August 12, 2024 • 34 mins
Is your notion of yourself built on narrative that may or may not be accurate? If someone told you an entirely false story about yourself, could you come to believe it? What does that have to do with six people who spent over a decade in prison together for a crime they didn't commit? Join Eagleman for part 2 of some mind-blowing conclusions about your account of your own life.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Is your notion of who you are built on a
mountain of narrative that may or may not be totally accurate.
If somebody told you a totally false story about yourself,
could you come to believe it? And what does this
have to do with six people who spent over a
decade in prison together for a crime they didn't commit
(00:27):
but believed that they had. And what does any of
this have to do with why you are physically a
different person every seven years, but why you can't easily
see the changes in yourself through time, or what the
effective technology will be on our sense of self. Welcome
(00:48):
to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist
and an author at Stanford and in these episodes we
sailed deeply into our three pound universe to understand why, why,
and how our lives look the way they do. Today's
(01:12):
episode is part two in the story of our drifting memories.
So last week we talked about memory and its inaccuracies.
I talked about how medieval European painters struggled to accurately
depict lions because they had never seen a real lion.
They'd only seen versions painted by other people, and as
(01:34):
these sequences of paintings moved forward through history, they became
more and more distorted from the original lion that someone
had seen at some point, and the lions served as
a metaphor for us to discuss how memories, like messages
in the game of Telephone, become distorted over time. If
(01:56):
you heard the episode, you'll remember I talked about a
strange Native American folk tale called the War of the Ghosts,
and this was used by the psychologist Frederick Bartlett. He
had people read the story and then reconstruct it from
their memory at various time points later to understand how
(02:17):
their memory changed. And what he found is that over time,
your memory of a story becomes more coherent with your
internal model of the world and also more aligned with
whatever your cultural norms are. So we saw that memories
are not static recordings, but instead they are stored in
(02:37):
vast constellations of neurons that are interconnected and dynamic, and
new experiences can alter these neural connections, leading to changes
in how memories are recalled, for example, in the context
of eyewitness testimony. This understanding of memory is massively important
because things that people say to you after you've witnessed
(03:01):
an event. Whether this is cowitnesses talking to you, or
psychologists or investigators, these can all change your memory of
what you believe you saw at the time of the event.
It alters your memory, but generally it doesn't change your
confidence in your memory. And finally, we also saw in
the last episode that even flashbulb memories, which are these vivid,
(03:24):
emotionally charged recollections of big significant events, even these sorts
of recollections become less accurate over time, as we saw
with a long term follow up study after the terrorist
attacks of September eleventh, two thousand and one. So this
week we're going to talk about not just your memory
(03:45):
of something external like a story you read or an
event you saw. Instead, we're going to zoom in on
what happens when those memories are about you. How do
memory distortions through time change your notion of your personal identity.
So let's start with a basic reality. Our brains and
(04:06):
our bodies change so much during our life that, like
a clock's our hand, it's difficult to detect the changes.
So every seven years, for example, every cell in your
body has been replaced. Physically, you are not you anymore.
But you're a new you. Fortunately, there's one constant that
(04:27):
links all these different versions of you together, and that
is memory. Perhaps memory can serve as the thread that
makes me who I am. It sits at the core
of our identity. It provides a single, continuous sense of self.
But given what we talked about in the last episode,
(04:49):
there might be a problem here because could the continuity
of memory be an illusion? So imagine that you walk
into a room room, and you meet your self at
different ages in your life. So there you are at
age seven, and there's you as a teenager, and over
(05:10):
here it's you in your late twenties and mid fifties
and early seventies and all the way through your final years.
Imagine that you all sit together and you share the
stories about your life, and you tease out this single
thread of your identity. Would you be able to find
a core version of you? Well, it's tough to say,
(05:33):
because you all possess the same name and the same history.
But the fact is that you're all somewhat different people
at all these different ages. You have different values and goals.
And what we're going to talk about today is that
your life's memories might have less in common than expected.
Your memory when you look back and ask yourself who
(05:57):
you were at fifteen is different to who you actually
were at fifteen. And your sixty year old self and
your forty year old self will look back on an
important event that happened to your twenty year old self,
but they may have different recollections of exactly what happened
and in what order and who is there. And the
(06:17):
question is, if you don't all agree on the same memories,
are you really the same person? So first, let's start
from the point of view of the brain to think
about self identity. There's no single region in the brain
that underpins the self. It's a vastly distributed property. But
we can point to some large players in the game,
(06:40):
like the prefrontal cortex located just behind your forehead, which
generally navigates your planning, your decision making, your self reflection.
It helps you evaluate your action and give some narrative
to your intention, and all this contributes to a coherent
self concept and more generally, the prefrontal cortex is part
(07:03):
of a broader coalition of areas that we summarize as
the default mode network. Now, this is a network of
brain regions that are active when you're at rest and
not focused on something in the outside world. And this
network seems to be involved in self referential thinking and
daydreaming and reflecting on your own life and experiences, so
(07:27):
it seems to be involved in maintaining a stable sense
of self. And you have other areas involved, like the amygdala,
which is involved in processing emotions and that influences how
you react to your environment and shapes your emotional identity.
But while we can point to all these brain areas
as being involved, there's something else massively important. Your identity
(07:49):
is fundamentally rooted in your memories. This tells you your
whole life narrative. There are many types of memory, like
short term and long term, and please listen to episode
forty three to learn more about these different types. But
the subtype we care about today is autobiographical memory, which
is your memory of personal experiences and events. This type
(08:13):
of memory plays an absolutely crucial role in shaping your identity.
By recalling these memories and reflecting on these memories, you
create this continuously changing narrative that defines who you are now.
The reason that your memory is and your overarching narrative
can always change is because of neuroplasticity, which is the
(08:34):
brain's ability to adapt. Your brain is flexible. All the
tens of billions of neurons in your head are always
wiring and rewiring and disconnecting and seeking new partners and reconnecting,
and they're doing this every moment of your life. I
call this live wiring, and this, of course underlies the
(08:56):
fluid nature of our identity. If you did didn't have
this kind of flexibility in your brain, you would be
stuck in time. You would never reorganize in response to
new experiences, you would never learn, you would never change
in response to trauma or education, or the relationships you have,
(09:19):
or more generally, you wouldn't change from the politics and
culture and the wider world around you. Now, if this
were just a matter of the world getting poured into
your nervous system as you mature, that's one thing. But
the deeper, amazing issue that we're talking about today is
that your past is not a faithful record. Instead, it's
(09:40):
a reconstruction, and sometimes it borders on mythology. When we
review our life memories, we should do so with the
awareness that not all the details are accurate. Some of
the details come from stories that people told us about ourselves.
Others were filled in with what we think must have happened.
(10:01):
Others are based on rewrites that make the overarching story
more consistent. So if your answer to who you are
is based simply on your memories, that makes your identity
something of a strange, ongoing, mutable narrative. So how do
our personal memories influence who we think we are? Let's
(10:37):
return to the memory researcher Elizabeth Loftis. Last week I
told you that in one of her experiments, she showed
that the way questions are phrased influences people's memories. For example,
if you ask people how fast a couple of cars
are going when they hit each other, the people will
give different speed estimates than if you ask them how
(10:57):
fast the cars were going when they mashed into each other.
The word smashed illicits higher speed estimates because it distorts
something about people's memories. So, because Lostess was intrigued by
the way that leading questions could contaminate memory, she decided
to go further. She asked this question, would it be
(11:19):
possible to implant entirely false memories into a person? So
to find out, she recruited a bunch of participants and
had her team contact their families to get information about
events in their past, and then, armed with this information,
the researcher team put together four stories about each participant's childhood.
(11:44):
Three of the stories were true, and the fourth story
contained plausible information, but it was entirely made up. This
fourth story was about getting lost at a shopping mall
as a child, being found by a kind elderly person,
and finally being reunited with a parent. In a series
(12:06):
of interviews, participants were told these four stories about their childhood,
and at least a quarter of them claimed that they
could remember the incident of being lost in the mall,
even though it hadn't actually happened and it didn't stop there. Because,
as Loftus describes it, the participant may start to feel
(12:27):
like they remember a little bit about it, and then
when they come back a week later, they're starting to
remember more. Maybe they tell some details about the older
woman who rescued them, and over time, more and more
details creep into this false memory, like someone will say
that the older woman had a particular hat that they remember,
(12:49):
or they'll say they remember that they had their favorite
toy with them, or they'll say they remember their mother
was so mad or so glad when they were reunited.
Only was it possible to implant false new memories in
the brain, but people embraced and embellished those memories. They
were unknowingly weaving fantasy into the fabric of their identity.
(13:14):
Now we're all susceptible to this kind of memory manipulation,
And it turns out this is true of even Elizabeth
Loftus herself. So, when Elizabeth was a child, her mother
had drowned in a swimming pool. And years later she
was having a conversation with a relative, and that conversation
(13:36):
brought out this extraordinary fact that Elizabeth had been the
one to find her mother's body in the pool. Now
that news came as a total shock to her because
she hadn't known that, and in fact, she didn't believe it.
But she describes, quote, I went home from that birthday
and I started to think, maybe I did. I started
(13:58):
to think about others. There are things that I did remember,
like when the fireman came, they gave me oxygen. Maybe
I needed the oxygen because I was so upset that
I found the body. Now soon she was able to
visualize finding her mother's body in the swimming pool. But
then her relative called her up to say he'd made
(14:19):
a mistake. It wasn't the young Elizabeth after all who
had found the body. It had been Elizabeth's aunt. And
that's how Loftus had the opportunity to experience what it
was like to possess her own false memory, richly detailed
and deeply felt. So your memories are not a faithful record. Instead,
(14:42):
they are a constant reconstruction. Now it might feel to
you almost inconceivable that you could somehow misremember your own
life narrative. But this is precisely what happened in the
small town of Beatrice, Nebraska, to multiple people in a
way that that affected a combined seventy five years of
(15:03):
their lives. So here is what happened. There was an
elderly woman, a grandmother, named Helen Wilson, who was raped
and murdered in her apartment in nineteen eighty five, and
for four years the police searched, but they couldn't come
up with who had done this. By nineteen eighty nine,
they were looking for any suspects who seemed sexually unconventional
(15:28):
because a profiler at the FBI suggested that's who they
should be looking for. So they finally found two people,
a man and a woman who fit that general description.
He had been a pornographic filmmaker and she had met
him in California where they filmed together, and the two
of them had come back to Beatrice, Nebraska and started
(15:48):
filming pornography again. So the police picked them up and
interviewed them. Now, he denied that he had anything to
do with this murder that he was being accused of.
He was baffled, and he said, why am I a
suspect in this case of murder? He said he didn't
even know the victim they were talking about, or anything
about this crime. But according to the transcripts, the detective
(16:10):
said to him, you're having a hard time remembering. Maybe
it's because you don't want to remember. Could that be it? Joe?
He kept denying it, and the detectives kept telling him
they would be able to prove his guilt. But that's
not the mind blowing part of the story, which was
taking place in the neighboring room where they were interviewing
(16:31):
the woman. The detectives told her that she was at
the apartment of this elderly woman that's grandmother, and they
quote worked on bringing back little bits of memory to her.
She didn't remember anything about this grandmother, or the apartment,
or what the woman was wearing, or even why she
would have been there or gone inside, but the police
(16:52):
kept telling her, according to the transcript, quote, let me
try and help you refresh your memory. They told her
her memories were repressed because the whole event was so awful.
With time, she ended up wholeheartedly believing that she had
done the crime, and she confessed that she suffocated the
(17:16):
woman with a pillow while the man had performed the rape. Now,
this was a very manipulative interrogation and subsequent confession, and
maybe it would have ended there. But the problem was
that at the scene of the crime they had found
type B blood, and neither of these two had type
B blood. So the police felt that maybe the solution
(17:38):
was that there were other people involved, and they kept
pushing the woman to generate recollections. She ended up telling
the police that she thought maybe there was another man
with her during the crime, so they showed her a
lineup of photographs and she ended up picking a high
school friend of hers, who then got arrested too, and
maybe it would have ended there, but he didn't have
(18:01):
typebe blood either. Then a fourth suspect was arrested, another
woman who tended to hang out with the group. She
had a number of interviews with the police psychologist, and
she was also brought around to the idea that she
had committed this horrible crime and had repressed her memory,
so she ended up giving a confession of guilt. Then
(18:24):
she had a dream about this whole thing, and in
her dream she saw a fifth man there. So he
got arrested and also had interviews with the psychologist, and
he eventually also came to the conclusion that his psyche
had simply forgotten or repressed this whole terrible event. Then
(18:45):
he and the second woman to be arrested each had
a dream that there was another woman at the scene,
and that woman was arrested. Now she was certain that
she was doing laundry on the night of February fifth,
nineteen eighty five, but a police psychologist told her that
she had witnessed this murder but simply couldn't remember it.
He said to her, have you ever had memory problems before?
(19:10):
So she thought about it and insisted that she did
not have any memory problems. He asked, how about something
really terribly frightening, like something that really had an impact emotionally.
So she kept denying this and felt quite certain that
she couldn't possibly forget a rape and murder scene. She said, quote,
(19:31):
I just don't understand. I mean, this isn't something I
would not say anything about. I'm not saying I'm perfect here,
and I've done my share of little sins, but we're
talking about killing an old person. End quote. As it
turned out she had type BE blood and so she
got charged anyway. Now, there were six people charged for
(19:54):
this crime, and they became known as the Beatrice Six.
The first man pled innocence, two more pled no contest,
but three of the six people pled guilty. They all
went to jail for well over a decade of their lives,
and the man who kept insisting on his innocence kept
(20:15):
trying to get a DNA test done. But it was
only in two thousand and seven that he was able
to finally get the Nebraska Supreme Court to make it happen.
And the incredible result is that he and his five
co defendants were finally exonerated. They were all found to
be innocent. Another DNA test revealed the actual perpetrator, a
(20:38):
Beatrice resident who had died in nineteen ninety two, and
it appears that he had acted alone in the rape
and murder. So what this case represents is something so
stunning about our memory and its stability and its manipulability.
Although these six people all denied having ever been in
(20:59):
that woman's apartment, much less committing this crime, several of
them were able to be convinced that they had repressed
the memory because it was so traumatic. The psychologist told
them over and over that the memories of the murder
would probably come back to them when they were thinking
deeply about it or having a dream, but it might
(21:19):
take a while. As it turns out, it didn't even
take that long. Half the suspects ended up completely believing
in their guilt, even though they were not there and
had nothing to do with this. Now, as a side note,
this whole notion about memory suppression was floating around in
psychology circles at that time, and there were actually a
whole bunch of convictions passed down based on this idea,
(21:44):
Like maybe an adult who comes to believe, let's say,
through hypnosis that twenty years earlier she was sexually abused
by someone and that memory had been repressed and she
had never remembered it until just this moment. And there
was a window of time I am in the nineteen
eighties and nineties when a number of people were convicted
based on this kind of memory testimony. And while it's
(22:07):
theoretically possible that someone could repress the memory for decades
and then it pops up, essentially all these repressed memory
cases were eventually overturned as strong evidence like DNA evidence
got introduced into the court system, and many of these
accusations were found to be totally false. But this case
(22:27):
of the Beatrice six was especially amazing because here people
who were innocent ended up believing, truly believing that they
themselves were guilty for three of the six. They absolutely
believed in their own guilt, and they suffered deep regret
and shame. These new beliefs they had became just a
(22:49):
new sedimentary layer in the history of their identity. So
this is just like Elizabeth loftis receiving misinformation about finding
her mother's body in the pool, and she came to
have a memory of it. This is also like Lofts's experiments,
where she plants false information into the narrative of participants
in the laboratory. I'm going to link a New Yorker
(23:12):
article about the Beatrice six in the show notes on
Eagleman dot com slash podcast, and also an HBO documentary
about this, so check it out there for more. But
the point I want to make for now is that
all these cases demonstrate the malleability and the manipulability of
our memory, not only about an external story or picture
(23:33):
or terrorist attack, but even when the memories are about
our own lives. The writer John Dufresny once wrote that
(23:57):
memory is a myth making machine. What we do is
keep revising our past to keep it consistent with who
we think we are. So think about the narrative of
your own life. Which parts have you conveniently forgotten because
they didn't mesh well with the overarching story. What parts
have you told so many times that they've taken on
(24:20):
a reality of their own, perhaps a little unanchored from
what actually went down. Last week I told the story
of a group of my colleagues who studied what happened
with memories of nine to eleven. The bottom line was
that memories drifted. People were given these detailed surveys one
week after the attack, and then they were tracked down
(24:41):
a year later and regiven the survey, and it was
found that accuracy of recall was lower than expected, and
it got even lower at three years after the event
and then ten years after the event. But here's the
important thing to surface. What drifted were the memories about
the self. The factual memories like who is president at
(25:02):
the time and how many planes there were? Those were
essentially stable over time. Why is there some difference in
the brain and the way they're stored. No, it's because
those event facts were discussed endlessly in the media and
in daily conversations, and so any misremembering got automatically corrected
by the wider environment. In fact, as I mentioned last week,
(25:25):
the researchers could predict the accuracy of memories just based
on how much media attention and ensuing conversation there was
around something. But if you have some flashball memory that
is inconsistent, like exactly what you were thinking or feeling,
or even where you were standing or what you saw,
(25:45):
you're really likely to repeat that a lot over the
next decade. Digging that story in but that's not likely
to get corrected by anybody, So the canyon of that
memory gets etched deep and deeper into the neural landscape,
even if the river is not flowing in the right spot.
(26:06):
So personal memories drift, but event memories get corrected back
into place. And I was thinking about this the other
day because now it's more than two decades after the
nine to eleven attacks, and I'm fascinated by how our
increasing technology might influence our personal memories. So when I
(26:26):
think about my past, I have some handful of photographs
that pin me down to reality, at least in particular
moments when the shutter clicked. In other words, I can't
misremember those moments in my life too much because there's
some objective evidence of what I looked like, or what
I wore, or what the house behind me looked like,
(26:48):
or what my parents' car looked like. So these photos
constrain my otherwise drifty memory. They tie my memory to
some factual version that I can move too far from.
What I've been wondering about lately is how memory will
change and how it might become a little more accurate,
not because our brains are getting any better, but instead
(27:11):
because our technology is improving. So when I was growing up,
we had photography, but to capture that moment you had
to go down to the store and buy film and
insert that correctly into the camera, And then after you
had snapped some number of shots, then you needed to
drive back to Walgreen's and get it developed and pick
(27:32):
it up a few days later. So, as you can imagine,
photographs were few and far between. So when I think
back on my childhood, I really have only a few
spots that are really pinned it down. But my kids
are the subjects of a gajillion photographs, And in fact,
we have an Alexa in our kitchen that cycles through
(27:52):
these on its screen, So they're constantly seeing documentation of
their lives from when they were one year old, two
years older, three or four. And what that means is
that they are far more pinned to their real historical
trajectory than I was. The technology binds them to reality.
(28:14):
By the way, it's a side note, I have no
idea if this is a good or bad thing. Presumably
they have fewer delusions about their history, but that also
means they are less free from it. It's difficult to
predict the consequences of that. In any case, the technology
they are surrounded by gives them a much tighter relationship
with their history. And by the time they have kids,
(28:36):
who knows what technology is going to exist. Maybe my
grandkid's bedroom will be wallpapered with dynamic movies from their
past year. Maybe the movies are going to be captured
by twenty four to seven three hundred and sixty degrees
surround view cameras that they wear on themselves all the time.
And maybe it won't even be on the walls, but
instead it'll be holograms, such that they're always surrounding by
(29:00):
three dimensional scenes of their past. Their recent paths are
distant past. Maybe they're always going to be living in
a community with themselves in time and therefore pinned down
to a more accurate story of who they recently were.
Whatever the case is, and I presume we can't possibly
imagine it correctly, they will have a different relationship with
(29:24):
their history. It's going to be more tightly bound to
reality and less like the telephone game. Nonetheless, so much
of our lives are not tracked, and this will be
true even for them. Our emotional reactions are small transgressions
that go uncaught and unrecorded, the contents of the dreams
(29:47):
we have at night, the thousands of thoughts we have
that go unexpressed. And so even for the next generation,
they still face the challenge of building a coherent narrative
that sometimes conflicts with other people's narratives about them, and
all those narratives their own and others are likely to
(30:07):
drift quite a bit from what actually happened. All these
considerations led me to write a short story years ago
in my novel sum So, in closing today's episode, I
want to redo this literary thought experiment about what would
happen if we were actually challenged to put the narrative
(30:28):
of our personal identity to the test. The story is
called reversal. There is no afterlife, but that doesn't mean
we don't get to live a second time. At some point,
the expansion of the universe will slow down, stop and
begin to contract, And at that moment the earrow of
(30:50):
time will reverse. Everything that happened on the way out
will happen again, but backwards. In this way, our life
neither eyes nor disintegrates, but rewins. In this reverse life,
you are born of the ground at funeral ceremonies. We
dig you up from the earth and transport you grandly
(31:12):
to the mortuary where the birth makeup is removed. You
are then taken to the hospital, where, surrounded by doctors,
you open your eyes for the first time in your
daily life. Broken vases reassemble, melt water freezes into Snowmen
broken hearts find love. Rivers flow uphill, marriages re ride
(31:36):
rocky roads, and eventually end in erotic dating. The pleasures
of a lifetime of intercourse are relived, culminating in kisses
instead of sleep. Bearded men become smooth faced children who
are sent to schools to gently strip away The original
sins of knowledge, reading, writing, and mathematics are expunged. After
(32:00):
this diseducation, graduates shrink and crawl and lose their teeth,
achieving the purity of the highest state of the infant.
On their last day, howling because it is the end
of their lives, Babies climb back into the wombs of
their mothers, who eventually shrink and climb back into the
(32:21):
wombs of their mothers, and so on, like concentric Russian dolls.
In this reverse life, you have blissful expectations about what
will come next. As you experience your story backward, at
the moment of reversal, you are genuinely happy for while
life must be lived forward the first time, you suspect
(32:44):
it will really be understood only upon replay, but you
have a painful surprise in store. You discover that your
memory has spent a lifetime manufacturing small myths to keep
your life flat story consistent with who you thought you were.
You have committed to a coherent narrative, misremembering little details
(33:09):
and decisions and sequences of events. On the way back,
the cloth of that storyline unravels, reversing through the corridors
of your life. You are battered and bruised in the
collisions between reminiscence and reality. By the time you enter
the womb again, you understand as little about yourself as
(33:33):
you did your first time here. Go to Eagleman dot
com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Send me an email at podcast at eagleman dot com
with questions or discussion, and check out and subscribe to
Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and
(33:56):
to leave comments. Until next time. I'm David Eagleman, and
we have been drifting together in the inner cosmos,
Is your notion of who you are built on a
mountain of narrative that may or may not be totally accurate.
If somebody told you a totally false story about yourself,
could you come to believe it? And what does this
have to do with six people who spent over a
decade in prison together for a crime they didn't commit
(00:27):
but believed that they had. And what does any of
this have to do with why you are physically a
different person every seven years, but why you can't easily
see the changes in yourself through time, or what the
effective technology will be on our sense of self. Welcome
(00:48):
to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist
and an author at Stanford and in these episodes we
sailed deeply into our three pound universe to understand why, why,
and how our lives look the way they do. Today's
(01:12):
episode is part two in the story of our drifting memories.
So last week we talked about memory and its inaccuracies.
I talked about how medieval European painters struggled to accurately
depict lions because they had never seen a real lion.
They'd only seen versions painted by other people, and as
(01:34):
these sequences of paintings moved forward through history, they became
more and more distorted from the original lion that someone
had seen at some point, and the lions served as
a metaphor for us to discuss how memories, like messages
in the game of Telephone, become distorted over time. If
(01:56):
you heard the episode, you'll remember I talked about a
strange Native American folk tale called the War of the Ghosts,
and this was used by the psychologist Frederick Bartlett. He
had people read the story and then reconstruct it from
their memory at various time points later to understand how
(02:17):
their memory changed. And what he found is that over time,
your memory of a story becomes more coherent with your
internal model of the world and also more aligned with
whatever your cultural norms are. So we saw that memories
are not static recordings, but instead they are stored in
(02:37):
vast constellations of neurons that are interconnected and dynamic, and
new experiences can alter these neural connections, leading to changes
in how memories are recalled, for example, in the context
of eyewitness testimony. This understanding of memory is massively important
because things that people say to you after you've witnessed
(03:01):
an event. Whether this is cowitnesses talking to you, or
psychologists or investigators, these can all change your memory of
what you believe you saw at the time of the event.
It alters your memory, but generally it doesn't change your
confidence in your memory. And finally, we also saw in
the last episode that even flashbulb memories, which are these vivid,
(03:24):
emotionally charged recollections of big significant events, even these sorts
of recollections become less accurate over time, as we saw
with a long term follow up study after the terrorist
attacks of September eleventh, two thousand and one. So this
week we're going to talk about not just your memory
(03:45):
of something external like a story you read or an
event you saw. Instead, we're going to zoom in on
what happens when those memories are about you. How do
memory distortions through time change your notion of your personal identity.
So let's start with a basic reality. Our brains and
(04:06):
our bodies change so much during our life that, like
a clock's our hand, it's difficult to detect the changes.
So every seven years, for example, every cell in your
body has been replaced. Physically, you are not you anymore.
But you're a new you. Fortunately, there's one constant that
(04:27):
links all these different versions of you together, and that
is memory. Perhaps memory can serve as the thread that
makes me who I am. It sits at the core
of our identity. It provides a single, continuous sense of self.
But given what we talked about in the last episode,
(04:49):
there might be a problem here because could the continuity
of memory be an illusion? So imagine that you walk
into a room room, and you meet your self at
different ages in your life. So there you are at
age seven, and there's you as a teenager, and over
(05:10):
here it's you in your late twenties and mid fifties
and early seventies and all the way through your final years.
Imagine that you all sit together and you share the
stories about your life, and you tease out this single
thread of your identity. Would you be able to find
a core version of you? Well, it's tough to say,
(05:33):
because you all possess the same name and the same history.
But the fact is that you're all somewhat different people
at all these different ages. You have different values and goals.
And what we're going to talk about today is that
your life's memories might have less in common than expected.
Your memory when you look back and ask yourself who
(05:57):
you were at fifteen is different to who you actually
were at fifteen. And your sixty year old self and
your forty year old self will look back on an
important event that happened to your twenty year old self,
but they may have different recollections of exactly what happened
and in what order and who is there. And the
(06:17):
question is, if you don't all agree on the same memories,
are you really the same person? So first, let's start
from the point of view of the brain to think
about self identity. There's no single region in the brain
that underpins the self. It's a vastly distributed property. But
we can point to some large players in the game,
(06:40):
like the prefrontal cortex located just behind your forehead, which
generally navigates your planning, your decision making, your self reflection.
It helps you evaluate your action and give some narrative
to your intention, and all this contributes to a coherent
self concept and more generally, the prefrontal cortex is part
(07:03):
of a broader coalition of areas that we summarize as
the default mode network. Now, this is a network of
brain regions that are active when you're at rest and
not focused on something in the outside world. And this
network seems to be involved in self referential thinking and
daydreaming and reflecting on your own life and experiences, so
(07:27):
it seems to be involved in maintaining a stable sense
of self. And you have other areas involved, like the amygdala,
which is involved in processing emotions and that influences how
you react to your environment and shapes your emotional identity.
But while we can point to all these brain areas
as being involved, there's something else massively important. Your identity
(07:49):
is fundamentally rooted in your memories. This tells you your
whole life narrative. There are many types of memory, like
short term and long term, and please listen to episode
forty three to learn more about these different types. But
the subtype we care about today is autobiographical memory, which
is your memory of personal experiences and events. This type
(08:13):
of memory plays an absolutely crucial role in shaping your identity.
By recalling these memories and reflecting on these memories, you
create this continuously changing narrative that defines who you are now.
The reason that your memory is and your overarching narrative
can always change is because of neuroplasticity, which is the
(08:34):
brain's ability to adapt. Your brain is flexible. All the
tens of billions of neurons in your head are always
wiring and rewiring and disconnecting and seeking new partners and reconnecting,
and they're doing this every moment of your life. I
call this live wiring, and this, of course underlies the
(08:56):
fluid nature of our identity. If you did didn't have
this kind of flexibility in your brain, you would be
stuck in time. You would never reorganize in response to
new experiences, you would never learn, you would never change
in response to trauma or education, or the relationships you have,
(09:19):
or more generally, you wouldn't change from the politics and
culture and the wider world around you. Now, if this
were just a matter of the world getting poured into
your nervous system as you mature, that's one thing. But
the deeper, amazing issue that we're talking about today is
that your past is not a faithful record. Instead, it's
(09:40):
a reconstruction, and sometimes it borders on mythology. When we
review our life memories, we should do so with the
awareness that not all the details are accurate. Some of
the details come from stories that people told us about ourselves.
Others were filled in with what we think must have happened.
(10:01):
Others are based on rewrites that make the overarching story
more consistent. So if your answer to who you are
is based simply on your memories, that makes your identity
something of a strange, ongoing, mutable narrative. So how do
our personal memories influence who we think we are? Let's
(10:37):
return to the memory researcher Elizabeth Loftis. Last week I
told you that in one of her experiments, she showed
that the way questions are phrased influences people's memories. For example,
if you ask people how fast a couple of cars
are going when they hit each other, the people will
give different speed estimates than if you ask them how
(10:57):
fast the cars were going when they mashed into each other.
The word smashed illicits higher speed estimates because it distorts
something about people's memories. So, because Lostess was intrigued by
the way that leading questions could contaminate memory, she decided
to go further. She asked this question, would it be
(11:19):
possible to implant entirely false memories into a person? So
to find out, she recruited a bunch of participants and
had her team contact their families to get information about
events in their past, and then, armed with this information,
the researcher team put together four stories about each participant's childhood.
(11:44):
Three of the stories were true, and the fourth story
contained plausible information, but it was entirely made up. This
fourth story was about getting lost at a shopping mall
as a child, being found by a kind elderly person,
and finally being reunited with a parent. In a series
(12:06):
of interviews, participants were told these four stories about their childhood,
and at least a quarter of them claimed that they
could remember the incident of being lost in the mall,
even though it hadn't actually happened and it didn't stop there. Because,
as Loftus describes it, the participant may start to feel
(12:27):
like they remember a little bit about it, and then
when they come back a week later, they're starting to
remember more. Maybe they tell some details about the older
woman who rescued them, and over time, more and more
details creep into this false memory, like someone will say
that the older woman had a particular hat that they remember,
(12:49):
or they'll say they remember that they had their favorite
toy with them, or they'll say they remember their mother
was so mad or so glad when they were reunited.
Only was it possible to implant false new memories in
the brain, but people embraced and embellished those memories. They
were unknowingly weaving fantasy into the fabric of their identity.
(13:14):
Now we're all susceptible to this kind of memory manipulation,
And it turns out this is true of even Elizabeth
Loftus herself. So, when Elizabeth was a child, her mother
had drowned in a swimming pool. And years later she
was having a conversation with a relative, and that conversation
(13:36):
brought out this extraordinary fact that Elizabeth had been the
one to find her mother's body in the pool. Now
that news came as a total shock to her because
she hadn't known that, and in fact, she didn't believe it.
But she describes, quote, I went home from that birthday
and I started to think, maybe I did. I started
(13:58):
to think about others. There are things that I did remember,
like when the fireman came, they gave me oxygen. Maybe
I needed the oxygen because I was so upset that
I found the body. Now soon she was able to
visualize finding her mother's body in the swimming pool. But
then her relative called her up to say he'd made
(14:19):
a mistake. It wasn't the young Elizabeth after all who
had found the body. It had been Elizabeth's aunt. And
that's how Loftus had the opportunity to experience what it
was like to possess her own false memory, richly detailed
and deeply felt. So your memories are not a faithful record. Instead,
(14:42):
they are a constant reconstruction. Now it might feel to
you almost inconceivable that you could somehow misremember your own
life narrative. But this is precisely what happened in the
small town of Beatrice, Nebraska, to multiple people in a
way that that affected a combined seventy five years of
(15:03):
their lives. So here is what happened. There was an
elderly woman, a grandmother, named Helen Wilson, who was raped
and murdered in her apartment in nineteen eighty five, and
for four years the police searched, but they couldn't come
up with who had done this. By nineteen eighty nine,
they were looking for any suspects who seemed sexually unconventional
(15:28):
because a profiler at the FBI suggested that's who they
should be looking for. So they finally found two people,
a man and a woman who fit that general description.
He had been a pornographic filmmaker and she had met
him in California where they filmed together, and the two
of them had come back to Beatrice, Nebraska and started
(15:48):
filming pornography again. So the police picked them up and
interviewed them. Now, he denied that he had anything to
do with this murder that he was being accused of.
He was baffled, and he said, why am I a
suspect in this case of murder? He said he didn't
even know the victim they were talking about, or anything
about this crime. But according to the transcripts, the detective
(16:10):
said to him, you're having a hard time remembering. Maybe
it's because you don't want to remember. Could that be it? Joe?
He kept denying it, and the detectives kept telling him
they would be able to prove his guilt. But that's
not the mind blowing part of the story, which was
taking place in the neighboring room where they were interviewing
(16:31):
the woman. The detectives told her that she was at
the apartment of this elderly woman that's grandmother, and they
quote worked on bringing back little bits of memory to her.
She didn't remember anything about this grandmother, or the apartment,
or what the woman was wearing, or even why she
would have been there or gone inside, but the police
(16:52):
kept telling her, according to the transcript, quote, let me
try and help you refresh your memory. They told her
her memories were repressed because the whole event was so awful.
With time, she ended up wholeheartedly believing that she had
done the crime, and she confessed that she suffocated the
(17:16):
woman with a pillow while the man had performed the rape. Now,
this was a very manipulative interrogation and subsequent confession, and
maybe it would have ended there. But the problem was
that at the scene of the crime they had found
type B blood, and neither of these two had type
B blood. So the police felt that maybe the solution
(17:38):
was that there were other people involved, and they kept
pushing the woman to generate recollections. She ended up telling
the police that she thought maybe there was another man
with her during the crime, so they showed her a
lineup of photographs and she ended up picking a high
school friend of hers, who then got arrested too, and
maybe it would have ended there, but he didn't have
(18:01):
typebe blood either. Then a fourth suspect was arrested, another
woman who tended to hang out with the group. She
had a number of interviews with the police psychologist, and
she was also brought around to the idea that she
had committed this horrible crime and had repressed her memory,
so she ended up giving a confession of guilt. Then
(18:24):
she had a dream about this whole thing, and in
her dream she saw a fifth man there. So he
got arrested and also had interviews with the psychologist, and
he eventually also came to the conclusion that his psyche
had simply forgotten or repressed this whole terrible event. Then
(18:45):
he and the second woman to be arrested each had
a dream that there was another woman at the scene,
and that woman was arrested. Now she was certain that
she was doing laundry on the night of February fifth,
nineteen eighty five, but a police psychologist told her that
she had witnessed this murder but simply couldn't remember it.
He said to her, have you ever had memory problems before?
(19:10):
So she thought about it and insisted that she did
not have any memory problems. He asked, how about something
really terribly frightening, like something that really had an impact emotionally.
So she kept denying this and felt quite certain that
she couldn't possibly forget a rape and murder scene. She said, quote,
(19:31):
I just don't understand. I mean, this isn't something I
would not say anything about. I'm not saying I'm perfect here,
and I've done my share of little sins, but we're
talking about killing an old person. End quote. As it
turned out she had type BE blood and so she
got charged anyway. Now, there were six people charged for
(19:54):
this crime, and they became known as the Beatrice Six.
The first man pled innocence, two more pled no contest,
but three of the six people pled guilty. They all
went to jail for well over a decade of their lives,
and the man who kept insisting on his innocence kept
(20:15):
trying to get a DNA test done. But it was
only in two thousand and seven that he was able
to finally get the Nebraska Supreme Court to make it happen.
And the incredible result is that he and his five
co defendants were finally exonerated. They were all found to
be innocent. Another DNA test revealed the actual perpetrator, a
(20:38):
Beatrice resident who had died in nineteen ninety two, and
it appears that he had acted alone in the rape
and murder. So what this case represents is something so
stunning about our memory and its stability and its manipulability.
Although these six people all denied having ever been in
(20:59):
that woman's apartment, much less committing this crime, several of
them were able to be convinced that they had repressed
the memory because it was so traumatic. The psychologist told
them over and over that the memories of the murder
would probably come back to them when they were thinking
deeply about it or having a dream, but it might
(21:19):
take a while. As it turns out, it didn't even
take that long. Half the suspects ended up completely believing
in their guilt, even though they were not there and
had nothing to do with this. Now, as a side note,
this whole notion about memory suppression was floating around in
psychology circles at that time, and there were actually a
whole bunch of convictions passed down based on this idea,
(21:44):
Like maybe an adult who comes to believe, let's say,
through hypnosis that twenty years earlier she was sexually abused
by someone and that memory had been repressed and she
had never remembered it until just this moment. And there
was a window of time I am in the nineteen
eighties and nineties when a number of people were convicted
based on this kind of memory testimony. And while it's
(22:07):
theoretically possible that someone could repress the memory for decades
and then it pops up, essentially all these repressed memory
cases were eventually overturned as strong evidence like DNA evidence
got introduced into the court system, and many of these
accusations were found to be totally false. But this case
(22:27):
of the Beatrice six was especially amazing because here people
who were innocent ended up believing, truly believing that they
themselves were guilty for three of the six. They absolutely
believed in their own guilt, and they suffered deep regret
and shame. These new beliefs they had became just a
(22:49):
new sedimentary layer in the history of their identity. So
this is just like Elizabeth loftis receiving misinformation about finding
her mother's body in the pool, and she came to
have a memory of it. This is also like Lofts's experiments,
where she plants false information into the narrative of participants
in the laboratory. I'm going to link a New Yorker
(23:12):
article about the Beatrice six in the show notes on
Eagleman dot com slash podcast, and also an HBO documentary
about this, so check it out there for more. But
the point I want to make for now is that
all these cases demonstrate the malleability and the manipulability of
our memory, not only about an external story or picture
(23:33):
or terrorist attack, but even when the memories are about
our own lives. The writer John Dufresny once wrote that
(23:57):
memory is a myth making machine. What we do is
keep revising our past to keep it consistent with who
we think we are. So think about the narrative of
your own life. Which parts have you conveniently forgotten because
they didn't mesh well with the overarching story. What parts
have you told so many times that they've taken on
(24:20):
a reality of their own, perhaps a little unanchored from
what actually went down. Last week I told the story
of a group of my colleagues who studied what happened
with memories of nine to eleven. The bottom line was
that memories drifted. People were given these detailed surveys one
week after the attack, and then they were tracked down
(24:41):
a year later and regiven the survey, and it was
found that accuracy of recall was lower than expected, and
it got even lower at three years after the event
and then ten years after the event. But here's the
important thing to surface. What drifted were the memories about
the self. The factual memories like who is president at
(25:02):
the time and how many planes there were? Those were
essentially stable over time. Why is there some difference in
the brain and the way they're stored. No, it's because
those event facts were discussed endlessly in the media and
in daily conversations, and so any misremembering got automatically corrected
by the wider environment. In fact, as I mentioned last week,
(25:25):
the researchers could predict the accuracy of memories just based
on how much media attention and ensuing conversation there was
around something. But if you have some flashball memory that
is inconsistent, like exactly what you were thinking or feeling,
or even where you were standing or what you saw,
(25:45):
you're really likely to repeat that a lot over the
next decade. Digging that story in but that's not likely
to get corrected by anybody, So the canyon of that
memory gets etched deep and deeper into the neural landscape,
even if the river is not flowing in the right spot.
(26:06):
So personal memories drift, but event memories get corrected back
into place. And I was thinking about this the other
day because now it's more than two decades after the
nine to eleven attacks, and I'm fascinated by how our
increasing technology might influence our personal memories. So when I
(26:26):
think about my past, I have some handful of photographs
that pin me down to reality, at least in particular
moments when the shutter clicked. In other words, I can't
misremember those moments in my life too much because there's
some objective evidence of what I looked like, or what
I wore, or what the house behind me looked like,
(26:48):
or what my parents' car looked like. So these photos
constrain my otherwise drifty memory. They tie my memory to
some factual version that I can move too far from.
What I've been wondering about lately is how memory will
change and how it might become a little more accurate,
not because our brains are getting any better, but instead
(27:11):
because our technology is improving. So when I was growing up,
we had photography, but to capture that moment you had
to go down to the store and buy film and
insert that correctly into the camera, And then after you
had snapped some number of shots, then you needed to
drive back to Walgreen's and get it developed and pick
(27:32):
it up a few days later. So, as you can imagine,
photographs were few and far between. So when I think
back on my childhood, I really have only a few
spots that are really pinned it down. But my kids
are the subjects of a gajillion photographs, And in fact,
we have an Alexa in our kitchen that cycles through
(27:52):
these on its screen, So they're constantly seeing documentation of
their lives from when they were one year old, two
years older, three or four. And what that means is
that they are far more pinned to their real historical
trajectory than I was. The technology binds them to reality.
(28:14):
By the way, it's a side note, I have no
idea if this is a good or bad thing. Presumably
they have fewer delusions about their history, but that also
means they are less free from it. It's difficult to
predict the consequences of that. In any case, the technology
they are surrounded by gives them a much tighter relationship
with their history. And by the time they have kids,
(28:36):
who knows what technology is going to exist. Maybe my
grandkid's bedroom will be wallpapered with dynamic movies from their
past year. Maybe the movies are going to be captured
by twenty four to seven three hundred and sixty degrees
surround view cameras that they wear on themselves all the time.
And maybe it won't even be on the walls, but
instead it'll be holograms, such that they're always surrounding by
(29:00):
three dimensional scenes of their past. Their recent paths are
distant past. Maybe they're always going to be living in
a community with themselves in time and therefore pinned down
to a more accurate story of who they recently were.
Whatever the case is, and I presume we can't possibly
imagine it correctly, they will have a different relationship with
(29:24):
their history. It's going to be more tightly bound to
reality and less like the telephone game. Nonetheless, so much
of our lives are not tracked, and this will be
true even for them. Our emotional reactions are small transgressions
that go uncaught and unrecorded, the contents of the dreams
(29:47):
we have at night, the thousands of thoughts we have
that go unexpressed. And so even for the next generation,
they still face the challenge of building a coherent narrative
that sometimes conflicts with other people's narratives about them, and
all those narratives their own and others are likely to
(30:07):
drift quite a bit from what actually happened. All these
considerations led me to write a short story years ago
in my novel sum So, in closing today's episode, I
want to redo this literary thought experiment about what would
happen if we were actually challenged to put the narrative
(30:28):
of our personal identity to the test. The story is
called reversal. There is no afterlife, but that doesn't mean
we don't get to live a second time. At some point,
the expansion of the universe will slow down, stop and
begin to contract, And at that moment the earrow of
(30:50):
time will reverse. Everything that happened on the way out
will happen again, but backwards. In this way, our life
neither eyes nor disintegrates, but rewins. In this reverse life,
you are born of the ground at funeral ceremonies. We
dig you up from the earth and transport you grandly
(31:12):
to the mortuary where the birth makeup is removed. You
are then taken to the hospital, where, surrounded by doctors,
you open your eyes for the first time in your
daily life. Broken vases reassemble, melt water freezes into Snowmen
broken hearts find love. Rivers flow uphill, marriages re ride
(31:36):
rocky roads, and eventually end in erotic dating. The pleasures
of a lifetime of intercourse are relived, culminating in kisses
instead of sleep. Bearded men become smooth faced children who
are sent to schools to gently strip away The original
sins of knowledge, reading, writing, and mathematics are expunged. After
(32:00):
this diseducation, graduates shrink and crawl and lose their teeth,
achieving the purity of the highest state of the infant.
On their last day, howling because it is the end
of their lives, Babies climb back into the wombs of
their mothers, who eventually shrink and climb back into the
(32:21):
wombs of their mothers, and so on, like concentric Russian dolls.
In this reverse life, you have blissful expectations about what
will come next. As you experience your story backward, at
the moment of reversal, you are genuinely happy for while
life must be lived forward the first time, you suspect
(32:44):
it will really be understood only upon replay, but you
have a painful surprise in store. You discover that your
memory has spent a lifetime manufacturing small myths to keep
your life flat story consistent with who you thought you were.
You have committed to a coherent narrative, misremembering little details
(33:09):
and decisions and sequences of events. On the way back,
the cloth of that storyline unravels, reversing through the corridors
of your life. You are battered and bruised in the
collisions between reminiscence and reality. By the time you enter
the womb again, you understand as little about yourself as
(33:33):
you did your first time here. Go to Eagleman dot
com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading.
Send me an email at podcast at eagleman dot com
with questions or discussion, and check out and subscribe to
Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and
(33:56):
to leave comments. Until next time. I'm David Eagleman, and
we have been drifting together in the inner cosmos,
Host
David Eagleman
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