Creating False Memories for Higher Consciousness.

[Reddington]

In her most famous study, she gave two dozen subjects a journal filled with details of three events from their childhoods. To make memories as accurate and compelling as possible, Loftus enlisted family members to assemble the information. She then added a fourth, completely fictitious experience that described how, at the age of five, each child had been lost in a mall and finally rescued by an elderly stranger. Loftus seeded the false memories with plausible information, such as the name of the mall each subject would have visited. When she interviewed the subjects later, a quarter of them recalled having been lost in the mall, and some did so in remarkable detail.

“I was crying and I remember that day . . . I thought I’d never see my family again,” one participant said, in a taped interview (available on YouTube). “An older man approached me. . . . He had a flannel shirt on. . . . I remember my mom told me never to do that again.” These assertions were delivered with a precision and a certainty that few people could have doubted, except that there was no man in a flannel shirt and no admonition from the subject’s mother. Memory “works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page,” Loftus said in a recent speech. “You can go in there and change it, but so can other people.”

This is an excerpt from an article by Michael Specter published on The New Yorker last year on how neuroscience can help rewrite memories. At UC Irvine, a psychologist by the name of Elizabeth Loftus did the study on how false information can change one’s memory.


I came across this while researching behavioral psychology and cognitive inhibition to better understand why I'm having an overwhelming thought to recreate an experience in order to remember it differently. This is not to imply the experience is traumatic or anything of that nature or deny it ever happened. Just a simple wish to recall a specific memory differently to gain new perspectives on the situation. Here's a link to better understand all of this and feel free to comment.

https://webfiles.uci.edu/eloftus/Loftus_ScientificAmerican_Good97.pdf

 

[Duchess]

I have a false memory from my childhood, but oddly enough I share the memory with my brother. Perhaps it's because we construct the memory together and used to repeat the story over and over again until we both believed it. I've come to accept that it was a false memory, but my brother still believes it happened.

 

[Reddington]

I have a false memory from my childhood, but oddly enough I share the memory with my brother. Perhaps it's because we construct the memory together and used to repeat the story over and over again until we both believed it. I've come to accept that it was a false memory, but my brother still believes it happened.

We become the stories we tell ourselves.

 

[Queen Carawelo]

What does it mean? Do you create different memories than the actual thing?

The screw are you trying to forget about a bad break up? Do you want to create a happy memory because of it?


P.s

I didn't read the article, so don't think I'm a dumb ass asking this question.

Gracias.

 

[Reddington]

Idol,

It's normal for most people to assume a bad break up or a traumatic event as to why someone would want to Implant a false memory or recreate an experience. On the contrary, at least in my case, as I've said in the beginning, it is simply to test my cognitive development and gain a new perspective, a better understanding. My experience wasn't a bad break up, but in fact one of the happiest moments of my life.