo library asap
| f1shy wrote:
| But you must do that in your brain!
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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.
| injb wrote:
| What did the other half do?
| bityard wrote:
| They could tell by a few of the pixels that the photo looked
| shopped
| thakoppno wrote:
| 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.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| 77pt77 wrote:
| > I can imagine feeling really disturbed should something
| like this happen to me
|
| Stop making shit up.
|
| If anything these people are as guilty as the researchers.
| Swizec wrote:
| > 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
| sparky_z wrote:
| 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.
| thakoppno wrote:
| That would require proving a negative. I agree with your
| conclusion that nothing is truly proven.
| jtbayly wrote:
| To understand this better, read "Try to Remember", by
| Paul R. McHugh. Therapists can and do often cause false
| memories and do real damage.
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| > 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?
| bckr wrote:
| 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.
| bumby wrote:
| 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.
| cstrahan wrote:
| 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).
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Like a false memory of a ride in a hot air balloon?
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| 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'.
| [deleted]
| Tarq0n wrote:
| Is it unethical to make someone feel disturbed? It doesn't
| seem particularly serious or disproportional to me.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > 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.
| LeonB wrote:
| I think they mean "There's no _ethical_ way to do this
| without informed consent"
| Jensson wrote:
| But they failed with half the people. I wonder how many don't
| develop false memories like that?
| some_random wrote:
| 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.
| hackerlight wrote:
| Plausible. But it'd still be an interesting research
| question in its own right. I wonder if it's related to
| hypnotic suggestibilify.
| f1shy wrote:
| 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.
| withinboredom wrote:
| 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.
| bumby wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
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