How do we know if the things in our head actually happend? How can we decifer what is true or false or what is real and fake? The answer to that, is we can’t. We can’t really be sure if a memory of true or false without evidence. Not to say that all our memories are false, in fact most of them are true, or else our life would me a mess, but a memory phenomena that shows evidence of the inaccuracy of memory is memory implantation. Memory implantation is a technique used in cognitive psychology to investigate human memory. In memory implantation studies researchers make people believe that they remember an event that actually never happened. The false memories that have been successfully implanted in people’s memories include remembering being lost in a mall as a child, taking a hot air balloon ride, and putting slime in a teacher’s desk in elementary school. Memory implantation techniques were developed in the 1990s as a way of providing evidence of how easy it is to distort people’s memories of past events.

An example of this was explained in class with the “Remember When Game”. In this scenario, a young child was asked about 5 memories, where only 4 were genuine. However when asked about this made up event a couple days later, the child remembered it and recalled details of the even that had never been described to him, and had never happened.

Fortunatley, just this break I was saved from going home to the horrid winter weather in Buffalo NY and instead was invited on my friends family trip to Disney. Knowing I would have to take a break from the sun and sand at some point to do this blog I thought about what do to it on on the plane ride over. I thought one of the most interesting topics we covered in class was memory implantation. And so, I conducted my own experiment. A couple nights before going to the Disney parks prior to family dinner, I pulled her mom aside and asked her to help me out. I briefly explained to her my project and the topic at hand and asked that when talking about memories to throw in a false one.

So at dinner, many stories were brought up in our excitment to return to the parks now a couple years older including one that was made up by my friends mother. This memory included my friend being terrified of Mickey Mouse.

The next day we went to Magic Kingdom and on our walk towards the castle I asked my friend if she was still afraid of Mickey. She then went on to say, “Guys, you don’t understand…. He tried picking me up and I didn’t like getting picked up and his face was scary up close. Then when he set me down I ran away behind my mom and he came after me and tried getting a hug from me”.

We later that night explained to my friend that her memory and fear of Mickey wasn’t real… but it was difficult for her to wrap her head around and instead insisted we were playing a mean joke on her.