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Can I trust my memories?
TOP TIPS TO BOOST YOUR MEMORY
Get active
Exercising after learning will help facts stick. For best results, wait several hours before working out.
Quiz yourself
When it comes to revision, reviewing the material isn’t enough. You need to test yourself repeatedly too.
Take a break
You’ll remember more if you take regular breathers from learning. For best results, do something totally different and absorbing.
Timing matters
Teenagers remember better if they learn in the afternoon or evening, while older adults tend to have morning brains.
Try interval training
There’s a “sweet spot” for when you should revise. Revisit material at a point 10 or 20 per cent of the way between the time of learning and of taking a test to improve your memory by at least 10 per cent.
Sleep on it
Snoozing shortly after learning new facts or skills helps the brain reinforce its memory traces – especially if you have a test the next day.
Chew gum
It can help with recall during a test. However, the effects are short-lived, so save your chewing for when you need it most. Kate Douglas 36 | NewScientist | 27 October 2018
Can I trust my memories? Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus exposed false memories in historic sex abuse cases. Now there are fresh reasons not to believe your own memories, she tells Clare Wilson
N
O ONE has done more than Elizabeth Loftus to expose the fallibility of human memory. In the 1990s, amid growing panic over claims of satanic child sex abuse rings, the psychologist showed how easy it is for people to develop false memories of events that never happened. All it took was repeatedly being asked to imagine them. At the time, this was a common psychotherapy technique to recover supposedly repressed memories. Over the past three decades, Loftus, from the University of California, Irvine, has become well known for her work as an expert witness in legal cases. Her ongoing research on the fallibility of eyewitness testimony has taken on fresh importance in an era of fake news, the Me Too movement and digital image manipulation.
true events from their childhood, and a completely made-up experience about how they got lost in a shopping mall, frightened, crying, and were ultimately rescued by an elderly person and reunited with the family. After they’d had about three interviews, we found that about a quarter of these adults fell prey to the suggestion and developed a partial or complete memory of being lost. Why was that discovery important?
At the time, people were going into therapy with depression or an eating disorder and coming out with an even bigger problem, namely memories of traumatic experiences that they thought they had repressed. Their therapists weren’t deliberately planting false memories. They believed that child abuse was the most likely explanation for their client’s problems, and they needed to recover the memory to get better. Innocent people were getting accused and families were being destroyed.
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Why did you first start looking into false memories?
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OK for press
I had already been looking at how reliable eyewitness testimony was, to see if people’s memories of the details of an event could be distorted. Like if the guy running away had curly hair, not straight hair. But in t he 1990s, when there was an explosion of highly improbable satanic child abuse claims, it looked like people were developing whole memories for things that didn’t happen. We came up with the idea of trying to make people remember an event that never happened – being lost in a shopping mall when they were young. How did you do it?
We told people we were doing studies of childhood memory, and we talked to their parents to get some stories. Then we would interview adults and present them with three
What was the reaction?
I started getting hate mail and death threats. There was a letter-writing campaign to try to get me fired from my university position. I also got sued for exposing an egregious case of wrongful accusation. I spent many years fighting off that litigation. These days things have calmed down quite a bit but there’s still some hostility. The Me Too movement has led to a surge in historic claims of sexual assaults. Do you think some of these could be based on false memories?
It is possible. We have to accept that when there are two people whose versions of an
it at 60. People often don’t detect you gave them the wrong rating and they start to feel less anxious about the task. When they look back, it was less awful for them. You could do this with kids when they go to the dentist. A former student of mine did some research with kids at a dental clinic, and she got them to remember less fear and pain, and they also behaved better at the next visit. So there could be benefits to fallible memories?
If your kid has had a traumatic but minor experience,ratherthandwellingonthenegatives, it might be better instead to talk them up. To say:
“People remember voting in elections they didn’t vote in. It makes them feel better”
BRAD SWONETZ/REDUX/EYEVINE
“You were so brave, you hardly cried.” It is generally a little easier to plant a positive memory than a negative one. We don’t know why, it just empirically seems to be the case.
event are different, the man’s version may not be the truth or, alternatively, maybe the woman’s version is not the truth. We have to look for other sources of evidence to corroborate either person. But right now, at the height of “Me Too”, people are not as interested in hearing you talk about false accusations as they might have been a year ago. The pendulum has swung too far in the direction of automatically believing the accuser. It used to be too far the other way. But we know most abuse cases are not successfully brought to trial...
I absolutely see what you’re saying. But as an expert witness on memory, I see a different subset of cases to the ones that most people see. I see the most contentious ones. I hate the idea that people will try to point to all the false memory work and use it to deny guilt when they’re truly guilty. I think that probably sometimes happens and it’s just going to be a cost. I don’t know what we can do to stop that.
What other memory problems has your research shed light on?
We have been doing some work on a phenomenon called memory blindness. Say that someone is being interviewed after witnessing a crime. They tell you that person was wearing a green jacket. Later on you tell them they told you the jacket was brown. We are exploring the extent to which people even notice you fed back a different answer from the one they actually gave. Often they don’t. We think this can be a problem in cases where the police are writing out a statement. They say “Here’s what you told me.” What if there are errors contained in it? It can happen. We are showing that people can fail to detect them and be influenced by them. Can we misremember our feelings as well as facts?
The evidence would suggest so. Another study we are doing is we take you through a difficult task and ask you to rate your anxiety. I tell you that you rated it at 40 when really you rated
Is there any evolutionary reason why memory is so unreliable?
One benefit is that when errors creep in, you can fix them and update memories with true information. Another is that some errors can make you feel better about yourself. These are called prestige-enhancing memory distortions. A common example is people remember voting in elections they didn’t vote in, because they like to think of themselves as civic-minded. Sometimes it gets people into trouble, like in “stolen valour cases”, when someone famous says they were a brave soldier on the battlefield and it turns out they were really behind a desk on that day. So most of the time it is a harmless delusion?
If these kinds of prestige-enhancing distortions aren’t caught, it does allow people to feel better about themselves. People with depression don’t have them as much as everyone else. Such people are sadder but wiser. This is just a correlation, so we don’t know if the lack of prestige-enhancing memory distortions is causing the depression. But it does suggest another possible upside to the unreliability of our memories. If there are costs, there have got to be some benefits. ■ Clare Wilson is medical news reporter at New Scientist 27 October 2018 | NewScientist | 37
Get active
Exercising after learning will help facts stick. For best results, wait several hours before working out.
Quiz yourself
When it comes to revision, reviewing the material isn’t enough. You need to test yourself repeatedly too.
Take a break
You’ll remember more if you take regular breathers from learning. For best results, do something totally different and absorbing.
Timing matters
Teenagers remember better if they learn in the afternoon or evening, while older adults tend to have morning brains.
Try interval training
There’s a “sweet spot” for when you should revise. Revisit material at a point 10 or 20 per cent of the way between the time of learning and of taking a test to improve your memory by at least 10 per cent.
Sleep on it
Snoozing shortly after learning new facts or skills helps the brain reinforce its memory traces – especially if you have a test the next day.
Chew gum
It can help with recall during a test. However, the effects are short-lived, so save your chewing for when you need it most. Kate Douglas 36 | NewScientist | 27 October 2018
Can I trust my memories? Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus exposed false memories in historic sex abuse cases. Now there are fresh reasons not to believe your own memories, she tells Clare Wilson
N
O ONE has done more than Elizabeth Loftus to expose the fallibility of human memory. In the 1990s, amid growing panic over claims of satanic child sex abuse rings, the psychologist showed how easy it is for people to develop false memories of events that never happened. All it took was repeatedly being asked to imagine them. At the time, this was a common psychotherapy technique to recover supposedly repressed memories. Over the past three decades, Loftus, from the University of California, Irvine, has become well known for her work as an expert witness in legal cases. Her ongoing research on the fallibility of eyewitness testimony has taken on fresh importance in an era of fake news, the Me Too movement and digital image manipulation.
true events from their childhood, and a completely made-up experience about how they got lost in a shopping mall, frightened, crying, and were ultimately rescued by an elderly person and reunited with the family. After they’d had about three interviews, we found that about a quarter of these adults fell prey to the suggestion and developed a partial or complete memory of being lost. Why was that discovery important?
At the time, people were going into therapy with depression or an eating disorder and coming out with an even bigger problem, namely memories of traumatic experiences that they thought they had repressed. Their therapists weren’t deliberately planting false memories. They believed that child abuse was the most likely explanation for their client’s problems, and they needed to recover the memory to get better. Innocent people were getting accused and families were being destroyed.
COPY SUB
G_Super_foods
Why did you first start looking into false memories?
PAGE SUB
OK for press
I had already been looking at how reliable eyewitness testimony was, to see if people’s memories of the details of an event could be distorted. Like if the guy running away had curly hair, not straight hair. But in t he 1990s, when there was an explosion of highly improbable satanic child abuse claims, it looked like people were developing whole memories for things that didn’t happen. We came up with the idea of trying to make people remember an event that never happened – being lost in a shopping mall when they were young. How did you do it?
We told people we were doing studies of childhood memory, and we talked to their parents to get some stories. Then we would interview adults and present them with three
What was the reaction?
I started getting hate mail and death threats. There was a letter-writing campaign to try to get me fired from my university position. I also got sued for exposing an egregious case of wrongful accusation. I spent many years fighting off that litigation. These days things have calmed down quite a bit but there’s still some hostility. The Me Too movement has led to a surge in historic claims of sexual assaults. Do you think some of these could be based on false memories?
It is possible. We have to accept that when there are two people whose versions of an
it at 60. People often don’t detect you gave them the wrong rating and they start to feel less anxious about the task. When they look back, it was less awful for them. You could do this with kids when they go to the dentist. A former student of mine did some research with kids at a dental clinic, and she got them to remember less fear and pain, and they also behaved better at the next visit. So there could be benefits to fallible memories?
If your kid has had a traumatic but minor experience,ratherthandwellingonthenegatives, it might be better instead to talk them up. To say:
“People remember voting in elections they didn’t vote in. It makes them feel better”
BRAD SWONETZ/REDUX/EYEVINE
“You were so brave, you hardly cried.” It is generally a little easier to plant a positive memory than a negative one. We don’t know why, it just empirically seems to be the case.
event are different, the man’s version may not be the truth or, alternatively, maybe the woman’s version is not the truth. We have to look for other sources of evidence to corroborate either person. But right now, at the height of “Me Too”, people are not as interested in hearing you talk about false accusations as they might have been a year ago. The pendulum has swung too far in the direction of automatically believing the accuser. It used to be too far the other way. But we know most abuse cases are not successfully brought to trial...
I absolutely see what you’re saying. But as an expert witness on memory, I see a different subset of cases to the ones that most people see. I see the most contentious ones. I hate the idea that people will try to point to all the false memory work and use it to deny guilt when they’re truly guilty. I think that probably sometimes happens and it’s just going to be a cost. I don’t know what we can do to stop that.
What other memory problems has your research shed light on?
We have been doing some work on a phenomenon called memory blindness. Say that someone is being interviewed after witnessing a crime. They tell you that person was wearing a green jacket. Later on you tell them they told you the jacket was brown. We are exploring the extent to which people even notice you fed back a different answer from the one they actually gave. Often they don’t. We think this can be a problem in cases where the police are writing out a statement. They say “Here’s what you told me.” What if there are errors contained in it? It can happen. We are showing that people can fail to detect them and be influenced by them. Can we misremember our feelings as well as facts?
The evidence would suggest so. Another study we are doing is we take you through a difficult task and ask you to rate your anxiety. I tell you that you rated it at 40 when really you rated
Is there any evolutionary reason why memory is so unreliable?
One benefit is that when errors creep in, you can fix them and update memories with true information. Another is that some errors can make you feel better about yourself. These are called prestige-enhancing memory distortions. A common example is people remember voting in elections they didn’t vote in, because they like to think of themselves as civic-minded. Sometimes it gets people into trouble, like in “stolen valour cases”, when someone famous says they were a brave soldier on the battlefield and it turns out they were really behind a desk on that day. So most of the time it is a harmless delusion?
If these kinds of prestige-enhancing distortions aren’t caught, it does allow people to feel better about themselves. People with depression don’t have them as much as everyone else. Such people are sadder but wiser. This is just a correlation, so we don’t know if the lack of prestige-enhancing memory distortions is causing the depression. But it does suggest another possible upside to the unreliability of our memories. If there are costs, there have got to be some benefits. ■ Clare Wilson is medical news reporter at New Scientist 27 October 2018 | NewScientist | 37