False Memories: What Are They and How Do We Create Them?

False Memories: What Are They and How Do We Create Them?

Grace Holtzclaw

Winthrop University

Introduction

        The concept of fabricating an event that did not actually happen is a term called “false memory.” It is an anomaly that is heavily studied in the psychology community. False memories are most commonly tied into the idea of suppressing childhood abuse, but each individual experience the phenomenon at some point. This may be as simple as “remembering” that a friend said something specifically when, in fact,  they did not. Each person questions the validity of an event that has happened in the past, at some point, which can be considered quite normal. This essay will explain what false memories are, how they are formed, theories to explain them, and how they affect humans in different ways. Research on false memories did not become popular until the late 1900s, more specifically the 1970s. Experiments and new research are being explored to this day, with rising popularity (Brainerd & Reyna, 2005, p. 34) .

What are False Memories and How are They Formed?

        Simply put, false memories are just as transparent as they seem. Events and information, once stored, can be fabricated and altered by the brain. The changes made can range from minor details being altered, to extreme where one may remember a whole event that never actually happened.  Humans store events in many different areas of the brain, categorized by the substance of the experience or memory. The hippocampus, part of the limbic system, is most responsible for storing short-term and long-term memory (Brainerd & Reyna, 2005, p. 57-67). Once memories are encoded into their specific compartment of the brain, they can still be altered. False memories are not to be mistaken for fallible memories, where only a small detail of an event is fuzzy or slightly different. Fallible memories are not as much of a phenomenon to scientists because each person is susceptible to minor suggestibility. With each individual’s biased interpretation of an event, the details may become varied. The focus here is not on how memories change in minor detail over time, but how completely new ones are fabricated or changed to extremes. Memories are constantly changing as new information is obtained.

        While a group of people may experience one event, each individual will remember it slightly different from the other individuals. Elizabeth Loftus, an American cognitive psychologist studied the storage of events and memories in depth. She was one of the first to administer a wide range of test studies on encoding and changes made to information over time (Loftus, Doyle, & Dysart, 2013). In one of her studies she had 45 students watch a driver education video where speeding cars were involved in a traffic accident. After the clip the students filled out a questionnaire and gave a personal account on what happened to the vehicles. Some students believed the cars merely “contacted” one another at speed of around 30 miles per hour, while others saw the cars “smashing” into one another at a speed above 50 mph. A week later the students were given the same survey, without re-watching the clip, and many recounted it differently than their initial response (Loftus, Doyle, & Dysart, 2013, p. 70) .  This is considered a phenomena of false memory translation, proving that initial memory interpretations can vary through the experience of each person. Loftus used experiments like this one to prove that false memories may be induced through the suggestion of an outside source, and that memories may be changed once new information is incorporated through experience. Also, memories change and become less clear over time.