For me, growing up was difficult. I spent most of my time stuck in the middle of custody battles, going from home to home, and for the most part, being abused by most of these so-called caregivers. It became apparent that because of the animosity that lurked in the air, I would be told elaborate stories that weren’t always necessarily rooted in truth. It became a constant battle to decipher what was truth and what was not; for a child, that is no easy task. As I got older and started focusing on therapy to deal with my traumas, memories started leaking into the foreground that had me questioning how true they really were. Therefore, when we started focusing on memory, I found it both interesting and disturbing at how easily a false memory can be created and began to really wonder about my own past. Were all the terrible things I remembered completely accurate?
After all, memory truly is just a muddied mess of our mental experiences; each one being vulnerable to be influenced by many factors, including our emotions, beliefs, social context and any prior knowledge. Therefore, what we pull from memory can be significantly different from what was encoded initially, as well as what was encoded being completely different to the actual event in question.
Elizabeth Loftus, whom is a celebrated psychologist and researcher of memory, has given us very convincing evidence into how false memories can grow and become mentally embedded in the brain. She states that many false memories can begin with suggestion towards what an individual may remember about an event. This can be referred to as the misinformation effect, which is when a person’s memory for an event is modified by things that happen after the event has occurred. (Goldstein p. 227) According to Loftus: “Just because someone tells you something with a lot of confidence and detail and emotion, it doesn’t mean it actually happened. You need independent corroboration to know whether you’re dealing with an authentic memory, or something that is a product of some other process.” (Shaw) Basically, we need proof that what we remember is even completely accurate!
Misleading or faulty information almost always leads to a false recollection of an event and as time moves forward, our false memory becomes more vivid which allows it to become more believable. This got me thinking about my own memories; especially when I read about an experiment that Ira Hyman, Jr. conducted where he created false memories for a party and proved it is possible to create false memories for early events in a person’s life. “False memories may have even been involved in some cases of “recovered memories” of childhood abuse” (Goldstein p. 241) Due to the factor that I was told so many different stories, it would be entirely possible that some of my “memories” are no memories at all! At least not all of them. While it’s understandable that human brains are imperfect, the extent in which we should trust our own memories is truly questionable. Which leads me to more questions, such as how do we identify these false memories and is it even possible to reverse them?
Works Cited
Goldstein, E. B. (2011). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience. Stanford, CT: Cengage Learning.
Shaw, J. (2016, August 08). What Experts Wish You Knew about False Memories. Retrieved April 16, 2018, from https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/what-experts-wish-you-knew-about-false-memories/
Hi Ashleigh. I am sorry to hear that you had a hard upbringing. No one should be put in the situation you were in. Thank you for sharing your story. I also have situations where I cannot tell if something happened to me or if it was a false memory. There are some situations or “memories” that I have that are blatantly did not happen based on the rest of my life.
Ashleigh,
Much like you, I have a past that has left me wondering whether or not my memories are true or if they are representations of others’ stories and influence on me. I think as we have made more progress in the study of memories, we are finding how fragile and pliable our memory can be.
Fortunately we are also finding methods to help us process our painful and traumatic memories of the past. There is a form of therapy used in the treatment of PTSD called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) where the patient will think back and imagine the traumatic event while following a therapists moving finger ( or a moving light) back and forth in front of them. After following the movement for a about 30 seconds, the patient then talks with the therapist about the targeted memory that came up, allowing for access to the trauma memory network and allowing new associations with more adaptive memories. They repeat this process many times until the patient no longer feels any sort of emotional distress about the memory.
I have gone through this treatment many times and it has helped me process so many things that I had no idea were causing emotional distress and it allowed me to let go of the pain I had associated with the memories I could remember. It doesn’t really matter if these memories were real or false, their effects are the same and so the focus is instead placed on processing what happened, reducing the sensitivity to triggers and working on more adaptive ways to reframe my thoughts.
References:
http://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/
Ashleigh,
I am so sorry to hear what has happened to you. Your false memories explanation was spot on and it brought me back to a recent episode I watched on SVU Law and Order. It was an episode about a middle aged woman’s father who was sent to jail for twenty years to life because of something she said had happened to her at the age of six years old. She claimed that her father had sexual harassed her. During the episode they showed a little previous background about the parents and the mother was a drug addict and the father was always working to provide for the family (which included a little boy and little girl). However, one time the mother came home and her daughter was crying and she asked her daughter what was wrong? Did he touch you? And the daughter said yes. The father ends up going to prison doing a 20 to life sentence however the daughter decided to recant and stated that it never happened now when she is in her thirties. She claimed she was afraid of her mother and did and said whatever her mother told her too. At the end of the episode they showed a clip where her father was awaiting a hearing and was freed however she had this look on her face and was crying and it seemed like she did not know whether it happened or it did not happen. This SVU episode is an example of a false memory to some extent. This little girl was told something by her mother so many times that she believed it and now that it was decades later she could not really remember what happened. Sometimes people we trust tell us things that aren’t completely truthful but we believe them because we trust this person. This is how false memories can occur.
Ashleigh, what a great post! I am so very sorry to hear that you had to encounter such difficult times throughout your childhood. It is unfortunate that we cannot distinguish the truth from false memories. You asked at the end, how do we identify these false memories and is it possible to reverse them, so I looked into finding an answer.
Apparently there is one method for testing false memories and that is by tracking neural pathways. In a 2008 experiment a team of researchers presented 20 volunteers with a list of words (e.g. nap, sheets, alarm clock, snooze, and bed). Just as we learned in taking the False Memory lab, we may recall words like “sleep” or “pillow” even though it was not one of the original words. These researchers performed and MRI on the volunteers when asked to recall the words, and when they recalled words that were not on the original list, a section of the left temporoparietal region lit up that did not light up when recalled the words that were on the original list. So at least subconsciously the brain knows the difference between reality and illusion. Although not everyone can have an MRI every time they want to know if something really happened or not and it is still exceedingly difficult to tell.
Now, is it possible to reverse false memories? I believe I learned about this in my abnormal psych class, but I have been having trouble mixing the information with both classes this semester. There was a case in 1997 where a woman filed a malpractice suit against her psychiatrist because he basically implanted false memories in her mind making her believe she suffered from, what they referred to then, Multiple Personality Disorder. She originally went to therapy because she had minor insomnia and mild anxiety, but after under-going recovered-memory therapy, her symptoms included; migraines, dizziness, back aches, nausea, bowel disturbances, and severe insomnia. In her case, the psychiatrist used a technique called abreactive therapy which helped create emotional associations to these so-called “memories”. He conducted hypnosis sessions, psychotropic medications and instutionalized her in mental-ward hospitalizations. Her “memories” consisted of being sexually abused by her father at the age of three and forced to engage in bestiality and satanic ritual abuse that included slaughtering and consumption of human babies. According to her therapist, this traumatic experience had generated alternative personalities, or alters, within the clients mind. Creating false memories and creating emotional associations could so easily be generated by a therapist and the mental connections could be so powerful that they generalized to similar stimuli. After her therapy the client recalls finding a piece of hair in her pizza which triggered visual and emotional memories of gagging from eating babies. This is insane stuff and is so scary to think we can so easily be convinced that awful traumatic things happened to us when we don’t even remember. It dates back as far as James B. Watson and the Little Albert experiment with the young baby being deathly afraid of anything with white fur. Although this treatment and experimental techniques are no longer allowed, this client’s case is the reason the APA changed the name from Multiple Personality Disorder to Dissociative Identity Disorder in the DSM. The woman initially fought her diagnosis, but eventually became to believe it. Once she realized she was misdiagnosed it was impossible for her to trust another therapist and unfortunately the only advice she got was to forget her traumatic events whether they happened or not. But how is she to forget when she never even got a trial for the case because of the time frame?
References
https://www.inverse.com/article/29175-how-find-false-memories-your-own-mind