There’s surprisingly little difference between real memories and imagined ones—namely the belief that it’s not just imagined. Apply confirmation bias to that and you have a way of planting false memories.
I sometimes give “false memory placebos” where I use the same techniques to give false memories of having hypnotized them for some effect, which then happens because they expect it to. That wouldn’t work if they didn’t alieve it was real.
There’s surprisingly little difference between real memories and imagined ones—namely the belief that it’s not just imagined. Apply confirmation bias to that and you have a way of planting false memories.
Corollary:
There’s surprisingly little difference between real sensory input and imagined ones—namely the belief that it’s not just imagined. Apply confirmation bias to that and you have a way of sending false sensory input.
I don’t think so. I suspect real sensory input are very different from imagined ones, it’s just that most of these differences aren’t preserved by the process that turns sensory inputs into memories.
Meh. To a conscious mind this makes no difference internally.
I sometimes have to experimentally verify whether a stimuli is real or imagined. Like moving closer to the perceived source of a sound/noise to see if it gets louder or not. If it does, it’s real, if it doesn’t, then it isn’t. As far as I know, this isn’t a particularly unique thing that happens only to me.
Only about half of the people being surveyed claimed to remember the false events, so clearly the procedure fails to produce false memories in a large proportion of those surveyed. Just because memories can be faked does not necessarily mean that all or even most of those claiming to remember the events have really produced false memories.
Although I have not done so on surveys, I can certainly attest that I’ve claimed to remember things that I didn’t remember at all; most often I’ve done it to avoid embarrassing other people.
Yes, it’s obviously possible to fail to implant false memories and have them still report that they remember.
I’m not claiming that just asking someone if they remember a fictitious event is enough to reliably implant false memories. I’m also not claiming that the mere existence of false memories under some circumstances means it’s definitely all of them in this case.
It’s just that in my experience its so easy to do real false memories that I think they’re mostly real.
That may be the case. But then, people do seem to lie on surveys quite a lot. I’d be interested to see if the results were significantly different if they used some method, such as dice, to minimize the rate of error by dishonesty.
It’s the former.
There’s surprisingly little difference between real memories and imagined ones—namely the belief that it’s not just imagined. Apply confirmation bias to that and you have a way of planting false memories.
I sometimes give “false memory placebos” where I use the same techniques to give false memories of having hypnotized them for some effect, which then happens because they expect it to. That wouldn’t work if they didn’t alieve it was real.
Corollary:
There’s surprisingly little difference between real sensory input and imagined ones—namely the belief that it’s not just imagined. Apply confirmation bias to that and you have a way of sending false sensory input.
I don’t think so. I suspect real sensory input are very different from imagined ones, it’s just that most of these differences aren’t preserved by the process that turns sensory inputs into memories.
Meh. To a conscious mind this makes no difference internally.
I sometimes have to experimentally verify whether a stimuli is real or imagined. Like moving closer to the perceived source of a sound/noise to see if it gets louder or not. If it does, it’s real, if it doesn’t, then it isn’t. As far as I know, this isn’t a particularly unique thing that happens only to me.
Only about half of the people being surveyed claimed to remember the false events, so clearly the procedure fails to produce false memories in a large proportion of those surveyed. Just because memories can be faked does not necessarily mean that all or even most of those claiming to remember the events have really produced false memories.
Although I have not done so on surveys, I can certainly attest that I’ve claimed to remember things that I didn’t remember at all; most often I’ve done it to avoid embarrassing other people.
Yes, it’s obviously possible to fail to implant false memories and have them still report that they remember.
I’m not claiming that just asking someone if they remember a fictitious event is enough to reliably implant false memories. I’m also not claiming that the mere existence of false memories under some circumstances means it’s definitely all of them in this case.
It’s just that in my experience its so easy to do real false memories that I think they’re mostly real.
That may be the case. But then, people do seem to lie on surveys quite a lot. I’d be interested to see if the results were significantly different if they used some method, such as dice, to minimize the rate of error by dishonesty.