Blogpost 3: Philosophy of Memory

When was the last time you watched a movie? Do you remember the red curtain opening and the movie starting? How about the bright red sign that says "EXIT" How about when you got home, did you remember how the top light lighted green just in time for you to drive pass onward?

Well unless you're in a really old movie theatre that violates fire safety laws and legislations, and with an upside down traffic light, this probably didn't happen. Since curtains are usually no longer in use, fire exit signs are lit green inside the cinemas and because a traffic light always has the red light on top. So where did you get these memories?

Because of how the way our brain works, memory is constantly shaped and reshaped by our knowledge, emotions, feelings and belief. Here, Ms. Jennifer Horton from Discovery lists down the five ways on how our brain can create false memories in her article "Top 5 Ways False Memories are Formed" .

1. misinformation
2. misattribution
3. fuzzy tracing
4. emotion
5. inference

Now, with all these five elements in place, the brain can actually 'remember' a thing or event that never actually happened. Now imagine all the eye witness accounts that sent innocent people to jail.

Let me give you a short description of the five. Misinformation is when you are given a wrong information e.g. a man saying that the guy was wearing a green shoe. Misattribution, when you combine details from two different events. Fuzzy tracing, when one gives a generalized meaning to an event instead of its details, leading in wrong information. Emotion, is when your emotion actually alters your memory. And inference are altered memory due to bias and preference.

Knowing all that, what do you think of your memory now? Do you still think that it is like a video recorder that records every event as it happened? It's not, and it's pretty scary to think how suggestive our mind really is.

Which brings us to hypnosis. Hypnotic therapy uses the power of suggestion to help enhance a persons memory to be able to remember a past event that may have caused trauma.  If, let's say, that hypnosis really does work can it also be used to alter memory or maybe even create new ones? Let us turn to science to answer this question.

In Jeremy Dean's article entitled "Implanting False Memories: Lost in the Mall & Paul Ingram" from Psyblog, he wrote about Elizabeth Loftus' Lost in the mall technique.

"In a seminal study Loftus and Pickrell (1995) recruited 24 participants who were to be presented with four stories from when they were between 4 and 6 years old, three of which were true, and one false. ...Each family was also asked to provide the circumstances of another event that could possibly have happened, but didn't. In each case the false memory was for getting lost in a shopping mall. Relatives provided details of a specific shopping mall it could have been along with other details to make the fake story plausible."

The result? After revealing to the participants that one of the four memories is actually false, out of the 24 participants, 5 falsely recalled the made-up 'lost in the mall' memory. This may not seem so impressive, but this shows that suggestions do have power over our memories.