Four ways that other people can warp your memory

[burymecloser]

Four ways that other people can warp your memory
Your past is not your own. Through simple nudges, your friends, colleagues and strangers can change your recollections in ways you will never realise.
By David Robson
20 September 2016

“Our memories are constantly being reshaped by social interactions,” says William Hirst at the New School for Social Research in New York. “People can implant memories, people can induce you to forget or they can reinforce other memories.” These are not rare events. Every time you have a conversation, you are inviting someone to ghost-write bits of your autobiography.

The four ways that other people can warp your memory are:

1. Collaborative inhibition

Imagine that you and your friends John and Jane attended a football match, where you see a fight break out between the two sides. Afterwards, the three of you get together to discuss the event. You may expect that you will each trigger each other’s recall, helping each person to get a better understanding of the event. Although the group as a whole may record more than any single person, each individual will find that their own memory has been slightly impaired by the discussion.

2. Shared forgetting

Through subtleties in the way he talks about an event, John can encourage Jane to forget something over time. It hinges on the fact that whenever we reactivate a memory, it becomes fragile and malleable. Suppose John is talking about a wedding he attended with Jane. He might mention his speech – reinforcing the memory – but he might neglect to mention a fight on the dancefloor. Through association, this memory may still have been activated at the cellular level (rendering it vulnerable) but Jane may have suppressed that thought to concentrate on the rest of John’s anecdote. As a result, that “silence” has altered the brain’s memory trace, so that Jane will find it harder to retrieve details in the future.

3. Infectious thoughts

Following the pioneering research of Elizabeth Loftus, we already know that it is alarmingly easy to plant false information in someone’s memory. One time, for instance, she hired some subjects who had all visited Disneyland as a child. Beforehand, some of them saw a fake advert for Disneyland featuring Bugs Bunny. Around 30% of these subjects subsequently “remembered” having met the cartoon rabbit at the resort – despite the fact he was a Warner Bros character and would never appear alongside Mickey and friends.

4. Planting doubts

Robert Nash, a psychologist at Aston University in the UK, knows this only too well. Looking back at his sister’s graduation, he could clearly recall that the British newsreader Trevor McDonald had attended the event. “I was absolutely convinced,” he says. But when, before his own graduation, he mentioned the event to his parents, he found them laughing in disbelief. A bit of research online only left him with more doubts. “And the more I thought about it, the more I knew that it wasn’t plausible.”

Read the full article

 

[Siúil a Rúin]

Interesting article! It does sound entirely plausible, since memory is known to be reconstructed with each recall. Sometimes I'll have that feeling of certainty about a memory and then encounter proof it occurred differently. There are a lot of ramifications for what the article is saying.

 

[ChocolateMoose123]

Where do memberberries fall into this?

 

[Crabs]

Where do memberberries fall into this?

"Member Ghostbusters?"

"Member...Slimer?"