“Everyone has false memories all the time, even if you think you have the best memory in the world,” said the psychologist. Julia Shaw, on the BBC television program “The Life Scientist” and added: “The memories of our lives are accompanied by a footer called multisensory components. These memories are much more complex than remembering an event.”
In the British television report, the academic University College London exemplified this effect: “If you are remembering an event, such as the September 11, 2001 With the attack on the Twin Towers in New York, you don’t have to access as many places in your brain. But when reliving an experience of your own, you need to connect all the parts of the brain responsible for different sensations, forming a large and intricate network of neurons.”
In that aspect, memories, the specialist warned, are not the exact record of the past that we think they are. “The way we remember is hopelessly flawed and often bears little relation to verifiable events, something that has been confirmed time and time again in scientific studies,” the researcher told the UK media, adding: “Ultimately, our brains they are not there simply to record the past perfectly and reliably. “They are there to navigate the present and think about the future.”
Julia Shaw She became known for an experiment she conducted for her doctorate, in which she showed how a group of students created false memories. In that investigation, the students ended up describing how, a few years ago, they had attacked people or been attacked by an animal, when in reality no such thing had happened.
To carry out this study, Shaw used information provided by the parents of the volunteers to implant memories in them. After gaining his trust, he would tell them, for example, that his parents had told him that when they were 14 years old they had attacked someone with a gun and the police had been involved. He would then introduce real-life details, such as ‘your friend Alan was present’ and inform them that it happened where they lived at the time.
The next step was to help them remember what she knew was unrememberable, and she guided them in imagination exercises. “In the end, the amount of detail they gave me far exceeded my expectations. A staggering 70% of the participants in our study created false memories of criminal activities. From a purely scientific perspective, that is exciting,” the specialist admitted.
In this context, the psychologist stressed that the study “went through extensive ethical approval, because it was a great manipulation and it was a great learning experience.” “Our memories are being influenced by people, usually unintentionally, all the time. So I think it’s appropriate to teach people to be aware of this and understand how that process works,” he said. Julia Shaw.
“It is a manifestation of how flimsy the curtain is that separates our imagination and our memory,” wrote the psychologist. Elizabeth F. Loftus, who did similar experiments. Loftus is considered one of the most eminent psychologists of the 20th century for American Psychological Associationand contributed to changing the dominant idea until a few decades ago that memories were literal representations of past events stored in a kind of mental library.
“Our representation of the past is a living and changing reality. “It is not a place back there that is preserved in stone, but a living being that changes shape, expands, shrinks and expands again, an amoeba-like creature,” Loftus noted. Research into the science of memory has had an impact on criminal justice, which depends largely on the statements of witnesses and suspects.
The language used to describe an event can change the way it is remembered, so that, for example, leading questions can distort everything from the statements of suspects in police interrogations to the testimony of the defense or the prosecution. That is why experts in that field are often called upon to examine evidence in court cases. “We are almost always hired by the defense, because of the nature of our work, not because we want to,” Shaw said. In several trials against high-profile defendants, such as Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinsteinthey have called Loftus as a defense specialist.
“In most adversarial systems, the prosecution’s evidence must be beyond a reasonable doubt to validate a criminal conviction. If at any point in the process, when applying the science of false memories, possible manipulations are detected that could lead to distorted, changed details or even completely implanted memories, we sound the alarm,” explained the specialists in the field of memory. .
However, in cases of abuse, where it is often one’s word against another’s, it is uniquely difficult to see how the science of memory calls into question the memories of victims forced to relive the moment. “We have to be very careful and not assume that memories are not enough evidence. That is not the case,” he stressed. Julia Shaw and concluded: “If we couldn’t trust memories, our legal system would collapse and certain types of crimes would never be convicted.”
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