The "Mandela Effect"- Has my Bible changed? Or do I just have a bad memory like most people?

Pashalis said:
So essentially the people engaged in this Mandela Effect, can and do. only rely on their own brains (without knowing anything about it) when assessing the informations related to "the effect", since that is their only reference point that "proofs" that a change has occurred, since there is a glitch somewhere that allowed them to remember the other time line.

Yeah, the irony of folk who have no idea of the many ways our brains can throw reading errors into the mix, all running around and getting freaked out by the notion that some things ain’t quite what they seem to be. :rolleyes:

There are unaccountable mysteries and occurrences of high strangeness, but very often the solutions can be far more mundane and closer to home than that I think.
 
Alada said:
onemen said:
Ok then what about the Mattew 26:45-46 about Wake Up/Sleep-rest ? For some reason It's bugging me the most.
Am I one of thoses who always thought Jesus said to his disciples "to stay awake / not to sleep". Or I was wrong from the beginning on this ?
Because when I heared about this on the Red Pill video, I had to verify because I always though he said to "stay awake"and It is just told "you are sleeping now and resting yourself" (It's Louis Segond in French) but in other versions It's clearly said a variation of "Sleep on now/rest/take your rest".
In fact, I always had an image in mind from the Jesus movie of 1979 where he descended a moutain after praying and telling his disciples to stay awake before the military coming to take him.
But now I've just learned that the movie was based on the Luke gospel
(Watch here at 1:22:55 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWYuIe8ftHA).
Well it's not really matching my memory of him descending a mountain but even so it still don't make sense, as in the matching history segment to Mattew, he is depicted saying: "Why are you sleeping?" he asked them. "Get up and pray so that you will not fall into temptation." (Chap 22: verse 46), which is closer to the idea of "Wake up/don't sleep I had in mind.

Well, I've even cited this verse to a relative not later than a few weeks ago. I also had in mind that reference from Marianne Williamson about Jesus asking to stay awake in Love Reality Time of transition.

Well seems to me the above adds to the data supporting the idea that combining many sources just muddies the water, we miss remember and or substitute and fill in the blanks. Did you see Laura’s earlier post on Bible quotations here?

I'm from a christian background. I recall having read a good portion of the new testament up to the Roman book when I was 15 or 16 years old. But the thing is that I neither can't remember this particular verse, nor the first time I had this idea that Jesus said to "Stay Awake at the moment of my death"... At least, Before encoutering this community.

Because on reflection, I begun to be attached to this idea (of a Jesus descending a mountain and telling his followers to stay awake at the moment of his arrest) from a combination of the ideas of Gurdjieff (to stay awake you need to remember death) with the readings on the forums/cassiopaea website about the c's or the necessity to wake up / to be conscious and also from the citation from this Love Reality & Time of transition documentary and after learning about Caesar, I kind of had understood this in mind with "Caesar's spirit"." ( :lol: )
Although I never really checked the correct saying until yesterday in the Bible and in the movie in question. Not only the verse is quite contrary of what I had in mind, but also in the movie he didn't descend from a moutain, he only prayed on a rock.

So, that might be a correct explanation that my system 1 filled the blanks of my gaps in memories with thoses multiples sources above combined with others populars sources which were already misquoted, misrepresented and wrong claims from the beginning that I admitted to be true because I had associated the saying to the ideas from here. :rolleyes:
 
monotonic said:
One of my family members remembers finding verses in the Bible that hadn't been there before and she hasn't found since, at a time when she and her entire family were surrounded by death and survived by coincidence. So I see a connection there between high strangeness and timeline changes.

What did these verses say (exact wording, if she remembers — approximate content, if she does not remember exactly). Also, where in the Bible were they? (Which book of the Bible? Chapter/verse numbers, if she recalls? Or if she recalls only something like "It was somewhere in the Old Testament/New Testament," that in itself is a bit of possibly useful info.)
 
Welcome to the forum Kate, actually, seeing as this is your first post on the forum, we would appreciate it if you would post a brief intro about yourself in the Newbies section, telling us how you found this forum, how long you've been reading it and/or the SOTT page, whether or not you've read any of Laura's books yet, etc.

**Added**

Just saw that you already wrote a small intro here.
 
JGeropoulas said:
JEEP said:
Hithere said:
Scottie said:
The other day, I saw there is some new movie coming out with John Goodman in it. I was totally sure that John Goodman had died! Well, that's curious, no? But who knows... maybe my brain is just confusing him with somebody else. So, what to do? I mentioned it. It was recorded in my brain, filed away, and life went on. So far, there is no significance that I can see even for me personally, so it just gets filed away.

I also thought that he was dead. Maybe a false news story at some point?

Maybe a stretch, but perhaps confused w/ the late John Candy as he was also a tall, rotund actor?
Yeah, that was my first thought too.
That might explain it. :)
 
Hithere said:
JGeropoulas said:
JEEP said:
Hithere said:
Scottie said:
The other day, I saw there is some new movie coming out with John Goodman in it. I was totally sure that John Goodman had died! Well, that's curious, no? But who knows... maybe my brain is just confusing him with somebody else. So, what to do? I mentioned it. It was recorded in my brain, filed away, and life went on. So far, there is no significance that I can see even for me personally, so it just gets filed away.

I also thought that he was dead. Maybe a false news story at some point?

Maybe a stretch, but perhaps confused w/ the late John Candy as he was also a tall, rotund actor?
Yeah, that was my first thought too.
That might explain it. :)

I was thinking it might be a confusion between Philip Seymour Hoffman, who died in 2014, and John Goodman.
 
Hithere said:
JGeropoulas said:
JEEP said:
Hithere said:
Scottie said:
The other day, I saw there is some new movie coming out with John Goodman in it. I was totally sure that John Goodman had died! Well, that's curious, no? But who knows... maybe my brain is just confusing him with somebody else. So, what to do? I mentioned it. It was recorded in my brain, filed away, and life went on. So far, there is no significance that I can see even for me personally, so it just gets filed away.

I also thought that he was dead. Maybe a false news story at some point?

Maybe a stretch, but perhaps confused w/ the late John Candy as he was also a tall, rotund actor?
Yeah, that was my first thought too.
That might explain it. :)

Me too I though he was dead. But it was a hoax.

_http://hoaxes.org/weblog/comments/john_goodman_isnt_dead
 
Although there are probably some rare occurences of splitting realities, most cases are likely due to wrong memories. The problem is not wrong memories per se but the fact that a lot of people are convinced that they perfectly remember this or that event. It can be considered as a form of Dunning-Kruger effect where the individual overestimates the accuracy of his memories.

Here is an article describing the false memory process and how numerous factors can create false memory that, of course, we consider as true.

How false memories are created and can affect our ability to recall events.


https://www.psychologistworld.com/memory/false-memories-questioning-eyewitness-testimony.php

You may take it for granted that the person whose memory you can trust the most is your own.

Yet, psychologists have found that our recollection of everyday events may not be as dependable as we would believe. Moreover, even once information has been committed to memory, it can be altered. Our recollection of memories can be manipulated and even entire sets of events can be confabulated (Coan, 1997).

False memories have been investigated by psychologists as early as Freud but have attracted significant attention in recent decades. Our recollection of past events can affect not only our future decisions and opinions but also more significant outcomes, such as court verdicts, when influenced by inaccurate eyewitness testimonies (Loftus, 1975).

In this article, we will look at how false memories are created, the impact of questioning, language and other factors on our recall and the real life consequences of false memories.

False memories and False Memory Syndrome


Many of us experience false memories without even realising:

Imagine that you are walking past a person in the street and see them clearly for only a split second. Once they are out of view, you might note that they were carrying a satchel. But what color was it?

"Green," you might think, "Yes, it was green."

But then self-doubt sets in:

"Or was it the person's coat that was green - wasn't the bag blue? Yes, it was an eggshell blue. I remember now," you may ruminate.

Once you have suggested to yourself this alternative, a false memory may develop and your recollection of events can become skewed.

False memories are a normal occurrence and they will generally have little impact on our lives. In rare cases, however, a false memory can bother a person.

A person may come to believe the traumatic details of a false memory and it can then affect them in their ability to function as normal in everyday life. In such severe cases, the experience has been labelled as false memory syndrome, although there is some doubt as to its existence as a condition.

You can, however, experience and believe false memories without suffering from false memory syndrome. You might recall a previous holiday and idealize it - look at it through 'rose-tinted glasses', and remember spending all of your time on a sunny beach. You overlook the stress of the flight, finding your hotel and the days that it rained. Your memories in this case do not entirely reflect reality, but you do not suffer as a result of them.

Framing questions

Although they are referred to as 'false memories', often our memories are distorted only when we attempt to recall them. Perhaps the best known examples of this are two experiments conducted by U.S. psychologists Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer in 1974.

In the first experiment, Loftus and Palmer (1974) showed different videos of a car collision to different participants. Some saw a video of the car crashing at 20mph, others a video of a collision at 30mph and the rest a video of a crash at 40mph.

The participants were then asked the speed of the collision in a survey question. The question was identical for each participant except for the verb mentioned when describing the crash. Some verbs suggested that the crash was a minor collision, others a full-blown crash.

The experiment results showed that the verb used to describe the crash had more effect on the speed estimated than the actual speed of the car that the participants witnessed in the video
.

In a second experiment, participants were shown similar videos of a car and later questioned about what they had witnessed. The question asked the subject whether or not they had seen any broken glass following the collision, and again, the verb describing the collision was altered to suggest varying degrees of severity.

The researchers found that the more serious the accident seemed in the question wording, the more likely participants were to recall having seen broken glass around the car.

Both studies suggest that the framing of questions following an event can affect our recollection of it, even after it has been remembered. Even seemingly slight changes, such as verb alterations in Loftus and Palmer's experiments, can create false memories of events. In fact, Loftus found in a later experiment that even the switching of 'a' and 'the' in a question can influence respondents' recollection of an object.

Loftus, Miller and Burns (1978) showed participants a number of slides of a car at a junction. They were later questioned regarding the scene. Some were asked whether they had seen 'a' stop sign, others 'the' stop sign. Lotus et al found that those participants asked about 'the' stop sign were more likely to recollect it than other group. The use of the definite article seems to assure people that an object exists without them needing to question its accuracy.

All of these experiments support Loftus' misinformation effect on our memories - the manipulation of past event recollection by misguidance following it; a case of what the German psychologist Georg Müller (1850-1934) may have identified as retroactive interference of information on our memories (Lechner, Squire and Byrne, 1999).

Inventing an entire event

We have learnt from these experiments that our memory cannot necessarily be relied on for the recollection of specific details of an event. But we would know if we had been lead to believe that an entire event had been suggested to us - or would we? This question was answered by one of Elizabeth Loftus' psychology students in an experiment to gain extra credits at university:

James Coan (1997) produced four booklets containing recollections of events from childhood and gave each to a family member. The stories in the booklets were true except for the one given to Coan's brother - a description of him being lost in a shopping mall as a child, an older man finding him and him then finding his family again.

Each family member was asked to read through the booklets and familiarise themselves with their contents, after which they were asked to recall the stories. Coan's brother recalled the story with additional details invented by himself, and was unable to identify his as being the falsified story.

This lost in the mall technique of implanting false memories was further tested in a formal experiment with Loftus and Jacqueline Pickrell (Loftus and Pickrell, 1995), and shows how we can even adopt rich false memories that are entirely invented.

Creating false memories

Researchers conducting experiments involving human memory often need to implant invented information and use the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm to create false memories. This involves reading a list of related words to a person (e.g. 'sun, hot, relax, beach, tan, after-sun') and asking them to recall them. It has been found that people will often recall false memories of words which are semantically linked, such as 'holiday' or 'sunbathing', rather than the actual words that had been given to them (Roediger and McDermott, 1995).7

One use for the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm was when researchers at the University of Virginia sought and answer to the question: can your mood affect how receptive you are to false memories?

First, participants of the experiment were lured with false memories using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. Then, the researchers played music to participants to induce either a more positive or more negative mood. They found that subjects in a more negative mood were less likely to recall false memories implanted previously (Storbeck and Clore, 2005).8

Eyewitness testimony: memories in court

The discovery of false memories has had wide-reaching implications, particularly in court cases, where accurate eyewitness testimonies are essential. Factors such as the presence of a weapon when a crime is being committed can affect our ability to recall events clearly. Johnson and Scott (1976) demonstrated this with two groups of participants. Each group was asked to wait in a room. The first group heard a conversation in a nearby room, and saw a man leave the room with greasy hands holding a pen. The second group heard an aggressive argument and then witnessed a man exit the room holding a bloodied knife. The participants were then asked to identify each man from a lineup of photographs.

Members of the first group, who did not witness a weapon, were more likely to be able to correctly identify the man than the group who saw a weapon.


One argument arising from this would be that where a witness gave testimony regarding a defendant who they said had a weapon, the accuracy their recall may be questioned with reference to the effect of weapon focus.

It has also been suggested that in cases such as those involving sexual abuse, in which historic events must be recalled, the techniques used to help a person to recall events may in some circumstances generate false memories.

Hypnosis, for example, which uses suggestions and visualization to induce a trance, could inadvertently interfere with the recall process. For example, Susan Clancy (2005) noted that prior to hypnosis, people who claimed that they had been abducted by aliens did not possess detailed memories of the experience.

The debate and research regarding false memories and memory recall continue today, demonstrating the fluidity of our memories, reminding us many factors can affect our ability to recall events even after they have occurred. Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, who lead some of the first research into false memories, has since testified in hundreds of court cases with regards to eyewitness testimonies and an increased focus on the issue has lead to an improved understanding of the techniques used to recover memories.
 
Interesting phenomenon.

FWIW I actually remember the silver leg when watching star wars. Also years ago when I watched star wars I actually heard the line “no, I’m your father”. I remember distinctly because I had to rewind the video (and god, that makes me feel old!) and re watch the scene several times over. I always thought it was “Luke, I’m your father”.

From what I can “recall”, in the moonraker movie Jaws and the girl both had braces.

But I think that’s most likely a false memory.
 
A couple of things occur to me.

If we pop over into a new time line, we jump into one where everything fits, where a new version of events would presumably come fully equipped with new logical memories associated with them for us to recall upon searching. That is, the discordant memory, the one we insist on having experienced but which no longer fits the objective reality is connected to... nothing.

So when we go back to really search through our minds to see if maybe we were mistaken, well, gosh darn it, we're going to find a logical reason for having been mistaken, because all we have access to now will be a set of chemical/neural markers which make sense for the current reality. In fact, the more we search and try to remember, firing the brain elements associated with that memory, the more it will firm up and become obvious. Simply by thinking, we solidify the current reality and erase any recollection of it having been anything different.

For instance...

I remember the girl having braces as well. Upon first encountering the "glitch" I am offended! But she DID have braces! I saw the film as a kid; my first bond film. I was seven or eight at the time. I remember it standing out!

But looking at the video evidence presented in the YouTube clip, and going over it in my mind several times, I find my initial certainty slowly erasing.

I can even think of a rational reason for the error; priming. -The whole scene uses a number of psychological cues and markers which *demand* that she have braces...

-Who is that girl? She's in danger! She's just little and he's a terrifying monster! This is horrible! We do not want to see the terrible outcome. We want something to avert pain!

-She's a little nerdy. (Nerds have braces). -Jaws is a damaged guy, but has a simplicity, even an innocence to him. (He's nerdy too). We really want him to have a heart in his chest!

-Sunlight glinting on his BRACES when he SMILES. (Priming the next shot.). He likes her. He maybe won't hurt her. Good! -And see..? They share a moment of soul recognition and affection; they are the same! She's okay! He's okay! It's all going to be okay! -The camera rests on her, we look for her reaction and she rewards us with an awkward, sunny smile. She loves him! But... it is missing something. All the cues have been placed for BRACES in her nerdy smile. So they must be there.

Easy.

We'll just insert them. Our brains aren't movie cameras. We assemble details as needed, and we have just been pummeled for the last ten seconds with a strong rational and emotional requirement for braces to be on that girl's teeth.

Derren Brown would be proud. (Or is that "Darren Brown..?")

And as I think on this explanation.., pow! I actually remember there having been no braces, even thinking at the time in a sub-basement of my braind, "Wait. What? She should have braces for this to make sense. I'll give her braces."

Priming is a powerful thing. Even in this very thread I saw a couple of examples. Here's one in JGeropoulas's earlier response...

JGeropoulas said:
While I've been putting my response together, I missed some of the additional discussion, but here's my 2 cents:
Beau said:
Perhaps a lot these instances are people remembering things how they should be and not as they are, although that doesn't explain why so many people remember Mandela dying in the 80's. But the Scarecrow with a gun? And the lion vs. wolf? I think there is some validity to the idea of timeline changes here.
I've watched that movie every year of my childhood and I have never seen that gun pictured. Seems like the tin man had an ax because he was a wood chopper, but there’s no rationale for the lion having the gun, and if he did, then his fearfulness would’ve made less sense. (I wonder if the original book indicates he had a gun)?

Nobody said the lion had a gun. The claim was that the Scarecrow had a gun; it was in the very piece of text JGeropoulas quoted just above. However, it is an understandable error, since we were just talking about lions and sheep and perceptual artifacts.

...

The more I think through my little plot explanation for Dolly having braces, the more I solidify it, annihilating the old memory and becoming more convinced of the present reality's endless permanence.

Except, dammit, I was CERTAIN that she had braces. I remember seeing them. But clearly I was wrong, and now I also have an explanation to rationalize it. Evidence that my brain sucks.

Or maybe... maybe I was right.

How can we proceed if we click into the materialist notion that intuition is garbage and that there is a reasonable, boring, swamp gas explanation for everything?

I don't accept that. I need proof!

But there is no proof. Proof in many cases would represent a violation of free will. Or is that just another materialist swamp gas retroactive explanation?

It's a tricky business, this whole trying to see beyond the Matrix.
 
I've been taking Strangers to Ourselves to work with me to read on my breaks, and the other day a coworker sparked a conversation with me about parallel realities after reading the blurb on the back. She thought the book would help her understand the phenomena, and she brought up the Berenstain Bears topic as a case in point. It's been such a long time since I'd watched the animated cartoons or read the books that I couldn't remember how it was spelled, but I remembered it being pronounced "Berensteen" so I was perplexed when she pointed out that it was actually spelled 'stain'. Not indicative of any parallel reality shifts, but a good example of how the mind can distort reality if we're not paying attention.

There was another incident recently where I recalled an excerpt of a tv show to a coworker, and when the clip was pulled up it wasn't at all how I remembered it. The lines being said were the same, but I mis-remembered who was in the scene and even their ethnicity! It's been at least 10 years since I'd seen the clip, so when we watched the scene and I saw just warped my memory of it was I attributed it to the length of time since having seen it and my mind doing some weird memory alterations based on who showed me the video.

Pierre said:
Although there are probably some rare occurences of splitting realities, most cases are likely due to wrong memories. The problem is not wrong memories per se but the fact that a lot of people are convinced that they perfectly remember this or that event. It can be considered as a form of Dunning-Kruger effect where the individual overestimates the accuracy of his memories.

Here is an article describing the false memory process and how numerous factors can create false memory that, of course, we consider as true.

How false memories are created and can affect our ability to recall events.


https://www.psychologistworld.com/memory/false-memories-questioning-eyewitness-testimony.php

Thanks for sharing the article Pierre!
 
Everyone who has seen the bond movie made the connection with the braces . That is pretty powerful suggestive manipulation. What exactly is going on here?
 
This is strange indeed, I remember "Sex in the city" and "interview with a vampire". We all should understand how, as pierre shared, "false memories are created and can affect our ability to recall events" but that doesn't explain the group memory changes as this seems to be the case. I also agree that this is probably not that important, except maybe an indication of reality becoming more fluid/timeline change/group could be connecting deeper through the work and networking, or even an indicator that we should begin thinking as a group since separation is an illusion... or a big hoax. We'll figure it out in "time".
 
Thinkingfingers said:
This is strange indeed, I remember "Sex in the city" and "interview with a vampire". We all should understand how, as pierre shared, "false memories are created and can affect our ability to recall events" but that doesn't explain the group memory changes as this seems to be the case.

Here is an article describing how collective false memory can form:

Can groups of people "remember" something that didn't happen?

http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/now/question/217069-can-groups-of-people-remember-something-that-didn-t-happen

In a recent Public Policy Polling survey of registered Republicans, over one third of the participants believed that thousands of Muslims had been cheering in the streets while the Twin Towers crumbled on September 11th. Donald Trump, as of publication, not only holds this belief himself but asserts that he is “100% right” about it despite being confronted with overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Despite being one of the most well-documented catastrophes in modern times, there is no video footage, photographs, or corroborated reporting of any celebrations happening.

While it’s tempting to believe that Trump and one third of Republican voters are simply delusional, it’s hard not to see the force of their convictions as evidence of a genuine feeling of “remembering” something. But can a group of people really remember something that didn’t happen? Hopes&Fears reached out to psychologists specializing in neurobiology, cognitive science, developmental psychology, and social psychology to find out the answer. It turns out Republicans might not be the only group likely to collectively (mis)remember the past.

Stephen J. Ceci - Professor of Developmental Psychology at Cornell University

Off the top of my head the first and best example I can think of that demonstrates mass false memory is the classic social psychology study done in 1954. Princeton and Dartmouth played particularly rough football game in 1951 and then four years later students at both schools were shown a film of the game. Among the many examples of roughness, the All-American quarterback for Princeton got his nose broken and had a concussion, and another player got his leg broken. Everyone agreed that the teams were playing “dirty.” However, the way students from the two schools recalled the infractions was biased. Princeton students were much more likely to recall Dartmouth players committing infractions while Dartmouth students were more likely to recall the infractions being committed by Princeton players.

In some of the high-profile mass-allegation daycare cases, it was customary for one child to initially make a disclosure about his or her molestation by, say, a teacher’s aid, then soon most of the classmates would “remember” similar molestation. The contagion was caused by a combination of social pressures (“Don’t you want to help put the man in jail who hurt your classmate, Isabel?”; “Isabel said you were there and it happened to you, too.”) and various types of suggestion such as inducing the children to engage in imagery about the alleged molestation (“OK, so how do you think you would feel IF it happened to you?”) that subsequently gets incorporated in the memory trace of all classmates subjected to the imagery.

Kimberly Wade - Associate professor in Psychology at the University of Warwick

There are a few relevant studies that show people can hold distorted memories about significant public events. The best example is an experiment by Stephan Lewandowsky and colleagues in 2005 that shows Americans are more likely than Australians and Germans to falsely remember that weapons of mass destruction had been discovered in Iraq. There is another study by Sacchi and colleagues (2007) looking at how doctored photos of past public events can distort people’s memories. Adults were shown misleading doctored photos of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing and a 2003 protest in Rome against the war in Iraq. The Beijing event was made to look more significant by increasing the size of the crowd. The Rome photo was made to look more violent by inserting police officers and aggressive-looking demonstrators. The results showed that people who viewed the doctored Beijing photo estimated that a larger number of people were involved than people who viewed the original photo. People who viewed the doctored Rome photo said the event was more and negative, and recalled more physical confrontation and damage to property. They were even less inclined to participate in future protests after seeing the doctored photo.

So it’s not inconceivable that this sort of thing can happen in a group setting. There are many studies showing that when two people witness the same event and discuss it, one person’s memory report can contaminate what the other person subsequently claims to remember. This is called ‘memory conformity’ in the literature and it’s a very powerful and well-documented effect.

There are several good reasons to think that childhood memories are more prone to distortion than recent memories. Of course, most people understand that memories fade over time and that childhood memories are more likely to be sparse and lacking in detail. Given this, and some other good reasons, we predicted that it would be easier to implant false memories in people for an event that supposedly happened when they were 2 years old rather than 10 years old. And that’s exactly what we found in an experiment we published in 2008 (Strange, Wade, & Hayne, 2008).

The thing is, false memories can serve a variety of functions. Lots of research shows that some false memories are self-serving— they can make us feel better about ourselves, better about our relationship, better about the country we live in and love.

People are more likely to remember information that is provided if it is in a weird, difficult-to-read font.

Larry R. Squire - Professor of Psychiatry, Neurosciences, and Psychology at the University of California, San Diego

I am not sure what to make of the idea of false memories in groups and would think the issues are the same as in individuals. For example, we did a study of how recollection surrounding the O.J. Simpson trial verdict changed over time in a group of students. Was this group behavior or something that happened in many individuals? In any case, I should think the mechanisms should be the same in individuals or groups (if there is a phenomenon that depends in some way on group behavior).

I should expect older memories to be more subject to distortion because there has been more opportunity for them to change as the result of retelling, hearing other versions, and having other (related) experiences.

MIT researchers recently were able to successfully plant false memories in mice

William Hirst - Professor of Psychology at The New School

We know that it’s relatively easy to implant memories. In certain situations you can implant them about 30 to 40 percent of time. We also know that once a memory has been implanted the process continues and there are studies on what’s called updating. Take the case of false news about the Iraq War early on which was discovered to be false; in one study if you were in Germany or Australia you were likely to update the information, but if you were American you weren’t as likely to update the information. So for some people, even if you were told a fact was wrong, you would still remember the previous incorrect fact. This suggests that memory is schema consistent, so if something fits into the way you think things should be it, you don’t easily revise the memory once it’s been formed.

A schema is sort your organized representation of the world. When something fits into your view of the world, you’re primed to absorb that information. If it’s mildly inconsistent, it sort of stands and becomes memorable. But if it’s too inconsistent then it slips away. In terms of groups talking together, studies suggest that false memories are more likely to arise in a group discussion than individually because there is more chance of somebody offering a false memory which can then be implanted. However, if somebody in the group says “no that’s not true”, that will mitigate the influence. But for groups with a strong shared interest, like Trump supporters, they’re less likely to dispute one another and therefore it’s less likely for their memories to be updated.

I think it’s absolutely clear that our memories fit into a way of viewing and interpreting the world. From all the evidence, memory is not like a tape recorder. There’s not really a “truth” to memory. What Frederic Bartlett said is that memory is a continuous reconstruction. And what guides your reconstruction? Your view of the world. So memory,if you like, has a presentism (to use an ugly word). Your current view of the world, your current attitudes, allow you to reconstruct your own past to be consistent with your present self. We’re constantly reshaping our memory to essentially reinforce our present attitudes.

Also, every time we remember things, we’re selective. There are studies which suggests that not only does silence allow certain facts to decay or be forgotten, but also, because we talk about some things and not other things, the act of talking can actually promote forgetting some things. This is what I’ve called retrieval induced forgetting. Basically, you’re sculpting a collective memory about things which are rehearsed but also around things which we’re silent about. Furthermore, you’re more likely to show induced forgetting if a person you’re talking to is a member of your ingroup than an outgroup.

The basic thrust of my work is that our memories are to a large extent determined by our interactions with others, and by others I mean other people, media, and other external factors. Our memory is not only our own, but also that of all we interact with.

Fake Memories

In 1977, 60 eyewitnesses to a plane crash that killed nine people were interviewed by Flying Magazine. But they had differing recollections. One of the witnesses explained that the plane “was heading right toward the ground—straight down.” Yet photographs showed that the airplane hit flat and at a low-enough angle to skid for almost one thousand feet.

Craig Stark, Ph.D. - Professor of Neurobiology and Behavior, Fellow at Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, Facisco J. Ayala School of Biological Sciences

There are two ways we need to think about this. One is thinking about the group as a collection of individuals. And so, therefore, whatever leads one person to have a false memory-those same things can lead to one person or multiple people having a similar kind of false memory. So a classic example of this, myself included, will give Whether they’re giving demonstrations to audiences whether they’re a class of undergraduates or federal judges in which I plant false memories in 80% of the audience.

But in this case it’s really that you have a technique that’s so good at implanting a false memory—it’s got an 80% chance at working in each individual, so it’s going to work for most of the individuals in the audience. But there’s no interaction amongst that that’s doing anything to alter that it’s really just that each of them have this independent probability. So that’s one kind of group false memory.

The other kind is whether the group itself, or the interactions amongst the group, will do anything to alter the rate of the false memory, so as people start talking to each other, what does this actually do. I’m not a social psychologist who does anything in terms of group dynamics, but there is a bit of stuff out there on this kind of thing. A classic paper is one that surveyed about 3000 people after 9/11 looking at the accuracy of their memories, so comparing their memory versus the original one, and one of the things that they found is that the contents of the memory were really dictated in the end—so first of all one big aspect of the results is when they compared those two accounts, they found that 40% of the details differed from time point 1 to time point 2. What really drove the contents of that was how much they had paid attention to the media or discussed with other people the details of the event in the intervening time.

So as you’re talking with your buddies it can easily become part of your memory. Just as your buddy might be saying “Yeah, I can’t believe it, there were all these Muslims in Jersey who were celebrating,” and then their seeing it becomes your seeing it, so there definitely are these group dynamics as well.

For the September 11th story they looked at things like “did you have personal loss?” How emotionally salient was this for you? Did you live in New York City?” They looked at all those factors and those factors, but they didn’t do anything to alter the odds that those factors would be distorted or changed after a year. But it’s not like “Oh because you had a personal loss, then your memory of those events is protected.” Pitting them against each other is a difficult kind of thing—it’s like saying “Who’s a better athlete? A lineman on the football team, a basketball player?”

I’ve been looking at the neurobiology of memory for a long time; I haven’t seen anything in there that says “You should be able to stick some bit of information into your brain, and have it be free of any sort of distortion or degradation. Nothing that says it’s burned into your memory and you’ll remember it like it just happened. I’ve never seen anything that says you should be able to do that. And there are dozens of mechanisms in which you should be able to change, and it’s good thing that it can change because our memory didn’t evolve so that we would be able to have something happen to us—whether a day, week, or decade later—be able to relive all of that information perfectly from that one individual. We extract information from across events and from our past experiences; they shape we see the world and remember the world, and that shaping is distortion. We call is wisdom, we call it knowledge, we call it experience, and that’s great. But it is also going to be filling them in, and a lot of that filling in is education guesses, but it also leads to filling in of all of these different kinds of distortion. It’s a much more efficient system, more adaptive system, but it is one that’s not going to be perfect.

Take your digital camera—and it takes these pictures, and we think these pictures are an absolute record of what happened because it’s a picture. Except the digital camera is using a JPEG compression and what the algorithm does it makes these little squares saying “what can I throw away that the eye is never going to see?” I’m gonna throw away the details to get to the gist of what actually matters. Your memory is going a similar thing—it’s called a lossy compression scheme—and what it does is if you want to zoom into, say a license plate, you won’t get that crystal clear enhancement because that information is gone. And our memory is doing the same thing. We have tons of information stored in our synapses and the strength of our synapses is how it’s storing memory but it’s using those same synapses for different memories. So as you expose yourself to similar things it’s using similar patterns.

The mere act of retrieving a memory puts it into a plastic state; you can do mad scientist ways of erasing a memory, or in a more normal situation, it’s in a labile state, so if there’s something new you’ve learned about the memory, you can update the contents of your memory. Just as you might hear your buddies talking about Muslims protesting in New Jersey, you put this new bit of information in your memory.

Frederich Barlett said memory is an imaginative reconstruction; we’re making it up out of our biases, our expectations, and how the world has shaped us.
 
Nima said:
FWIW I actually remember the silver leg when watching star wars. Also years ago when I watched star wars I actually heard the line “no, I’m your father”. I remember distinctly because I had to rewind the video (and god, that makes me feel old!) and re watch the scene several times over. I always thought it was “Luke, I’m your father”.

Ditto. I remember c3po having a silver leg also. It wasn't until a later victory ceremony that they fixed him up and he got both gold legs as far as I can remember. The quote about "Luke, I'm your father" I think was just a phrase that spread around and everyone just remembered it that way. I can't recall at all the way he actually said it in the movie.

Nima said:
From what I can “recall”, in the moonraker movie Jaws and the girl both had braces.

The way I remember it Jaws had metal teeth but the girl had braces. Kinda surprised to hear that she didn't. :huh: Actually Looking around I just found a discussion on Reddit that people were having and one person linked a universalexports.net website that previewed the show and if you scroll way down you will see Dolly with her description which says she had braces but the pic of her is without. _http://www.universalexports.net/Movies/moonraker-cast.shtml

Edit: to correct website name
 
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