Why can different people tell about the same event in different ways, and over time, the details of the story begin to differ even in the presentation of the same author?
It's all about the so-called phenomenon of false memory, according to experts at the Center for the Neurobiological Foundations of Learning and Memory at the University of California at Irvine.
In a series of experiments conducted by American scientists, twenty people took part with hyperthymesia - a rare innate ability to remember the smallest details of their own biography.
Such people will always tell you what they did on any day, whether it was a year or a month ago, what they ate for breakfast on a certain date, and what they watched on TV on Christmas Eve the year before last. The average person, as a rule, has a hard time remembering what he did a couple of days ago, if these events are not too significant.
The volunteers were shown a series of short videos, the stories of which were related to minor crimes such as theft or fraud. The participants were then asked to read several short stories that described the same plots, but with some distortion in details. And finally, they were asked to retell the content of the videos in their own words.
The results surprised the researchers. People with unique memories made almost as many mistakes in the presentation of the material as participants in the control group who did not possess unusual abilities. In many cases, the subjects recounted the events as they were presented in the read texts, rather than shown in the video recordings.
At the second stage, the same participants were told with many details the story that allegedly took place several months ago in the news. Although such a plot did not actually appear in the news, 20 percent of the subjects "remembered" it and even added "missing" details to the story. Among people with ordinary memory, this figure was 29 percent. There is a difference, but not that great, given the specifics of the sample.
Earlier, researchers from the University of Washington conducted a special experiment to find out if memories could be "implanted". They read fictional news to people, such as the encounters of Disneyland visitors with Bugs Bunny the rabbit (this character was actually created by Warner Bros.). About a third of the subjects later reported that they actually encountered a rabbit at Disneyland.
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In the current study, psychologist Elizabeth Loftus also managed to instill in her charges false memories of being lost in shopping malls as children, when in reality this did not happen to them in most cases.
Experts believe that false memory has nothing to do with what is commonly called "bad memory." We may forget some real events or not remember their details, and then we can talk about the fact that we have problems with memory. In the case of false memory, we tend to recall events and details that did not actually take place. Suppose they convince us that this and that happened to us, give a lot of details, and gradually make us believe that it really happened to us … Or, for some reason, we force ourselves to believe that which was not, especially when comparing information from different sources.
Have you ever heard the expression "Lying like an eyewitness"? This phenomenon is well known to law enforcement officials. When interviewing witnesses to an incident, the pictures of what happened in the presentation of different people are so different that it becomes difficult to understand where is the truth and where is the lie. Moreover, the point is not always that a person wants to hide something from the investigation. The point is how he perceived what he saw and how he interpreted it. But more often than not the witness simply does not really remember all the details and begins to compose them, and he himself is absolutely sure of their truth …
We can never be convinced that all our memories are true, scientists say. It can only seem to us that we remember this, although in reality it was not at all like that. Therefore, if the information is important, it is better to start looking for reliable sources and not rely on your own or unconfirmed other people's memories.