False Memories
Fraser, Nick and Chris consider why we remember things that didn't happen.
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by TellMeStudios for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer and I'm here with Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights. And this week, we're discussing the phenomenon of false memories and why they take hold.
Speaker B:So, can you remind me, why are we, who came up with this topic? Well, curiously, we actually couldn't quite remember. We were just having a debate about that. Chris reminded me that a couple of weeks ago, he said on our group communication platform, he made the claim, which was a fairly strong claim, that he'd once been a member of the band D-Ream alongside Brian Cox. And I thought, this is an utterly absurd suggestion. And then another part of my brain said, yeah, but it's the kind of thing he wouldn't make up. And he's about the right age. And I thought, you know what? It is possible that, you know, at some point, he turned up with a tambourine and he was, you know, when D-Ream were forming or something and was in the band for one song. And I started thinking of how actually, yeah, it wouldn't be that surprising if something like that had turned out to be true. It wouldn't blow my mind. And I started, and I thought, well, I'm still, you know, and eventually I said, okay, I've got to admit, I'm not totally sure that's false. And he then fessed up. He wasn't in D-Ream. He was, in fact, a backing dancer for Michael Jackson. No, he wasn't that either. As far as I'm aware, he's not been in any kind of pop group. But then I realised that actually the problem was the idea of him being in D-Ream was so strong that this was in danger of becoming a false memory for me. It was in danger of acquiring the memory that Chris was once in D-Ream. And I could imagine myself in a year's time saying, oh, yeah, actually, I worked with this guy who actually was in D-Ream. And then, you know, completely forgetting that I'd found out it wasn't true. And this reminded me actually of the fact that I have this problem with vegetarians, which is that if I know someone has been a vegetarian once, because they've come to my house, and I've had to cook for them, I retain that information forever. Long after they've ceased to be a vegetarian. And they'll tell me, you know, oh, I'm not vegetarian. Every time they come around, like, oh, I've made you, I've made you a lentil curry. But I'm not a vegetarian anymore. It doesn't matter. They're a vegetarian once they stay a vegetarian in my mind forever. So yeah, we were talking about that. And I suppose it got us thinking about false memories, where they come from, why they don't
Speaker A:go away. Okay, good intro. So former member of D-Ream, Chris Wragg. Well, yeah, I mean, on the
Speaker C:vegetarian topic, my own false memory is the false spelling of broccoli. I can only remember how not to spell broccoli, but I can never remember how to spell it. So I think there's something very interesting about the idea that sometimes you can only remember the wrong answer. And once that's ingrained, it is very difficult to replace it with the right, you know, the correct answer. And I think this has got real implications for the when these false memories occur for the way people do use these false memories to reach decisions. And they can be very powerful drivers of decision making. And a lot of what we, a lot of the way we assess how events happened is based on memory. And there's a good chance a proportion of that is false memory. So I think
Speaker B:it's an interesting broad. Yeah, it's a very really sort of, I would say, slightly understudied. Certainly, it's not something that people are conscious of the limitations of memory. But memory is nowhere near as good as people think it is. And there's lots of evidence that, you know, the way that we form memories in the first place, and when we're experiencing an event, the way that memory is formed will already take into account some interpretation. And there's been lots of studies now where people have successfully implanted false memories. Quite apart from some evidence from, for example, looking at the judicial system where quite a significant number of, I mean, hundreds of cases now have been overturned. These are sometimes people who've, you know, who've been in prison for 30 years and have had their convictions overturned because DNA evidence has now, you know, DNA technology has got to the stage where they can be definitively proved to have been innocent. And in something like three quarters of those cases in the US, they were convicted on eyewitness testimony. So it's a really significant thing. And, you know, most memory researchers, I think, are more or less of the view that memories simply cannot be relied on, you know, on their own. But actually, you know, we still go about our daily lives assuming that our memories are pretty faithful. And I think the vision that people have in their mind of what their memory is doing is kind of like recording a video. And actually, we know that memory is
Speaker C:nothing like that whatsoever. And I think this has got valuable lessons for organisations that are involved in analysis and the use of personal testimony or eyewitness accounts or, you know, face-to-face meetings and the reporting of those face-to-face meetings, that there is a requirement, I mean, in the judicial system, it is at least acknowledged that the witness doesn't turn up and pass judgment on the, you know, the accused. And so it is acknowledged that there is a requirement for a separation of the person who has observed the observer and the decider or the assessor. And yet in many organisations, the person doing the observing is also the person who is deciding what it is that actually happened. And I think that's particularly dangerous because it's very difficult, like, the place you're making the decision and the place where the false memory exists feel like they're in the same place. And it's very difficult to separate out for yourself, you know, you are very invested in what you know for a fact to be the truth when clearly you don't know for a fact it's the truth. Yeah, we cannot subjectively. So there's two
Speaker B:things here. One is we cannot subjectively separate false memories from true ones. There is simply no way of telling. We know that. You know, I'm fully aware that a significant proportion of my memories must be in some sense false ones. Now I've got one particular memory in mind, which is pretty insignificant. But I remember very clearly, before I had children and could therefore do things at weekends, I used to play badminton on Sunday mornings. And I remember once twisting my ankle really badly quite soon after playing, after starting playing. And I was off work for a couple of days because I couldn't walk. And I remember lying distinctly on the sofa of my flat in Islington. And one thing I remember that makes it quite distinctive is that I was I at the time was playing a tennis game on the PlayStation. And I you know, gave me a couple of days to basically brush up my tennis career on this game. Now, I've got that very clearly in my head. That's quite a good little story to me. And it was only I think, a few months ago, and I was reflecting on it. I realized that I, but at the time of playing badminton, I didn't live in that flat. The very clear memory I have of exactly where I was lying, you know, what game I was playing, and why I'd acquired the injury, they cannot all be true. So you know, I know, I know where I've had the opportunity to corroborate false memories. So sorry, to corroborate memories, I've, I know that I've unearthed false ones. But at the same time, you know, I'm very, very attached to some of my memories. And I find it impossible to believe that they're wrong. And just, you know, we're only on the theme of self experimentation. I have very clear memories of my one of my first bedrooms when I was still in a cot. So I was about two, very clear memory of the bedroom. And a lot of people will tell you that's not possible. You're too young to to acquire those kinds of memories. So as an experiment, I decided I drew a plan of the bedroom, and showed it to my mom and said, Is that is that a fair depiction of my bedroom? And it was and it was basically, more or less totally accurate. So, so, you know, but but if that had turned out to be false, yeah, I shouldn't have been too surprised. But the point is, I can't tell. Okay, I can only tell by being able to corroborate it. And most of the time, we're not
Speaker A:in that position. Right. Okay. Well, I mean, to summarize, I mean, I'm not a brain surgeon. But I think the reason why is that memories both false, both false and not false. The reason why they retained is by continual remembering of the memory. And that's how it gets in. That's how it gets implanted out in our neural pathways. That's why we remember stuff. So if the initial memory with initial initial perception is wrong, it kind of doesn't matter. That's why I'm not explaining this very well. I think I think this is one of the things about,
Speaker B:you know, a lot of people, there's a belief, there's a there's a prevailing belief in the sort of memory, research community that you memories can be influenced by, you know, having been told by other people what happened. So, you know, and that's what starts getting planted and remembered. Yeah. So so a story might might change in meaning or a fairly confused memory might turn into a quite a coherent narrative. And, you know, but entirely false memories can be implanted. So one of the pioneering researchers, which is Elizabeth Loftus, did this experiment where she she got people to talk about things that happened to them when they were young. And I think I think corroborated with what relatives had said. And then three out of four of the people that she tried that she used real memories. And then I think in some of them completely fabricated a story and got people to talk about a time when they got lost. And she said, I want you to talk about I know this didn't happen, but please just tell me about the time you got lost in the shopping mall. And people, you know, made up a story. And then a year later, a significant portion of those people were convinced it was actually a thing
Speaker A:that had happened to them. Sure. Okay, great. So that's a great foundation. So having established this, the unreliability of memory was something that Chris said earlier on, which I thought was quite interesting. We were talking about the example of within the judiciary. But one of the things you said is that organisations should bear this in mind, that the person who's making a decision shouldn't also, there should be a separation between the person who's making a judgment and the person who has the account of what happened. Okay. So I'm interested in taking that beyond, as you were sort of inferring there, taking that beyond the judicial system, what other areas could this be applied to? And where do we need to be wary of this?
Speaker C:So I think there's a particular danger with false memories, which is that the person who holds them is very emotionally attached to them. Exactly. And so they are much more difficult to shift from that that position. So, you know, I mean, nowadays, we are used to seeing fake news, for example, and having to spot fake news. And we're used to the concept of people lying to us. But in the event that somebody is not not lying to us, and not presenting us with materials separate from themselves, that they actually genuinely believe this thing, they can be very compelling and can sway things. And we, you know, we know the fallibility of memory. And so I think there is, there is this need organizationally, to treat personal testimony, which always seems to carry value. I mean, in our previous career, we, you know, experienced this, this a lot that as an analyst, you would collect a wide range of information, you would have things from conversations that people had had reported to you, you would have things related to news articles, and what journalists had reported, and then you would have people who had met the people you were interested in, in person. And in almost every occasion, you could see how their testimony would sway the decision maker more than the other forms of information. They were like, I've, I've met this person, or I've observed this set of events, I've been to this particular place. And therefore, I, you know, on a one on one level, it's very human, I am more convincing than the other more remote, distant pieces of information. And yet, there is clearly a good probability that what they are telling you, they may well believe, but they could be wrong, wrong about. And so it's about ensuring that you are not overly swayed by that type of information.
Speaker A:So it lends a potential to lend a false authority. Yes. To testimony or witness or a view. Okay, so, Nick, you were going to come in with something there.
Speaker B:Yeah, no, I think, sorry, I think the practical, the kind of practical lesson is that we just need to be much more sceptical about not just other people's testimony, but our own. And so you know, that that's, that's the problem is, is when it comes to our own, I think it's very hard. Wittgenstein, this is something Wittgenstein, well, he touched on these kinds of issues. And he, I think, at some point, used the analogy of buying this, you know, to check what was in a newspaper, but whether or not it was true buying a second copy of the same newspaper. And I think that's, that's the problem we're in, you know, we can only ever get a second copy of our own newspaper. We just, there's no, there's no feature of false memories, which we can sort of pay attention to, and therefore, you know, learn to strip them out. We just have to be, you know, constantly saying, and I mean, but you know, we've all, haven't we all been in arguments, it must be, it'll be with some kind of relative, usually, usually a mum or something like that, you know, about, you know, oh, no, I really remember you said that, and we were on that holiday, and you did this thing, and you sort of very distinctly remember it being totally different. You know, typically, there'll be a self serving element, you know, you'll remember that somebody else did a silly thing. And but, you know, your mum will be convinced it was you. And, you know, there's not a kind of, well, we'll agree to differ. I, that's unbearable, you know, that you're right. You know, I mean, I can't be the only person who's
Speaker C:Yeah, there's also a real sense of deflation when you have it categorically proved to yourself that your false memory is indeed false. You know, when somebody says, well, you know, here's your passport or whatever. And you, you weren't actually there when you thought you were or, you know, in your case, you weren't in the flats that you thought you were in.
Speaker B:The thing that I mean, I've always been, I don't know, perhaps I've never had enough confidence, or I've never paid enough attention to things, I think, to remember stuff properly. But I used to like watching Crime Watch as a kid. You know, I don't know why. But the thing that used to amaze me is that, you know, there will be a reconstruction of something of a crime that happened three months ago. And they'd say, you know, police really want to talk to, you know, anyone who was in the area and might have seen a car driving down this road at three in the afternoon. And then they'll say, we've had a number of calls saying they saw a blue Ford Escort in the area about that. Who are these people? They can remember the makes of cars that drove past at a certain time.
Speaker C:I'm now going to, I'm now going to reveal something about myself, which is that one of my, one of my personal sort of daydreams is if I see something slightly suspicious, I make a mental note of the license plate. And then I have a fantasy going forwards about how I'm the the key witness in solving some major, major crime.
Speaker B:And it hasn't happened yet. But that's just through lack of opportunity, presumably.
Speaker C:Well, yeah, I mean, I've done it, must have done it, you know, tens, tens of times. But one day, one day, I will be the key witness.
Speaker B:You need to hang around in more sort of crime ridden areas. I actually did. I did. We're getting a bit off topic here. But I did actually see a, I saw the most exciting crime I've ever seen was a smash and grab raid. And a couple of blokes turned, I was in, it was nighttime, I was in Carkinwell, I just finished playing poker. And I was waiting for a bus. And these two chaps turned up on a bike. One of them jumped off with a sledgehammer, smashed his way through the shop window, clambered in, came out with a load of clothes, and they drove off. But I did, I had the same thought. With yourself in hot pursuit, right? I didn't even, I was actually too scared to call the police. Because I thought, you know, I'm armed with a mobile phone, and they've got an enormous sledgehammer. So I didn't really want to look like I was calling the police. I mean, they were fairly nonchalant about it. But I did find myself thinking, actually, you know, what would, what would I, what details could I recall here? You know, and it's, now, now I look back, and I think actually, probably, I've turned, I've turned the narrative into something more coherent than was actually there.
Speaker A:So having sort of brought this phenomenon to our consciousnesses, is there, can you think of any, we've thought of examples where we've misremembered something. Can you give me any examples, ideally, from when you've been within an organisation, where you've been aware of this happening, and have sort of intervened and said, well, hold on. I mean, we need to be aware that we could have a false memory of this. I mean, it's, I mean, it's nice if it's a personal one. But if there's a, can you think of an organisational example? Because essentially, what we're saying, it sounds to me is like, okay, we need to be aware that this phenomenon exists. But to what end? Because how do you then prevent this from happening?
Speaker B:Well, there are, unfortunately, I can't remember any specifics. But there have been several cases, I think Tony Blair was one of them, who, you know, told us a firsthand account of something that had happened to him. Something that actually had been written, written about an entirely different politician, which he'd read in a, in a biography or something. But I mean, there have been quite a few well documented cases of public figures. I think Ronald Reagan, there's a few stories about him, having done the same sort of thing, you know, recounted stories that actually were, were things that had happened in films. You know, it's just very, very common. And I, so I think the answer is just, we just have to be aware of it. And we just means we have to factor that urge to believe eyewitness testimony has to be something that we should consciously pay attention to. And, you know, and factor out. Because it's, it's, it's not exactly the same. But something
Speaker A:that interests me is, is it a more kind of cultural level, or sociological level, where something becomes, I'm talking about narrative here, and a construction of a narrative, which becomes true, you know, along the lines of, you know, history is written by the victors. That's the kind of thing that interests me, because I think that's something you can be aware of, and look to be, and you can modify one, your behaviour. I mean, this reminds me of that quote, I know, this is,
Speaker B:it's known who said this, but I can't bring it to mind right now. But that, you know, things that appear in the press, are more or less mostly true, other than the things about which you have firsthand personal knowledge, and you realise that they're a load of rubbish. You know, we've all had that experience, even if it's a local paper writing about a sports event that you've been in, they get your name wrong, and your age wrong, and your class wrong, and the spelling of the school wrong, it'll all be wrong. But we still kind of believe news stories when we read them, even though our personal experience tells us that we shouldn't. And I just think this is a similar
Speaker C:kind of situation. Yeah, and I think it also, it also calls into question very often, you know, if organisations have people in particular, other countries, for example, their, you know, their authority, when they come back to report about what is, what has happened in that country, is usually given much greater credence than somebody who has been studying something remotely. And we should ask ourselves, you know, why that is, I recall the the case of, you know, looking at Middle Eastern countries, and, you know, an Arabist, who had been in the country coming back, who, you know, always fairly pretentiously insisted on using, you know, correct pronunciation for all the town names, which is, which is fine. But when, you know, when people say they're going to Barthelona for their holiday, you often smirks yourself. So it's a similar kind of thing. And yet, as I said, you know, his recollection of those, of those events was considered to be the gold standard truth. And everything else was calibrated around it, as opposed to saying, that's, that's one person's subjective recollection of a set of events. And here are some others, let's triangulate between them. And I, my dad was a journalist,
Speaker B:and that had plenty of stories of, you know, the real, how the how it works in the real world. And I remember he was saying one of his one of his friends was a foreign correspondent, he said that he was, he was in Beirut during the during the, you know, the fighting in the 80s. And I think he was, you know, he'd been phoned up to give the story about what was going on. He didn't have a bloody clue. He's in a hotel. So he just looked at the Reuters Newswire. And it said, you know, it's a city of fear here tonight. And he just said, well, it's a city of fear here tonight, you know, and, and made up the story based on based on what he kind of thought was probably going on based on the other news stories that he'd read. But the fact that he was a foreign correspondent meant that, you know, he was supposed to be an authority. And actually, you know, it's interesting when you are in anywhere, like a war zone or anywhere, which is supposed to be dangerous, you realize that actually, these things are totally different to how you imagine that actually often things that look like massive war zones are really just fighting, you know, happening in a very small place. But of course, you know, what we see is the exciting bits. I think there's a really
Speaker C: one, one thing out of out of: Speaker B:our own brains. I think to sort of bring it back to the way that we form memories, you know, you would think that being exposed to all this, having everyone with mobile phones and dashcams would sort of get rid of this problem, that we would know what was happening, that there would be no doubt as to what the truth was. But actually, in the same way that, you know, our own memories are formed through an act of interpretation of the world rather than as a kind of direct recording of it. Likewise, it doesn't, you know, having all this available media doesn't seem to have made life significantly more, or doesn't seem to have made our beliefs about the world
Speaker C:significantly easier to form. And I think a part of that is just the inherent confirmation bias, that, you know, if you take some of the footage of, you know, very, some of the shootings in the US, people will, you know, people will say, here's the footage, and you would think that it would be, it would be, you know, non contestable what the actual, what had actually happened. And yet people read the events, you know, seeing them themselves in different ways, they interpret those in different ways, they see the same thing, and they interpret it in different ways. And I think, you know, getting back to the false memories idea, you could, you know, if you say to people, you know, they've looked at loading of memories, and this relates to something you were talking about in a previous podcast on marketing, you know, what is marketing about? Well, part of it is about pre-loading the formation of memory, that if you say, you know, here were two cars that crashed into each other, here's footage of it. And you say to somebody, you know, when these, when these really fast cars smashed into each other, you know, look at these really fast cars smashing into each other. And then you ask somebody about their recollection of seeing the video footage, they will report fast cars smashing into each other. If you say, you know, look at this slight bump that happened, or whatever, that will change people's perception of the memory. And I think, you know, a lot of the reason why we develop a false memory or a misaligned memory is to do with what we want to believe in the first place and how we slot our observation of something into a narrative that we've already
Speaker A:formed. But also, I can imagine our friend and colleague Peter Coghill would have something to say to this, is we're getting to the territory of data and processing of data, it sounds like
Speaker B:to me. We need to wrap up there. I think I can guess what his view would be. Tell me. And it would echo what Chris himself sang when he was in the band D Ream, which is that things can only get
Speaker A:better with technology. Let's wrap up there. Thank you very much to Nick Hare and to Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights. I'm Fraser McGruer. Thank you for listening. And until next time, goodbye.
