Out of all the topics we have learned during this course, I have to say learning about false memories was one of my favorites. “A false memory is when you create a memory inside your mind that actually never occurred in real life (Goldstein, 2011)”. This is completely relevant to my life and I am sure anyone else’s by the nature of it, but this is a subject that brings up a lot of arguments between my parents and I on how my childhood had really went.
Anytime my brother and I are talking about our childhood together, he really only remembers about two things and I would be able to remember a whole list of what was really going on. I realize that I have great long term memory but not so much as short term. Anyway going back to the arguments between my parents and I. There is this one scenario that we see differently. My parents had refinished our basement and put both my brother and I bedrooms. They decided to close off my bedroom and turn it into a one bedroom apartment because I apparently did not sleep in it, and from what I remember I had no choice but to move out of that bedroom because of their decision. As you can see I am still holding a grudge over it because we both have different memories of the situation.
Is it possible for me not to remember sleeping in that bedroom anymore and rather sleep upstairs in the bedroom that I originally slept in. Or did my parents just make that up so it would seem believable rather then looking like mean parents kicking me out of a bedroom.
According to our text, “Implanting memories are extremely easy (Goldstein, 2011)”. “Most of our memories can seem accurate, but are actually false (Goldstein, 2011)”. This news is mind blowing. So I guess I will never really know how I felt about that bedroom. Maybe I really didn’t like it because of the “ghosts” living down there in the dark.
References
Goldstein, B. (2011). Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research and everyday experience (3rd ed.). Wadsworth, Inc.
I have to say; I enjoyed learning about false memories as well! It made me think back to my childhood and question a handful of my “memories.” One, in particular, was when I cracked my head on the cement garage steps when I was three. I had no recollection of this up until my dad told me, in very little detail, what had happened. He told me I was running through the garage and slipped on the wet cement. This sparked an incorrect epiphany of me running in a duck costume (random, right?) while my brother was chasing me through the yard while it was raining, and that was how I managed to crack my head open. For years I thought this was what happened, until my family and I were talking about my accident proneness with my SO and my dad told me the full story. Apparently, what had happened was I was with my dad in the garage when my mom yelled that lunch was ready, so I proceeded to run, and I’m sure you can guess the rest of the story.
I found an interesting article about false memories in childhood years; I’ll attach the link. The author, Melissa Dahl, shared a finding by Elizabeth Loftus, at the University of California, Irvine, “We pick up information from all sorts of places and times and use it to ‘create’ our memories,” (Dahl, 2014). Dahl included a humorous example from a tweet from the writer Elizabeth McCracken that said, “Have had reason to confront this upsetting fact: 87% of my kindergarten memories are in fact plagiarized from Ramona the Pest” (Dahl, 2014). It looks as if you and I aren’t the only ones who have had false memories during childhood.
Dahl, M. (2014). Your Fondest Childhood Memory May Not Have Really Happened. Retrieved from: http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2014/09/your-fondest-childhood-memory-may-not-be-real.html.