September 1, 2011 • 35 mins
We're the recorded information of all the experiences that came before the present moment. So how do we deal with the knowledge that some of the memories that compose us are fraudulent? Join Robert and Julie as they examine the world of false memories.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. You know, Julie,
we are basically our memories. We are. We are a
stack of cards. In each card is a memory, and
(00:25):
they form who we are. That that alone can be
kind of tricky to wrap your your head around, and
and it is kind of a simplification. But but still
we are made up of memories where where all these
these uh these recollections of things that have happened, things
we've learned, and they form who we are. So the
idea that some of those memories are false memories is
(00:46):
really fascinating. Yeah, because it means that part of what
we are is not factual. It's a fabrication and and
and it's and even more to the point, it's one
thing if you build some fabrication into who you are.
I'm a support Yeah, yeah, I try and believe something
that's not real every day, something new, you know, uh
(01:06):
and uh and build it up to him at least
fifty fifty. But but but the idea that there are
parts of us that we think are true, that are false.
That's that's the really fascinating and or chilling thing. Yeah,
and uh, what we're talking about is specifically a book
called Seventh Sins of Memory by Daniel Schockter. And he
(01:28):
was on a panel that you saw at the World
Science Festival covering memory and what happens with memory? Yes,
in New York City. Uh, as it was. Yeah, it
was a fascinating talk. We referred to to some of
the stuff that was brought up in our previous episode
on on memory. What do we talk about? That's what
happens when you record as many podcasts. That's that's a yeah,
(01:52):
false recall there. But but but but Yeah, as we've
discussed before, memory is uh is not this perfect thing.
It is a they in a sense, you could say
that it's it's a flawed system. It would be more
accurate to just say a memory is ephemeral because a
lot of the flaws that are there are a part
of its operating system, Like we can't remember everything, so
you're gonna forget things, um and uh, and in memories
(02:16):
are we were always having to update information. So there's
a potential for disaster there. And I know that we've
talked about this before that when you have a particularly
strong memory that has to do with like saying nine eleven, right,
you know, where were you on nine eleven, that your
potential for recall is actually hindered by the fact that
you're a magdala isn't on high alert your emotional center
(02:37):
of your brain, so your hypocampus is not necessarily really
accurately recording things at that moment because your amingdala is
kind of taking over. So that's just one example of how, um,
you know, you can come away from an experience having
really strong emotional feelings and saying, yes, I was there
and I was wearing this shirt and so on and
so forth, but um, you're actually hamstrung and your billy
(03:00):
to bring up those particular details, even if you feel
certain that that's the way it went down, right, and uh.
And it's also important to stress that memory is a
rather complex system. It's not just a situation of oh,
here's the part of my brain that does memory, and
it's doing memory right now. There it goes it remembered
something and then wrote a new memory. Now we have
(03:22):
There are several different types of memory, and they're all
sort of working in a in a chorus and uh,
uh you know, I mean it's it's very much like
an orchestra scenario where no no particular instrument is playing
the tune that everything together creates the song that you're hearing.
So you have things like episodic memory for events, semantic
memory for facts in general knowledge, uh, priming memory for
(03:44):
unconscious activation of memories and reminders. Conditioning from that Pavlovian
experience where the dog here's the dinner bell and starts
salivating even though the meal hasn't members in it. Yeah,
and the priming one is something we're gonna talk about
a little bit too, But that one is interesting. What
you're saying is you're can meeting sort of unconscious memories,
ain't even really aware of of this database that you're
building up. So in his book, Shackter lays out what
(04:07):
he calls the seven Deadly Sins of memory, and uh,
it's a fascinating look at it. I mean there's some
bleed over between one and another, but uh, like the
three first that he goes through transience and that's just
basically I'm not going to remember, um, this fact from
ten years ago because my brain forgets things over time.
(04:27):
That's that's pretty simple. Like when you and and then
there's gonna be this uh basic absent mindedness. And this
is where you don't remember what somebody told you because
you were you know, involved in another task or you
were driving and uh, you suddenly got distracted. You say,
you're listening to this podcast while driving, and suddenly you
have to you have to deal with some sort of
near wreck experience. You're maybe hoping me not, but you're
(04:51):
probably not going to commit to memory, at least not
committed strongly. Um, whatever you're listening to on a podcast
or radio. Uh. Then there there's a also blocking And
this is what happens when you're like, oh, um, what
was the actor in the Yeah, the actor and the
thing which I do all the time, what was what
was that film with Val Kilmer in it where he
(05:12):
has a sword? You know that that kind of thing.
And you'll sit there and will be agonizing, you know
what was that person's name? And someone will be like
look it up an IMDb and you're like, no, I
have to think of myself. And for me, I'm always
like that guy that was wearing shoes and like never
giving anybody good clues and so from there he breaks
out some of the things that can happen. Some of
them are are sins that basically color memory, like suggestibility,
(05:34):
which is really fascinating his own right. This is this
is like, for instance, the scenario where um, the police
are grilling a witness to a crime and trying and
trying to find out like who is the who they
saw at the scene, and they will sometimes sometimes even
kind of unconsciously hint that this is the person you
should pick, so sort of like leading the witness leading
in the courtroom before, where it's like that line of
(05:56):
questioning is really putting that idea in your head. Yeah,
like if I was to say, so, Julie, your favorite
food is pizza, right, well, yes it is actually yes.
I mean that's kind of a horrible example, but but
I'm leading you. You know, It's like the the answers
and the question. The answer that I want is in
the question that I ask you, like cheese, like sauce?
(06:16):
Do I ever? And then there's also just persistence, which
is for instance, a traumatic memory that keeps showing up.
But the one that we're going to discuss in detail
today is misattribution. This is a particularly fascinating. This. This
is like memory distortion on steroids can be. Sometimes it
can be pretty simple, like a day to day thing.
There's a predictability factor that we rely on when we're
(06:38):
bringing up a memory, right, we're taking it out of
the drawer, and misattribution seems to fall prey to our
need to fit details into a framework right, even if
the pieces don't fit. Um. There's a kind of familiarity
that exists, right because you you have some of the
facts right, you have some of the facts wrong, but
your mind wants to try to square that and um,
so you know, even though it's it could be wrong,
(07:00):
it feels right to you because on some level you're
familiar with some of the details. And there a bunch
of examples of what misattribution can be. Like one of
the most most obvious ones would be an example of
where you try and remember, um, like where you met
somebody or a year and you end up the memory
is fine, except that there's a detail wrong in it,
(07:23):
or a couple of details wrong, and it's basically got
gotten a little mixed up, that your order has been
slightly mixed up. From the kitchen they bring they bring
you the burger you ordered, but they give you fries
instead of the side salad that you requested, right right.
So you actually recall something, but you might map it
to the wrong place or time or to the wrong person,
and then you've got an imagined event that you ascribe
(07:46):
to a reality. Which this is really fascinating, where we
end up remembering something as fact, like we remembering something
as action that we merely imagined or thought about doing.
And the great example of this is something happens to
me way too often, and that is where I'll leave
the house and I'll actually lock the door, but then
(08:06):
I'll check it again, double sure that I locked it,
or sometimes walked to the car and then walk back
and then check that I locked it again, which is
just unexcusable to come back for the third time. But
it's but I can't I can't remember if I thought
about locking it or I did lock it. The same
with the things like blowing out the candle in the
bathroom or turning off a burner. These are vital things
(08:28):
we need to do, and we're making the middle note,
do it, do it, do it, But then after the fact,
we can't remember did I just think about doing that?
Or did I actually do it? Did I imagine myself
doing it? And um, if you go on the World
Science Festival site, you'll actually see a clip of this
example in In the example, it's not necessarily the person
imagining themselves doing something or himself doing something, but it's
(08:49):
this clip of this guy talking about how for many
years he harbored this resentment against his cousin for ruining
his eighth birthday party by swinging the bat, the pinona,
all the candy out. So he sees his cousin at
some point, you know, a couple of years ago, he's
now an adult, and he says, remember that time that
you completely ruined my eighth birthday party? And his cousin says,
(09:12):
what are you talking about. I was away at summer
camp at your eighth birthday party. And he said that
he immediately realized that he had concocted this, this memory,
and it's just just like that. He thought, Oh, that's
completely right, this he was at summer camp. And I
think that's fascinating. And I know that there are examples
for myself that you know, I've done the same thing. Um,
(09:35):
And for whatever reason, our minds kind of conjure these
these alternate realities. These are these are basically um binding errors,
um binding failures. Even in memory binding and and again
they you basically have two kinds um I mean memory
binding is the is the gluing together of various components
of an experience into a whole. Is the bringing together
(09:58):
of the different um the saw had the main dish,
the garnish, and the condiments into the complete order. And
in a binding failure, the the time that the event
occurs at the action or the object, et cetera, is
not bound to the particular time and place. And again
it can It can deal with with real events and
just sort of mix them around or imagined or just
(10:20):
purely thought about events. Yeah. Yeah, So that's really interesting
that you'd have to have that sort of sequential binding
in your head. Otherwise things kind of go awry if
you don't have that glue in place. In the books,
Actor describes an experiment where younger and older adults were
shown one object and then as to imagine a second object.
All right, So in the first case they had them imagine, say,
(10:42):
a magnifying glass. So that's easy to imagine, you know,
it's like a stick with a round thing. At the
top that you look through to see, you know. Um.
And then they imagined that they saw that they actually
saw a magnifying class there it is, so the actual
object with it. And then they imagined a lollipop, and
a lollipop is also a stick with a own thing
at the top, but with an entirely different purpose. Um.
(11:03):
Then they also did a dissimilar thing where it was
like a screwdriver and a coat hanger. And when they
looked at at the results, they found that that older
adults were more likely to say they'd actually seen the lolly,
which yeah, But but they had a number of tests
subbosely that were actually said, yeah, I saw the law,
(11:23):
you showed it to me. So the examples of of
the thing we imagine in the thing we perceived becoming confused,
which is more it's more likely when there is some
sort of semantic link between the two. Yeah, yeah, Well,
and again there's that familiarity, right, it's the context, and
it gives a sort of fire to your convictions. And
you do see that more in the elderly, who rely
(11:45):
on that sense of familiarity to corroborate their memories, and
they have a harder time recalling specific recollections. You also
see this sometimes uh like the misuh the misattribution of
the source of a memory, and that this may have
happened to a number of you. Where are you So
you hear something from a friend and then you misremember
it as being something you saw on the news, which
(12:07):
can get you into some trouble sometime if you're you know,
in a dinner party and you're like, oh, yeah, such,
such and such, and then people were like, I don't
think that's right. I think you you may have got
the wrong You're like, no, I saw that on Fox News.
It must be true. Well, seeing I was thinking about that,
and I was thinking, that is why language is so
flawed for us. And of course it's great because it's
what we have to communicate with each other with. But
(12:29):
I was thinking, here's here's a good example of something
like the health care bill in the United States. This
conversation began to happen around it, and there are all
sorts of bits of information, information that's unleashed and and
some of that has been misremembered, intentionally or not. And
you have these conversations going on and it's being processed
by the public at large, and then mass confusion ensues
(12:53):
and you're talking about things like the death panels and
all that. Yeah, yeah, I really have any any any origin.
In fact, it was more about people coloring the debate
with exaggerated ideas or just misconstruing information. And maybe they
weren't trying to do that intentionally, but I think it's
fascinating that you have this black and white document that exists,
(13:15):
and yet the reality that's been created around it, or
had been created around I guess depending on how you
look at it, uh, is quite different from what the
actual document is. And a lot of this I think
again has there's that suggestibility factor and um this uh
also this the the wrong source, right, because you could
sit around in a dinner party and mistake what someone
(13:38):
might say at the table for fact that was you know,
reported Fox News or NBC, and so it just really
muddles the conversations that we have and the reality of
of um of what we're all looking at. You know. Yeah.
Another possibility is that if you're watching say twenty four
hour news show, and you don't really end up in
(14:00):
remembering whether you heard something on an opinion based section
or um a more a factual news report. Um, you
know it's the same. Gonna go with a you know,
a newspaper did you get on the opinion page or
from the like the ap stories right? Or a blog
right that it's that a blog that's been researched and
documented or is it just someone's blog that says I
hate Monday's right. Well, I like in my own research
(14:22):
for articles, here at how stuff works. Like, sometimes I'll
find myself in a situation where and we'recalling a fact
from the research I've done, and I have to I
try to steer away from even looking at sources that
I that could potentially be problematic because ideally, like I've heard,
like some people can argue that, say, a Wikipedia article
is a good starting place for legitimate research because even
though you you have to cast out on the article itself,
(14:45):
since anybody can update it and in quality varies sometimes
right in quality very significantly. There's some fine Wikipedia articles
out there, but then there are some that are just
really incorrect, really flawed, or poorly written. So some people
say start there, then you know, use that as a
jumping off place for real research. But the problem there
(15:06):
is that you'll run across other facts you'll start putting
together an article or something, and then you'll put something
in and you'll misremember the source. So something you ended
up thinking is from say this New York Times article
or something published in a perior view journal is actually
from the Wikipedia article or a blog referring to one
of the uh, the primary sources and uh, and it
(15:28):
just gets confusing. So it's a topsy turvy world. All right,
we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back,
we're gonna look at a little something called a memory
conjunction error and how you and I could possibly be
ripping off things without us even knowing we're doing it.
This podcast is brought to you by Intel, the sponsors
(15:48):
of Tomorrow and the Discovery Channel. At Intel, we believe
curiosity is the spark which drives innovation. Join us at
curiosity dot com and explore the answers to life's questions.
And we're back. So memory conjunction air. This is another
fascinating aspect of misattribution UM where two memories are combined
(16:11):
into one. Generally, this is going to revolve around words
and faces and uh, and with with words especially, it's uh,
it's important that there's some sort of semantic link there
is that the example of Varnish and Spaniel, and sometimes
people mistake that for Spanish. Right they've seen or they've
seen that sort of sequence and they think, oh, I
heard the word Spanish. Yeah, there's list of a semantic
(16:34):
link there, but more of a like a linguistic link.
I guess that's the sound of the words. You know,
like you're you're You're probably not going to have a
memory conjunction error involving like two things that are completely different.
But say you didn't know anything about wrap and you
were introduced, because it will it will actually like happen
with you know, people you're introduced to, Like if you're
in a in some sort of line of work or
(16:55):
just in your social life, find yourself meeting a lot
of new people, you may have a memory conjunction error
um when you try to recall information about them later,
Like say you're introduced to Snoop Dogg and Little Wayne,
both rappers, and if you weren't familiar with them, you
might instead remember that you met one person like a
name like little Dog or you did it correctly or
(17:20):
a little Snoop Snoop or something yeah, so um and
But then even crazier is it can occur with faces
where you'll meet two people with similar faces and then
you'll commit to memory a face that is um a
combination of the two, which is so great, Yeah, and
so like that your mind would construct this third person
(17:41):
out of the two people. Like a lot of what
we're talking about with memory, it does raise some problematic
questions when the memory is important, because it's one thing
if you just met some people at a party and
then you get their names mixed up, or you know,
if it's some piddling thing you know where you you
accidentally say that you're, you know, the source of some
little news it was in New York Times when it
was really Washington Post or something. But when people's lives
(18:05):
are on the line, when you have criminal investigations and
witness testimonies. Yeah, And one of the best examples of
this is Donald Thompson, who is a memory researcher himself. Yeah,
Australian guy, and uh, he was arrested one morning in
connection with this rudal right, horrible saw it on this
lady who said, this is the guy, he was there,
(18:27):
this is the one arrested him. She was so sure
of it that police were actually able to track him
down by the way he looked right like she had
this idea of him cemented in her mind. Yeah, and
so they brought him in. But the thing is, Donald
Thompson had this just air tight alibi because he would
at the time of the attack, he was doing a
live TV interview and I ironically enough, he was talking
(18:50):
about the the the ephemeral nature of memory and about
false memories while this is going on. But the person
was like, no, that's him, this is the guy, that's right.
So while while she was being attacked, while she was
being raped, she was that that television program was on,
and she actually encoded his face onto the rapist face. Yeah,
it was a misastribution of of the face to the
(19:11):
wrong context or the wrong context to the right face,
which I mean, it's such a simple example of of this, uh,
but but just such a telling one. The idea that
she saw the face on the TV and then that
becomes the face fixed in the memory of the event. Well,
and then she had mentioned though that the big takeaway
from this is that I eye witness testimony is just
(19:34):
egregiously flawed. In the nineteen eighties, more than seventy five
thousand criminal trials per year were decided on the basis
of eyewitness testimony. This is from Daniel stractor Um who
wrote about this in several different articles. Uh. And then
another point that he likes to make is that in
an analysis of forty cases in which DNA exonerated wrongfully
(19:57):
imprisoned people, thirty six of them were put in the
clinker because of eyewitness testimony. So it's really one of
those things you need to back up and actually look
at the system and how it's conducted um eyewitness testimony
and UM and in fact, Janet Reno I believe tried
to reform this system and has to a certain degree.
(20:19):
And most police departments now when they do lineups, they
don't necessarily bring everybody in the room. Uh. And the
reason is is because even though you could have the
say someone um stole your wallet, even even if you
had the thief in that lineup, there could be someone
that looked a lot like that thief. In your mind
(20:39):
is misremembering and then uh fingering the other person who
is innocent because they look like the thief. So now
they're starting to take people in one at a time
so that your mind doesn't get too confused and you
can actually sort of fare it out, you know, yes
or no, is this the person that did it? But
even then, as we've discussed, the memory memory in them
is complex and flawed enough as it is, without the
(21:03):
without the the the investigation process, making it even worse. Yeah, yeah,
and yeah, you cannot do away with with uh this
you know, wholesale, because this is the person you know,
to which this act was uh, that this act happened to.
So you've got to have some sort of credence and
those details that some of that is going to be true.
There's another story that the chapter brings up in his
(21:24):
book that that I found particularly fascinating, and this involves
a British photographer who they just referred to by the
initials Mr. And this is the early nineties photographer you know,
deals with with a lot of faces in his time.
And he's I believe it was in London. He's, you know,
a lot of crowds around, and uh, he suddenly noticed
(21:46):
that he started seeing some more celebrities than usual, you know.
And you live in any big city or even a
you know, small smaller cities, occasionally you're gonna see somebody
and you're like, oh, is that is that Brad Pitt?
Is that you know William Schatton out front? Turner? Yeah,
Bonnie's my my wife, Bonnie, her dad looks kind of
like Ted Turner. Um. So he has been mistaken for
(22:07):
Ted Turner on on a few occasions where people are like,
I think they've actually come up and asked him before.
That's awesome. I hope he runs with that, just pretends
like he always has a Bison burger in his hand. Yeah.
But but this guy said, you know, he was noticing
it a little more often than his than his normal
because there's one thing to be like, oh I think
I saw that actor on on the tube this morning. Uh. No,
he was. He was seeing it regularly, and he'd be
(22:29):
out with his wife and he would he would be like,
is that who I think it is over there? And
she would like be like, no, I don't think that's anybody.
I think you're mistaken, And he got so strong that
he was. He would be he just feel compelled to
go and approach these people and and be like you're
you know, you're Brad Pitt or you're you know whoever,
and they would look at him like he was crazy.
So he went to the doctor and he found out
(22:49):
that he had multiple sclerosis, which had compromised his frontal lobe,
which is involved in the consolidation of information from short
term to long term as well as like spatial navigation.
When you see a face that looks sort of familiar,
we all have this happen, you know, where at first glance,
it looks like someone we know or a famous person,
and then we realize it's not. So when you see
(23:10):
the face, there's a part of the brain that identifies
it as a familiar face. Yeah, like your pattern recognition software. Yeah.
And then but there's another section that has all the
ideas and all the biographical information that kind of fact
checks the initial report. What so one part says, hey,
I think that's Brad Pitt over there, and the other
part of your brain says, no, that's not Brad pet
because he actually looks a little different and he would
never dress like that, you know, thanks like that. In
(23:32):
this British photographer, Mr, the frontal lobe damage had made
it so that his brain didn't sufficiently scrutinize the signals
that were generated by the weakly activated facial recognition system.
In his brain. So was it the fact checker that
was down? Yeah, but or basically the the connection between
the two the signals were. It's kind of like in
the in like a movie where one person is telling
(23:54):
the other what to say to like a radio headset,
and the signal gets distorted so that the ancication from
this hilarity us and hilarity us we're in this case
um not not exactly hilaritous no, no, no, But I
do think it's interesting that his his database, his backup
database with celebrities, you know, as a photographer. Yeah, well,
I think and also I mean celebrity is they're the
(24:15):
modern deities of our pop culture. So even though we
don't know like Madonna, we have seen so many images
of her, and we have biographical information, we have biographical informations,
so it's almost as if we do know her, even
though we don't have personal knowledge of her. Um. And
it's just this tail us just so fascinating too, because
it underlies just how complex memory is, that there are
(24:37):
multiple systems going on in something as simple as saying, hey,
is that who I think it is? Oh no, it's
not right, and that you could have some of the
smother wiring just not quite right, and then of a
sudden you're seeing Madge everywhere. So let's get to plagiarism
and uh yeah, amnesia. This is pretty fascinating and scary,
(24:57):
especially for us since we work uh in a field
of composed of research and writing well, and there's so
much research that we're filtering on a day to day
basis that Yeah. Um. I first became aware of it
when we were talking about the music podcast not excuse me,
not music, but dreaming and you know what, what can
happen in our dreams? And Paul McCartney when he wrote Yesterday,
(25:19):
he wrote it in a dream, woke up and immediately
went to the piano and he was fearful that he
had actually ripped that off, which is called kryptome kryptomnesia.
Uh yeah, there's a there's a great scene in the
by the way, Yeah, um, not in this and maybe
he had access into the world through his dreams and
still there from a parallel universe, parallel Paul. There's a
(25:41):
there's a great example of this in the HBO series
trem ay Um that takes place in New Orleans does
with the Aftermathickatrina, where there is a violinist and she's
trying to write her first song, and she she worked
really hard on this, and she's so proud of it
when she finished, and she plays it for a couple
of friends and they're like, oh, that that's sounds good,
and they don't have the heart to break it to
(26:02):
her that she just played a Bob Dylan song. Uh see.
And and so that's exactly what ends up happening with people.
Crypto Amnesia is when we produce from memory another person's writings,
writings or ideas, and and we end up having a
memory misattribution going on, and that we don't remember that
it was this other person's ideas. We we idea, we
(26:23):
think it's our own, we think it's a novel thought.
And you can see this just at the very basic levels.
If you've ever been in a meeting and you've said
something or you've heard someone else say something, and then
like you know, on to five minutes later, someone else says, hey,
I've got this idea, and they say the exact same thing.
It happens all the time. I'm sure I've done that.
I'm sure I've ripped off people ideas and meeting before
(26:44):
you just don't even know that you're doing it right,
because you're processing this is new information to you. Um. Yeah.
Unintentional plagiarism has been examined in a number of studies,
and there there was one where people were asked to
generate examples of particular categories of items, like a species
of bird, and they were found that up without realizing,
people plagiarized each other about four percent of the time,
(27:04):
and subsequent studies using more like natural procedures have found
even higher rates like that, sometimes as much. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it involves that thing that we talked about before,
which is called priming, And that's the unconscious influence of memory. Right,
your brain activates certain words or ideas and and just
kind of files them away, and then when you go
to create something novel concerning that topic, then then you're,
(27:30):
you know, unconsciously bringing up those exact words. And we've
seen those time and time and again in history. In fact,
Carl Young was looking through some of Nietzie's writings and
found a couple of paragraphs that were completely ripped off.
He probably didn't even know it from another person. Uh,
they were there, stunningly, some familiar and similar to each
(27:52):
other that Uh, you know, there are times that people
will take whole passages that they don't even realize that
they've committed to memory and bring them up just you know,
and it's sort of one of those things You're like,
why can't I have that sort of uh memory recall
when I want it and not when I want it?
But it's gonna gonna actually hurt my career, right, And
(28:14):
I've been counted that too, in like in the newspapers.
Remember one incident where a writer ended up being accused
of plagiarism and and at the time, I was kind
of like, wow, how why did they do this? Because
this person would never do do this, you know, because
it's as a writer you don't. I mean, it's the
worst thing that could happen pretty much as far as
your your actual career performance, because done intentionally, it's like
(28:36):
the lowest, laziest thing. But is this really underlines it?
It's not always an intentional act it there. Sometimes it's
just about the flawed nature of memory that we end
up recalling a source word for word, uh, when we
and think that those are our words on the page. Yeah.
They had another example in the seven sins um a
(28:59):
shocked her did and it was of George Daniels, who
wrote Science in American Society, and it was it was
doing really well. I got released and you know, great reviews,
and and then as he was sort of going through it,
he realized that he had quoted directly from a number
of sources, not ever meaning to thinking that those were
his complete novel thoughts. And he was completely horrified and
(29:21):
in fact came out and said, WHOA, I didn't realize that,
you know, these sources had gotten in my brain to
the extent that I was actually plagiarizing, which I believe them,
because you know, I think that he was. You know,
he had that moment of let me look back at
my my book that I created, and then all of
a sudden, that false, the falsity of that memory started
(29:43):
to fall away. Yeah. For our final section here, one
of the things that that really fascinated me reading about
mis attribution is, like we we talked about before, it's
the idea that these these memories form who we are,
and the idea that there could be a false memory
and they're making us up, composing who we are, and
we don't realize that it's false. But here's an even
(30:04):
crazier idea, then imagine we could scan the brain and
by scanning the brain tell if a memory is false
or not, even if we have no idea, and this
is it sounds very sci fi, but is in fact
something that we can do and has been done. Chapter
actually scans some brains with some test subject while just
(30:24):
for fun, well while they were citing list of words, uh,
and they were correctly and false recalling some of the
words in the list. And he reported that while the
scans were very similar, they were quote cantalyzing hints of difference. Yeah,
there have been a number of studies since then looking
into exactly what's going on um and and the idea
is that there's you know, there's that that fact checking
(30:46):
process similar to the whole I see the face, and
then another section of the brain determines whether or not
that that familiar faces actually who we think it think
it is. Some more things are going on. So the
idea is there's something in that activity and that fact
checking that can be scan and and therefore there'll be
some sort of little tell tale sign that that this
memory that you just recalled is flawed. So there's been
(31:07):
a number of additional studies since then, and looking at
them you'll see the results fall on both sides, but
a number of them do point to the idea that
there is a slight difference occurring when a false memory
is brought to mind as opposed to a true memory,
because you can see the basically the the fact checking
section of the brain is weaker in false memories. Okay, yeah,
(31:31):
sh doctor says this too, which I think is interesting.
Beyond an exercise and scientific fortune telling, these studies managed
to trace some of the roots of transience to the
split second encoding operations that take place during the birth
of a memory. What happens in frontal and temporal regions
during those critical moments determines, at least in part, whether
an experience will be remembered for a lifetime or drop
(31:53):
into the oblivion of the forgotten, which I think is
fascinating that you can take these scans and you can
see a fall memory at work. Yeah, and it's the
mere fact that it's like the the the illusion of
a false memory becomes a part of the illusion of
who we are, and then the machine can see through
the self believing illusion. It's just mind blown to me.
(32:16):
I think so too. And I think that that we
should end the podcast by by doing a little exercise.
And this was actually done on the panel that you attended, right,
And this is this is a little test to see
how good your memory is. And this is the one
that they used at the World Science Festival. It's a
word list and I'm going to repeat some words and
I just want you guys to to listen for a
(32:36):
moment I really think about them. Here's the word list. Candy, sour, sugar, bitter, good,
taste tooth, nice, honey, soda, chocolate, heart cake, eat pie. Okay, okay,
this is the list. And this list, of course is
(32:59):
bringing up a bunch of ideas for you, right, there
are some associations for you. Um and what semantic link
going on? Yeah, there's a semantic link. There's there's a
story that your idea is conjuring right now and shocked.
He actually does this to the audience and then he
reads out some of the words to test whether or
not people have actually remembered or misremembered something on that list. Now,
(33:25):
that's a long list, but it's interesting because there could
be a suggestibility factor here, right, Okay, So here's the test.
How about the word taste. Was the word taste on
that list? Yes, yes, okay, you're right correct? Good? What
about the word point no correct dissimilar from everything on
(33:50):
the list? Yeah? Yeah, that just kind of stands out,
doesn't it. Okay, Um, we got a couple more words.
What about the word sweet? Yes, no, it was not see,
but the semantic link is there. I just assume sweet
because everything else was around right, right, But you can't
help it, right because your your brain is already making
(34:12):
the framework in that connection, that familiarity that we talked
about that makes us feel certain about the decisions or
the memories that come up for us. So I don't know,
I would love to hear from from the audience about
whether or not they also I thought that sweet was
part of that list, because in the audience that I
think the majority of people, yeah, we were like, yeah, yeah, totally.
(34:34):
We heard that. Maybe some people were you know, hip
to what he was doing, and they were, well, yeah,
the panelists are like they all had that trush our
cat smile, or they had their and their their iPad
out and they were like jotting them down if they
they were said, which is cheating. But for the record,
But hey, if any of you have any any comments
on on this, if you have some experiences with false
memory you'd like to share, be they simple things that
(34:58):
occur every day, or if you have some of the
fun nominal Star story you would like to tell us
so we would love to hear about it. You can
find us on Facebook and Twitter, we'll blow the Mind
on both of those, and you can also drop us
an email at blow the Mind at how stuffworks dot com.
Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff
(35:19):
from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we
explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. You know, Julie,
we are basically our memories. We are. We are a
stack of cards. In each card is a memory, and
(00:25):
they form who we are. That that alone can be
kind of tricky to wrap your your head around, and
and it is kind of a simplification. But but still
we are made up of memories where where all these
these uh these recollections of things that have happened, things
we've learned, and they form who we are. So the
idea that some of those memories are false memories is
(00:46):
really fascinating. Yeah, because it means that part of what
we are is not factual. It's a fabrication and and
and it's and even more to the point, it's one
thing if you build some fabrication into who you are.
I'm a support Yeah, yeah, I try and believe something
that's not real every day, something new, you know, uh
(01:06):
and uh and build it up to him at least
fifty fifty. But but but the idea that there are
parts of us that we think are true, that are false.
That's that's the really fascinating and or chilling thing. Yeah,
and uh, what we're talking about is specifically a book
called Seventh Sins of Memory by Daniel Schockter. And he
(01:28):
was on a panel that you saw at the World
Science Festival covering memory and what happens with memory? Yes,
in New York City. Uh, as it was. Yeah, it
was a fascinating talk. We referred to to some of
the stuff that was brought up in our previous episode
on on memory. What do we talk about? That's what
happens when you record as many podcasts. That's that's a yeah,
(01:52):
false recall there. But but but but Yeah, as we've
discussed before, memory is uh is not this perfect thing.
It is a they in a sense, you could say
that it's it's a flawed system. It would be more
accurate to just say a memory is ephemeral because a
lot of the flaws that are there are a part
of its operating system, Like we can't remember everything, so
you're gonna forget things, um and uh, and in memories
(02:16):
are we were always having to update information. So there's
a potential for disaster there. And I know that we've
talked about this before that when you have a particularly
strong memory that has to do with like saying nine eleven, right,
you know, where were you on nine eleven, that your
potential for recall is actually hindered by the fact that
you're a magdala isn't on high alert your emotional center
(02:37):
of your brain, so your hypocampus is not necessarily really
accurately recording things at that moment because your amingdala is
kind of taking over. So that's just one example of how, um,
you know, you can come away from an experience having
really strong emotional feelings and saying, yes, I was there
and I was wearing this shirt and so on and
so forth, but um, you're actually hamstrung and your billy
(03:00):
to bring up those particular details, even if you feel
certain that that's the way it went down, right, and uh.
And it's also important to stress that memory is a
rather complex system. It's not just a situation of oh,
here's the part of my brain that does memory, and
it's doing memory right now. There it goes it remembered
something and then wrote a new memory. Now we have
(03:22):
There are several different types of memory, and they're all
sort of working in a in a chorus and uh,
uh you know, I mean it's it's very much like
an orchestra scenario where no no particular instrument is playing
the tune that everything together creates the song that you're hearing.
So you have things like episodic memory for events, semantic
memory for facts in general knowledge, uh, priming memory for
(03:44):
unconscious activation of memories and reminders. Conditioning from that Pavlovian
experience where the dog here's the dinner bell and starts
salivating even though the meal hasn't members in it. Yeah,
and the priming one is something we're gonna talk about
a little bit too, But that one is interesting. What
you're saying is you're can meeting sort of unconscious memories,
ain't even really aware of of this database that you're
building up. So in his book, Shackter lays out what
(04:07):
he calls the seven Deadly Sins of memory, and uh,
it's a fascinating look at it. I mean there's some
bleed over between one and another, but uh, like the
three first that he goes through transience and that's just
basically I'm not going to remember, um, this fact from
ten years ago because my brain forgets things over time.
(04:27):
That's that's pretty simple. Like when you and and then
there's gonna be this uh basic absent mindedness. And this
is where you don't remember what somebody told you because
you were you know, involved in another task or you
were driving and uh, you suddenly got distracted. You say,
you're listening to this podcast while driving, and suddenly you
have to you have to deal with some sort of
near wreck experience. You're maybe hoping me not, but you're
(04:51):
probably not going to commit to memory, at least not
committed strongly. Um, whatever you're listening to on a podcast
or radio. Uh. Then there there's a also blocking And
this is what happens when you're like, oh, um, what
was the actor in the Yeah, the actor and the
thing which I do all the time, what was what
was that film with Val Kilmer in it where he
(05:12):
has a sword? You know that that kind of thing.
And you'll sit there and will be agonizing, you know
what was that person's name? And someone will be like
look it up an IMDb and you're like, no, I
have to think of myself. And for me, I'm always
like that guy that was wearing shoes and like never
giving anybody good clues and so from there he breaks
out some of the things that can happen. Some of
them are are sins that basically color memory, like suggestibility,
(05:34):
which is really fascinating his own right. This is this
is like, for instance, the scenario where um, the police
are grilling a witness to a crime and trying and
trying to find out like who is the who they
saw at the scene, and they will sometimes sometimes even
kind of unconsciously hint that this is the person you
should pick, so sort of like leading the witness leading
in the courtroom before, where it's like that line of
(05:56):
questioning is really putting that idea in your head. Yeah,
like if I was to say, so, Julie, your favorite
food is pizza, right, well, yes it is actually yes.
I mean that's kind of a horrible example, but but
I'm leading you. You know, It's like the the answers
and the question. The answer that I want is in
the question that I ask you, like cheese, like sauce?
(06:16):
Do I ever? And then there's also just persistence, which
is for instance, a traumatic memory that keeps showing up.
But the one that we're going to discuss in detail
today is misattribution. This is a particularly fascinating. This. This
is like memory distortion on steroids can be. Sometimes it
can be pretty simple, like a day to day thing.
There's a predictability factor that we rely on when we're
(06:38):
bringing up a memory, right, we're taking it out of
the drawer, and misattribution seems to fall prey to our
need to fit details into a framework right, even if
the pieces don't fit. Um. There's a kind of familiarity
that exists, right because you you have some of the
facts right, you have some of the facts wrong, but
your mind wants to try to square that and um,
so you know, even though it's it could be wrong,
(07:00):
it feels right to you because on some level you're
familiar with some of the details. And there a bunch
of examples of what misattribution can be. Like one of
the most most obvious ones would be an example of
where you try and remember, um, like where you met
somebody or a year and you end up the memory
is fine, except that there's a detail wrong in it,
(07:23):
or a couple of details wrong, and it's basically got
gotten a little mixed up, that your order has been
slightly mixed up. From the kitchen they bring they bring
you the burger you ordered, but they give you fries
instead of the side salad that you requested, right right.
So you actually recall something, but you might map it
to the wrong place or time or to the wrong person,
and then you've got an imagined event that you ascribe
(07:46):
to a reality. Which this is really fascinating, where we
end up remembering something as fact, like we remembering something
as action that we merely imagined or thought about doing.
And the great example of this is something happens to
me way too often, and that is where I'll leave
the house and I'll actually lock the door, but then
(08:06):
I'll check it again, double sure that I locked it,
or sometimes walked to the car and then walk back
and then check that I locked it again, which is
just unexcusable to come back for the third time. But
it's but I can't I can't remember if I thought
about locking it or I did lock it. The same
with the things like blowing out the candle in the
bathroom or turning off a burner. These are vital things
(08:28):
we need to do, and we're making the middle note,
do it, do it, do it, But then after the fact,
we can't remember did I just think about doing that?
Or did I actually do it? Did I imagine myself
doing it? And um, if you go on the World
Science Festival site, you'll actually see a clip of this
example in In the example, it's not necessarily the person
imagining themselves doing something or himself doing something, but it's
(08:49):
this clip of this guy talking about how for many
years he harbored this resentment against his cousin for ruining
his eighth birthday party by swinging the bat, the pinona,
all the candy out. So he sees his cousin at
some point, you know, a couple of years ago, he's
now an adult, and he says, remember that time that
you completely ruined my eighth birthday party? And his cousin says,
(09:12):
what are you talking about. I was away at summer
camp at your eighth birthday party. And he said that
he immediately realized that he had concocted this, this memory,
and it's just just like that. He thought, Oh, that's
completely right, this he was at summer camp. And I
think that's fascinating. And I know that there are examples
for myself that you know, I've done the same thing. Um,
(09:35):
And for whatever reason, our minds kind of conjure these
these alternate realities. These are these are basically um binding errors,
um binding failures. Even in memory binding and and again
they you basically have two kinds um I mean memory
binding is the is the gluing together of various components
of an experience into a whole. Is the bringing together
(09:58):
of the different um the saw had the main dish,
the garnish, and the condiments into the complete order. And
in a binding failure, the the time that the event
occurs at the action or the object, et cetera, is
not bound to the particular time and place. And again
it can It can deal with with real events and
just sort of mix them around or imagined or just
(10:20):
purely thought about events. Yeah. Yeah, So that's really interesting
that you'd have to have that sort of sequential binding
in your head. Otherwise things kind of go awry if
you don't have that glue in place. In the books,
Actor describes an experiment where younger and older adults were
shown one object and then as to imagine a second object.
All right, So in the first case they had them imagine, say,
(10:42):
a magnifying glass. So that's easy to imagine, you know,
it's like a stick with a round thing. At the
top that you look through to see, you know. Um.
And then they imagined that they saw that they actually
saw a magnifying class there it is, so the actual
object with it. And then they imagined a lollipop, and
a lollipop is also a stick with a own thing
at the top, but with an entirely different purpose. Um.
(11:03):
Then they also did a dissimilar thing where it was
like a screwdriver and a coat hanger. And when they
looked at at the results, they found that that older
adults were more likely to say they'd actually seen the lolly,
which yeah, But but they had a number of tests
subbosely that were actually said, yeah, I saw the law,
(11:23):
you showed it to me. So the examples of of
the thing we imagine in the thing we perceived becoming confused,
which is more it's more likely when there is some
sort of semantic link between the two. Yeah, yeah, Well,
and again there's that familiarity, right, it's the context, and
it gives a sort of fire to your convictions. And
you do see that more in the elderly, who rely
(11:45):
on that sense of familiarity to corroborate their memories, and
they have a harder time recalling specific recollections. You also
see this sometimes uh like the misuh the misattribution of
the source of a memory, and that this may have
happened to a number of you. Where are you So
you hear something from a friend and then you misremember
it as being something you saw on the news, which
(12:07):
can get you into some trouble sometime if you're you know,
in a dinner party and you're like, oh, yeah, such,
such and such, and then people were like, I don't
think that's right. I think you you may have got
the wrong You're like, no, I saw that on Fox News.
It must be true. Well, seeing I was thinking about that,
and I was thinking, that is why language is so
flawed for us. And of course it's great because it's
what we have to communicate with each other with. But
(12:29):
I was thinking, here's here's a good example of something
like the health care bill in the United States. This
conversation began to happen around it, and there are all
sorts of bits of information, information that's unleashed and and
some of that has been misremembered, intentionally or not. And
you have these conversations going on and it's being processed
by the public at large, and then mass confusion ensues
(12:53):
and you're talking about things like the death panels and
all that. Yeah, yeah, I really have any any any origin.
In fact, it was more about people coloring the debate
with exaggerated ideas or just misconstruing information. And maybe they
weren't trying to do that intentionally, but I think it's
fascinating that you have this black and white document that exists,
(13:15):
and yet the reality that's been created around it, or
had been created around I guess depending on how you
look at it, uh, is quite different from what the
actual document is. And a lot of this I think
again has there's that suggestibility factor and um this uh
also this the the wrong source, right, because you could
sit around in a dinner party and mistake what someone
(13:38):
might say at the table for fact that was you know,
reported Fox News or NBC, and so it just really
muddles the conversations that we have and the reality of
of um of what we're all looking at. You know. Yeah.
Another possibility is that if you're watching say twenty four
hour news show, and you don't really end up in
(14:00):
remembering whether you heard something on an opinion based section
or um a more a factual news report. Um, you
know it's the same. Gonna go with a you know,
a newspaper did you get on the opinion page or
from the like the ap stories right? Or a blog
right that it's that a blog that's been researched and
documented or is it just someone's blog that says I
hate Monday's right. Well, I like in my own research
(14:22):
for articles, here at how stuff works. Like, sometimes I'll
find myself in a situation where and we'recalling a fact
from the research I've done, and I have to I
try to steer away from even looking at sources that
I that could potentially be problematic because ideally, like I've heard,
like some people can argue that, say, a Wikipedia article
is a good starting place for legitimate research because even
though you you have to cast out on the article itself,
(14:45):
since anybody can update it and in quality varies sometimes
right in quality very significantly. There's some fine Wikipedia articles
out there, but then there are some that are just
really incorrect, really flawed, or poorly written. So some people
say start there, then you know, use that as a
jumping off place for real research. But the problem there
(15:06):
is that you'll run across other facts you'll start putting
together an article or something, and then you'll put something
in and you'll misremember the source. So something you ended
up thinking is from say this New York Times article
or something published in a perior view journal is actually
from the Wikipedia article or a blog referring to one
of the uh, the primary sources and uh, and it
(15:28):
just gets confusing. So it's a topsy turvy world. All right,
we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back,
we're gonna look at a little something called a memory
conjunction error and how you and I could possibly be
ripping off things without us even knowing we're doing it.
This podcast is brought to you by Intel, the sponsors
(15:48):
of Tomorrow and the Discovery Channel. At Intel, we believe
curiosity is the spark which drives innovation. Join us at
curiosity dot com and explore the answers to life's questions.
And we're back. So memory conjunction air. This is another
fascinating aspect of misattribution UM where two memories are combined
(16:11):
into one. Generally, this is going to revolve around words
and faces and uh, and with with words especially, it's uh,
it's important that there's some sort of semantic link there
is that the example of Varnish and Spaniel, and sometimes
people mistake that for Spanish. Right they've seen or they've
seen that sort of sequence and they think, oh, I
heard the word Spanish. Yeah, there's list of a semantic
(16:34):
link there, but more of a like a linguistic link.
I guess that's the sound of the words. You know,
like you're you're You're probably not going to have a
memory conjunction error involving like two things that are completely different.
But say you didn't know anything about wrap and you
were introduced, because it will it will actually like happen
with you know, people you're introduced to, Like if you're
in a in some sort of line of work or
(16:55):
just in your social life, find yourself meeting a lot
of new people, you may have a memory conjunction error
um when you try to recall information about them later,
Like say you're introduced to Snoop Dogg and Little Wayne,
both rappers, and if you weren't familiar with them, you
might instead remember that you met one person like a
name like little Dog or you did it correctly or
(17:20):
a little Snoop Snoop or something yeah, so um and
But then even crazier is it can occur with faces
where you'll meet two people with similar faces and then
you'll commit to memory a face that is um a
combination of the two, which is so great, Yeah, and
so like that your mind would construct this third person
(17:41):
out of the two people. Like a lot of what
we're talking about with memory, it does raise some problematic
questions when the memory is important, because it's one thing
if you just met some people at a party and
then you get their names mixed up, or you know,
if it's some piddling thing you know where you you
accidentally say that you're, you know, the source of some
little news it was in New York Times when it
was really Washington Post or something. But when people's lives
(18:05):
are on the line, when you have criminal investigations and
witness testimonies. Yeah, And one of the best examples of
this is Donald Thompson, who is a memory researcher himself. Yeah,
Australian guy, and uh, he was arrested one morning in
connection with this rudal right, horrible saw it on this
lady who said, this is the guy, he was there,
(18:27):
this is the one arrested him. She was so sure
of it that police were actually able to track him
down by the way he looked right like she had
this idea of him cemented in her mind. Yeah, and
so they brought him in. But the thing is, Donald
Thompson had this just air tight alibi because he would
at the time of the attack, he was doing a
live TV interview and I ironically enough, he was talking
(18:50):
about the the the ephemeral nature of memory and about
false memories while this is going on. But the person
was like, no, that's him, this is the guy, that's right.
So while while she was being attacked, while she was
being raped, she was that that television program was on,
and she actually encoded his face onto the rapist face. Yeah,
it was a misastribution of of the face to the
(19:11):
wrong context or the wrong context to the right face,
which I mean, it's such a simple example of of this, uh,
but but just such a telling one. The idea that
she saw the face on the TV and then that
becomes the face fixed in the memory of the event. Well,
and then she had mentioned though that the big takeaway
from this is that I eye witness testimony is just
(19:34):
egregiously flawed. In the nineteen eighties, more than seventy five
thousand criminal trials per year were decided on the basis
of eyewitness testimony. This is from Daniel stractor Um who
wrote about this in several different articles. Uh. And then
another point that he likes to make is that in
an analysis of forty cases in which DNA exonerated wrongfully
(19:57):
imprisoned people, thirty six of them were put in the
clinker because of eyewitness testimony. So it's really one of
those things you need to back up and actually look
at the system and how it's conducted um eyewitness testimony
and UM and in fact, Janet Reno I believe tried
to reform this system and has to a certain degree.
(20:19):
And most police departments now when they do lineups, they
don't necessarily bring everybody in the room. Uh. And the
reason is is because even though you could have the
say someone um stole your wallet, even even if you
had the thief in that lineup, there could be someone
that looked a lot like that thief. In your mind
(20:39):
is misremembering and then uh fingering the other person who
is innocent because they look like the thief. So now
they're starting to take people in one at a time
so that your mind doesn't get too confused and you
can actually sort of fare it out, you know, yes
or no, is this the person that did it? But
even then, as we've discussed, the memory memory in them
is complex and flawed enough as it is, without the
(21:03):
without the the the investigation process, making it even worse. Yeah, yeah,
and yeah, you cannot do away with with uh this
you know, wholesale, because this is the person you know,
to which this act was uh, that this act happened to.
So you've got to have some sort of credence and
those details that some of that is going to be true.
There's another story that the chapter brings up in his
(21:24):
book that that I found particularly fascinating, and this involves
a British photographer who they just referred to by the
initials Mr. And this is the early nineties photographer you know,
deals with with a lot of faces in his time.
And he's I believe it was in London. He's, you know,
a lot of crowds around, and uh, he suddenly noticed
(21:46):
that he started seeing some more celebrities than usual, you know.
And you live in any big city or even a
you know, small smaller cities, occasionally you're gonna see somebody
and you're like, oh, is that is that Brad Pitt?
Is that you know William Schatton out front? Turner? Yeah,
Bonnie's my my wife, Bonnie, her dad looks kind of
like Ted Turner. Um. So he has been mistaken for
(22:07):
Ted Turner on on a few occasions where people are like,
I think they've actually come up and asked him before.
That's awesome. I hope he runs with that, just pretends
like he always has a Bison burger in his hand. Yeah.
But but this guy said, you know, he was noticing
it a little more often than his than his normal
because there's one thing to be like, oh I think
I saw that actor on on the tube this morning. Uh. No,
he was. He was seeing it regularly, and he'd be
(22:29):
out with his wife and he would he would be like,
is that who I think it is over there? And
she would like be like, no, I don't think that's anybody.
I think you're mistaken, And he got so strong that
he was. He would be he just feel compelled to
go and approach these people and and be like you're
you know, you're Brad Pitt or you're you know whoever,
and they would look at him like he was crazy.
So he went to the doctor and he found out
(22:49):
that he had multiple sclerosis, which had compromised his frontal lobe,
which is involved in the consolidation of information from short
term to long term as well as like spatial navigation.
When you see a face that looks sort of familiar,
we all have this happen, you know, where at first glance,
it looks like someone we know or a famous person,
and then we realize it's not. So when you see
(23:10):
the face, there's a part of the brain that identifies
it as a familiar face. Yeah, like your pattern recognition software. Yeah.
And then but there's another section that has all the
ideas and all the biographical information that kind of fact
checks the initial report. What so one part says, hey,
I think that's Brad Pitt over there, and the other
part of your brain says, no, that's not Brad pet
because he actually looks a little different and he would
never dress like that, you know, thanks like that. In
(23:32):
this British photographer, Mr, the frontal lobe damage had made
it so that his brain didn't sufficiently scrutinize the signals
that were generated by the weakly activated facial recognition system.
In his brain. So was it the fact checker that
was down? Yeah, but or basically the the connection between
the two the signals were. It's kind of like in
the in like a movie where one person is telling
(23:54):
the other what to say to like a radio headset,
and the signal gets distorted so that the ancication from
this hilarity us and hilarity us we're in this case
um not not exactly hilaritous no, no, no, But I
do think it's interesting that his his database, his backup
database with celebrities, you know, as a photographer. Yeah, well,
I think and also I mean celebrity is they're the
(24:15):
modern deities of our pop culture. So even though we
don't know like Madonna, we have seen so many images
of her, and we have biographical information, we have biographical informations,
so it's almost as if we do know her, even
though we don't have personal knowledge of her. Um. And
it's just this tail us just so fascinating too, because
it underlies just how complex memory is, that there are
(24:37):
multiple systems going on in something as simple as saying, hey,
is that who I think it is? Oh no, it's
not right, and that you could have some of the
smother wiring just not quite right, and then of a
sudden you're seeing Madge everywhere. So let's get to plagiarism
and uh yeah, amnesia. This is pretty fascinating and scary,
(24:57):
especially for us since we work uh in a field
of composed of research and writing well, and there's so
much research that we're filtering on a day to day
basis that Yeah. Um. I first became aware of it
when we were talking about the music podcast not excuse me,
not music, but dreaming and you know what, what can
happen in our dreams? And Paul McCartney when he wrote Yesterday,
(25:19):
he wrote it in a dream, woke up and immediately
went to the piano and he was fearful that he
had actually ripped that off, which is called kryptome kryptomnesia.
Uh yeah, there's a there's a great scene in the
by the way, Yeah, um, not in this and maybe
he had access into the world through his dreams and
still there from a parallel universe, parallel Paul. There's a
(25:41):
there's a great example of this in the HBO series
trem ay Um that takes place in New Orleans does
with the Aftermathickatrina, where there is a violinist and she's
trying to write her first song, and she she worked
really hard on this, and she's so proud of it
when she finished, and she plays it for a couple
of friends and they're like, oh, that that's sounds good,
and they don't have the heart to break it to
(26:02):
her that she just played a Bob Dylan song. Uh see.
And and so that's exactly what ends up happening with people.
Crypto Amnesia is when we produce from memory another person's writings,
writings or ideas, and and we end up having a
memory misattribution going on, and that we don't remember that
it was this other person's ideas. We we idea, we
(26:23):
think it's our own, we think it's a novel thought.
And you can see this just at the very basic levels.
If you've ever been in a meeting and you've said
something or you've heard someone else say something, and then
like you know, on to five minutes later, someone else says, hey,
I've got this idea, and they say the exact same thing.
It happens all the time. I'm sure I've done that.
I'm sure I've ripped off people ideas and meeting before
(26:44):
you just don't even know that you're doing it right,
because you're processing this is new information to you. Um. Yeah.
Unintentional plagiarism has been examined in a number of studies,
and there there was one where people were asked to
generate examples of particular categories of items, like a species
of bird, and they were found that up without realizing,
people plagiarized each other about four percent of the time,
(27:04):
and subsequent studies using more like natural procedures have found
even higher rates like that, sometimes as much. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it involves that thing that we talked about before,
which is called priming, And that's the unconscious influence of memory. Right,
your brain activates certain words or ideas and and just
kind of files them away, and then when you go
to create something novel concerning that topic, then then you're,
(27:30):
you know, unconsciously bringing up those exact words. And we've
seen those time and time and again in history. In fact,
Carl Young was looking through some of Nietzie's writings and
found a couple of paragraphs that were completely ripped off.
He probably didn't even know it from another person. Uh,
they were there, stunningly, some familiar and similar to each
(27:52):
other that Uh, you know, there are times that people
will take whole passages that they don't even realize that
they've committed to memory and bring them up just you know,
and it's sort of one of those things You're like,
why can't I have that sort of uh memory recall
when I want it and not when I want it?
But it's gonna gonna actually hurt my career, right, And
(28:14):
I've been counted that too, in like in the newspapers.
Remember one incident where a writer ended up being accused
of plagiarism and and at the time, I was kind
of like, wow, how why did they do this? Because
this person would never do do this, you know, because
it's as a writer you don't. I mean, it's the
worst thing that could happen pretty much as far as
your your actual career performance, because done intentionally, it's like
(28:36):
the lowest, laziest thing. But is this really underlines it?
It's not always an intentional act it there. Sometimes it's
just about the flawed nature of memory that we end
up recalling a source word for word, uh, when we
and think that those are our words on the page. Yeah.
They had another example in the seven sins um a
(28:59):
shocked her did and it was of George Daniels, who
wrote Science in American Society, and it was it was
doing really well. I got released and you know, great reviews,
and and then as he was sort of going through it,
he realized that he had quoted directly from a number
of sources, not ever meaning to thinking that those were
his complete novel thoughts. And he was completely horrified and
(29:21):
in fact came out and said, WHOA, I didn't realize that,
you know, these sources had gotten in my brain to
the extent that I was actually plagiarizing, which I believe them,
because you know, I think that he was. You know,
he had that moment of let me look back at
my my book that I created, and then all of
a sudden, that false, the falsity of that memory started
(29:43):
to fall away. Yeah. For our final section here, one
of the things that that really fascinated me reading about
mis attribution is, like we we talked about before, it's
the idea that these these memories form who we are,
and the idea that there could be a false memory
and they're making us up, composing who we are, and
we don't realize that it's false. But here's an even
(30:04):
crazier idea, then imagine we could scan the brain and
by scanning the brain tell if a memory is false
or not, even if we have no idea, and this
is it sounds very sci fi, but is in fact
something that we can do and has been done. Chapter
actually scans some brains with some test subject while just
(30:24):
for fun, well while they were citing list of words, uh,
and they were correctly and false recalling some of the
words in the list. And he reported that while the
scans were very similar, they were quote cantalyzing hints of difference. Yeah,
there have been a number of studies since then looking
into exactly what's going on um and and the idea
is that there's you know, there's that that fact checking
(30:46):
process similar to the whole I see the face, and
then another section of the brain determines whether or not
that that familiar faces actually who we think it think
it is. Some more things are going on. So the
idea is there's something in that activity and that fact
checking that can be scan and and therefore there'll be
some sort of little tell tale sign that that this
memory that you just recalled is flawed. So there's been
(31:07):
a number of additional studies since then, and looking at
them you'll see the results fall on both sides, but
a number of them do point to the idea that
there is a slight difference occurring when a false memory
is brought to mind as opposed to a true memory,
because you can see the basically the the fact checking
section of the brain is weaker in false memories. Okay, yeah,
(31:31):
sh doctor says this too, which I think is interesting.
Beyond an exercise and scientific fortune telling, these studies managed
to trace some of the roots of transience to the
split second encoding operations that take place during the birth
of a memory. What happens in frontal and temporal regions
during those critical moments determines, at least in part, whether
an experience will be remembered for a lifetime or drop
(31:53):
into the oblivion of the forgotten, which I think is
fascinating that you can take these scans and you can
see a fall memory at work. Yeah, and it's the
mere fact that it's like the the the illusion of
a false memory becomes a part of the illusion of
who we are, and then the machine can see through
the self believing illusion. It's just mind blown to me.
(32:16):
I think so too. And I think that that we
should end the podcast by by doing a little exercise.
And this was actually done on the panel that you attended, right,
And this is this is a little test to see
how good your memory is. And this is the one
that they used at the World Science Festival. It's a
word list and I'm going to repeat some words and
I just want you guys to to listen for a
(32:36):
moment I really think about them. Here's the word list. Candy, sour, sugar, bitter, good,
taste tooth, nice, honey, soda, chocolate, heart cake, eat pie. Okay, okay,
this is the list. And this list, of course is
(32:59):
bringing up a bunch of ideas for you, right, there
are some associations for you. Um and what semantic link
going on? Yeah, there's a semantic link. There's there's a
story that your idea is conjuring right now and shocked.
He actually does this to the audience and then he
reads out some of the words to test whether or
not people have actually remembered or misremembered something on that list. Now,
(33:25):
that's a long list, but it's interesting because there could
be a suggestibility factor here, right, Okay, So here's the test.
How about the word taste. Was the word taste on
that list? Yes, yes, okay, you're right correct? Good? What
about the word point no correct dissimilar from everything on
(33:50):
the list? Yeah? Yeah, that just kind of stands out,
doesn't it. Okay, Um, we got a couple more words.
What about the word sweet? Yes, no, it was not see,
but the semantic link is there. I just assume sweet
because everything else was around right, right, But you can't
help it, right because your your brain is already making
(34:12):
the framework in that connection, that familiarity that we talked
about that makes us feel certain about the decisions or
the memories that come up for us. So I don't know,
I would love to hear from from the audience about
whether or not they also I thought that sweet was
part of that list, because in the audience that I
think the majority of people, yeah, we were like, yeah, yeah, totally.
(34:34):
We heard that. Maybe some people were you know, hip
to what he was doing, and they were, well, yeah,
the panelists are like they all had that trush our
cat smile, or they had their and their their iPad
out and they were like jotting them down if they
they were said, which is cheating. But for the record,
But hey, if any of you have any any comments
on on this, if you have some experiences with false
memory you'd like to share, be they simple things that
(34:58):
occur every day, or if you have some of the
fun nominal Star story you would like to tell us
so we would love to hear about it. You can
find us on Facebook and Twitter, we'll blow the Mind
on both of those, and you can also drop us
an email at blow the Mind at how stuffworks dot com.
Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff
(35:19):
from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we
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