Is it easy to instill an illusion in a person by passing it off as a real memory? Recent experiments by Israeli scientists show that this is very easy to do. A little bit of lies and a drop of social pressure - and the person already “remembers” what in fact did not exist. It seems that the saying "Lies like an eyewitness" describes a very real phenomenon - the formation of false memory.
To see if it is possible to impose false memories on people, Yadin Dudai and his colleagues conducted a social experiment while simultaneously monitoring the brain activity of volunteers on a tomograph.
During the first phase of the experiment, the participants, divided into small groups, were shown a documentary. A few days later, they were asked to return and one by one take a short test with questions about the details of the movie they watched. When a volunteer sat down at a computer to take a test, the screen, along with questions, showed the alleged answers of other members of his group. Each participant saw an icon with a photo of a friend and his “answer” to this question (often incorrect), which was in fact a variant randomly selected by the computer. Under pressure from public opinion, participants in 70 percent of cases corrected their own correct answer to the wrong one. Seventy percent is an impressive figure, but scientists were not interested in it.
The final and decisive stage of the experiment was that the subjects were asked to take the test again - but this time the experimenters "confessed" that the options that the previous time were presented as the answers of other group members were simply the choice of a random number generator. And here's the amazing thing: almost 50 percent of the volunteers stayed true to their delusions. Of course, you say, they were embarrassed to admit that, under the influence of conformism, they did not believe their own memory.
But scientists, using tomography to observe the activity of the brain of the subjects, found that their nervous system really already considered the wrong answers "theirs." False memories have taken hold. These participants showed strong activation of both the hippocampus and the amygdala. The hippocampus is a small area of the forebrain responsible for storing short-term memories and “re-encoding” them into long-term ones, and the amygdala is responsible for regulating emotions and behavior in society.
By the way, short-term memories are stored in the hippocampus for a little less than a month. Then they are erased for uselessness or "recoded" and sent to the cerebral cortex for long-term storage. So it is logical to assume that if these memories were fragments of some important event, in a month they could move into the long-term memory of the participants in the experiment in a distorted form - in the same way as they were stored in the hippocampus.
Scientists have been interested in the phenomenon of false memories for a long time. A well-known phenomenon is confabulation, or paramenia. These are false memories that occur with mental disorders or amnesia. Usually in such cases, the human brain composes pleasant dreams that raise the prestige of the narrator: these can be incredible adventures, meeting celebrities, romantic stories …
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However, numerous experiments carried out over the past decade confirm that it is not so difficult for a healthy person to instill a "memory" of something that did not actually exist.
People who have witnessed a catastrophe often change their testimony, being in a state of passion or under the "influence" of incorrect information. Witnesses of one accident, who claimed that the driver who drove through the yellow light was to blame for the accident, were divided into two groups. The first group was presented with "proof" that the light was green, while the other group received no false information. After some time, both groups of witnesses were re-interviewed - and people from the first group, who were provided with false information, suddenly "remembered" that the green signal was still flashing at the traffic light, and not the red one, as they had previously stated.
Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, demonstrated an experimental example of falsifying childhood memories a few years ago. Together with her students, she invited a group of volunteers aged 18 to 53 to determine what events from their distant childhood they can recall based on the stories of their own parents. She offered them a printed booklet describing four events from their childhood, allegedly from the words of their parents. In fact, three of the described cases were real, and one was fictitious. A fictional story told how a child got lost in a store and was brought home by a complete stranger. The parents of the volunteers, in a one-to-one conversation, confirmed that nothing like this had happened to their children. However, 29 percent of the participants - some vaguely,and some even quite clearly - "remembered" how they got lost in childhood.
Other experiments showed similar results: "fake" memories appeared at the junction of their own memory and information received from other people. Moreover, over time, a person easily forgets the original source of information, "appropriating" the facts voiced by someone else. Impressiveness, a tendency to dramatize and a rich imagination also contribute to the formation of false memory, psychologists say.
As a matter of fact, this study has confirmed that the saying "Lying like an eyewitness" in some cases describes a very real phenomenon. Especially when many years have passed between the event and the story about it.
YANA FILIMONOVA