The Memory Illusion

by Dr Julia Shaw

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction: You-ness, and clay with consequences – Why identity and memory are inherently linked

  1. I remember being born: Infant mobiles, tea with Prince Charles, and Bugs Bunny – Why some of our childhood memories are impossible

  2. Dirty memories: #thedress, time travellers, and the good old days – Why to remember is to perceive

  3. Dancing with bees: Roofies, sea slugs, and laser beams – Why brain physiology can lead our memories astray

  4. Memory wizards: HSAMs, braincams, and islands of genius – Why no one has infallible memory

  5. Subliminal memories: Baby learning, psycho-phones, and brainwashing – Why we need to pay attention in order to form memories

  6. Defective detective: Superiority, identity crisis, and making monsters – Why we are overconfident in our memory

  7. Where were you when 9/11 happened?: Flashbulbs, memory hacking, and traumatic events – Why our memory for emotional events is flawed

  8. Social me-dia: Media multitasking, groupiness, and digital amnesia – Why media moulds our memory

  9. Tooky pulled my pants down: Satan, sex, and science – Why we can falsely remember traumatic events

  10. Mind games: Secret agents, memory palaces, and magical realism – Why we should embrace our faulty memory

  Acknowledgements

  Endnotes

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Think you have a good memory? Think again.

  Memories are our most cherished possessions. We rely on them every day of our lives. They make us who we are. And yet the truth is they are far from being the accurate record of the past we like to think they are. True, we can all admit to having suffered occasional memory lapses, such as entering a room and immediately forgetting why, or suddenly being unable to recall the name of someone we’ve met dozens of times. But what if our minds have the potential for more profound errors, that enable the manipulation or even outright fabrication of our memories?

  In The Memory Illusion, forensic psychologist and memory expert Dr Julia Shaw uses the latest research to show the astonishing variety of ways in which our brains can indeed be led astray. She shows why we can sometimes misappropriate other people’s memories, subsequently believing them to be our own. She explains how police officers can imprison an innocent man for life on the basis of many denials and just one confession. She demonstrates the way radically false memories can be deliberately implanted, leading people to believe they had tea with Prince Charles, or committed crimes that never happened. And she reveals how, in spite of all this, we can improve our memory through simple awareness of its fallibility.

  Fascinating and unnerving in equal measure, The Memory Illusion offers a unique insight into the human brain, challenging you to question how much you can ever truly know about yourself.

  About the Author

  Dr Julia Shaw is a senior lecturer and researcher in the Department of Law and Social Sciences at London South Bank University, and is one of only a handful of experts in the world who conduct research on complex memory errors related to emotional personal events – so-called ‘rich false memories’.

  Dr Shaw has published research articles in various international academic journals, has written textbook chapters, is a regular contributor to the popular science magazine Scientific American, and gives guest lectures and conference presentations around the world. She also teaches classes at undergraduate and graduate level, for which she has won two teaching excellence awards.

  Besides her teaching and research, she has delivered general business and police-training workshops, has evaluated offender diversion programs, and works with the UK police to advise on historical sexual and physical abuse cases. She has also been featured as an expert on TV, radio, and in UK and international newspapers.

  THE MEMORY ILLUSION

  Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory

  DR JULIA SHAW

  To Fred.

  ‘Our memories are constructive. They’re reconstructive. Memory works … like a Wikipedia page: you can go in there and change it, but so can other people.’

  – Professor Elizabeth Loftus

  Introduction

  Nobel Laureates, on receiving their prize, get the equivalent of a Twitter post explaining what the award is for. Since I learned this, I have spent what is probably far too much time reviewing these 140-characters-or-fewer statements written to describe the profound impact laureates have had on the world.

  One of my all-time favourites summarises the work of Seamus Heaney, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in literature. It explains that he received the award ‘for creating works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past’. What an incredible statement. Beauty, ethics and history, drenched with a sense of wonder and captured in just a few words. Every time I read that phrase I smile.

  I write these laureate summaries on the little whiteboard I have on my desk as inspiration. I also use them in my lectures, and I try to weave them into my writing. They represent the notion that even humanity’s greatest achievements can be explained in plain English. This is an idea that has been echoed by many of history’s greats; that for our work to carry significance, we must be able to explain it simply.

  I live by this philosophy of explanatory parsimony myself, though of course it does sometimes come at the cost of explanatory adequacy. In other words, when I explain concepts by using analogies, stories or simplifications, I always risk losing some of the nuances of the inherently complex issues under discussion. The subjects I will be examining here, memory and identity, are both incredibly complex, and in a single book I can only hope to scratch the surface of the incredible research being done at the intersection of those areas. But while I cannot promise to capture the whole scientific picture, I do hope to begin a questioning process, one which addresses fundamental queries that have likely been nagging at most of us ever since we first began to utilise the gift of introspection.

  Like many others, I first noticed my ability to introspect when I was a child. I remember lying awake for hours as a little girl, unable to fall asleep because I was so engrossed in thought. Lying on the top bunk of my bed I would press the soles of my feet against the white ceiling of my room and reflect on the meaning of life. Who am I? What am I? What is real? While I did not know it at the time, this was when I began to become a psychologist. Those questions are about the core aspects of what it means to be human. As a little girl I had no idea that I was in such good company when I could not figure out the answers.

  While I no longer have the bunk bed, I do still have the questions. Instead of philosophising to my ceiling I now conduct research. Instead of discussing who I am with my musical bear, I get to discuss it with fellow scientists, students, and others who are curious like me. So, let us start our adventure through the world of memory at the beginning of all beginnings, where re-search is me-search. Let’s ask: What makes you, you?

  You-ness

  When we define ourselves we may think about our gender, ethnicity, age, occupation and the markers of adulthood we have achieved, such as completing our education, buying a house, getting married, having children or reaching retirement. We may also think about personality characteristics – whether we tend to be optimistic or pessimistic, funny or serious, selfish or selfless. On top of this we likely think about how we compare to others, often directly monitoring how our Facebook friends and LinkedIn connections are doing to see whether we are keeping up. However, while all of these descriptors may b
e more or less appropriate ways of defining who you are, the true root of your ‘you-ness’ almost certainly lies in your personal memories.

  Our personal memories help us understand our life trajectories. It is only through my personal memories that I can recall the chats I had with one of my most inspiring undergraduate professors, Dr Barry Beyerstein, who taught me critical thinking and often shared lemon poppy-seed loaves with me. Or the talks after lectures with Dr Stephen Hart, who was the first person in my life to encourage me to go to graduate school. Or my mom’s serious car accident a few years back, which taught me the importance of expressing my emotions to the people I love. Such milestone interactions carry tremendous significant for us, and help us organise our personal narrative. More generally, memories form the bedrock of our identities. They shape what we think we have experienced and, as such, what we believe we are capable of in the future. Because of all this, if we begin to call our memory into question we are also forced to question the very foundations of who we are.

  Take this thought experiment as an example: What if you awoke one morning and could not remember anything that you have ever done, or thought, or learned? Would this person still be you? In thinking about this scenario, we may instinctively react with a feeling of fear. We may have the immediate sense that everything we are could be taken away from us just by taking our memory, leaving us a shell of our former selves. If our memory is gone, what do we have left? We could easily picture it as the premise of a terrifying science fiction movie: ‘And then they awoke, none of them knowing who they were.’ Alternatively we may look on the prospect with a sense of relief that we would no longer be confined by our past and could start our lives anew, with our basic mental capacities and personality still intact. Or perhaps we find ourselves uncertain, vacillating somewhere between the two viewpoints.

  While that kind of dramatic memory loss is thankfully rare in real life, at the same time our memories are subject to an enormous array of errors, distortions and modifications. I hope to shed light on some of them in this book. Armed with science and genuine curiosity, and sprinkling in little bits of my own escapades, I want to repeatedly challenge us to consider the many ways our memory can go awry. But how do we really begin to talk about the complex phenomenon of memory? Let us begin by looking at two of the key terms in memory research.

  Semantic memory, also called generic memory, refers to the memory of meanings, concepts and facts. Individuals are often better at remembering certain types of semantic information than others. For example, someone who is great at remembering the dates of historic events might be terrible at remembering people’s names; another person might experience the opposite – being great with names but terrible at important dates. Although both of these are types of semantic memory, performance in such tasks can vary considerably between individuals.

  Semantic memory works alongside episodic memory, or autobiographical memory. When you remember your first day of university, your first kiss, or the vacation you took to Cancún in 2013, you are accessing your episodic memory. This term refers to our collection of past experiences. It is our personal memory scrapbook; our mind’s diary; our internal Facebook timeline. Episodic memory is the mechanism that keeps track of memories that occurred at a particular time and place. Accessing these kinds of memories can be like reliving multisensory experiences. We can feel our toes in the sand, the sun against our skin, the breeze in our hair. We can picture the venue, the music, the people. These are the memories we cherish. It is this particular memory bank that defines who we are, rather than just the facts we know about the world.

  Yet, this episodic memory that we all rely on so much is something many of us woefully misunderstand. If we can get a better picture of how it actually works, we will also gain a better understanding of the circus that is our perceived reality.

  Clay with consequences

  Once we begin to question our memories, and the memories of others, it seems less surprising that we can often disagree with friends and family about the details of important past events. Even the precious memories of our childhood can actually be shaped and reshaped like a ball of clay. And memory errors are not isolated to those who we may perceive as vulnerable – those suffering from Alzheimer’s, brain damage or any other notable impairment. Instead, memory errors can be considered the norm, not the exception. We will explore this potential discord between reality and memory in more depth later.

  Similarly, false memories – recollections that feel like memories but which are not based on any real occurrence – are experienced all the time. And the consequences of such false memories can be very real. Believing inherently fictitious representations of reality can affect anything in our lives, potentially causing real joy, real upset, and even real trauma. Understanding our faulty memory processes may therefore help us establish a sense of how we can – and cannot – evaluate the information contained in our memories, and how to use them appropriately to define who we are. This has certainly been my experience.

  Over the course of my years of research on memory, I have come to realise that we see the world in deeply imperfect ways. In turn this has given me a great respect for the scientific method and collaborative research – the collective enterprise of science. They offer the best hope of seeing through the veil of our imperfect perceptions to understand the workings of memory. However, even with the wind of decades of memory research in my sails, I must admit that there will likely always be some doubt as to whether any memory is entirely accurate. We can merely collect independent corroborating evidence that suggests that a memory is a more or less accurate mental representation of something that actually happened. Any event, no matter how important, emotional or traumatic it may seem, can be forgotten, misremembered, or even be entirely fictitious.

  I now dedicate my life to researching how memory errors can occur, with a particular focus on how it is possible to shape our memories, and the memories of others, moulding actual past experiences to create a fictitious perceived past. What sets me apart from most of the other researchers doing similar work is the nature of the memories I generate. Over the course of just a few friendly interviews I can use my understanding of memory processes to severely distort the memories of my participants. I have convinced people they have committed crimes that never occurred, suffered from a physical injury they never had, or were attacked by a dog when no such attack ever took place. This may sound impossible, but it is simply a carefully planned application of memory science. And while it perhaps sounds a little sinister, I do it in order to help discover how severe memory distortions can come about, an issue which is particularly important for criminal justice settings where we heavily rely on the memories of eyewitnesses, victims and suspects. By creating complex false memories of crime that look and feel real in the lab, I highlight the distinct challenges our faulty memory processes pose for the law.

  When I tell people this, they immediately want to know exactly how I do it. I’ll be explaining that later in this book but for now let me assure you that it involves no sinister brainwashing, torture or hypnosis. Due to our psychological and physiological configuration all of us can come to confidently and vividly remember entire events that never actually took place.

  The Memory Illusion will explain the fundamental principles of our memories, diving into the biological reasons we forget and remember. It will explain how our social environments play a pivotal role in the way we experience and remember the world. It will explain how self-concept shapes, and is shaped by, our memories. It will even explain the role of the media and education in our (mis)understanding of the things we think memory is capable of. And it will look in detail at some of the most fascinating, sometimes almost unbelievable, errors, alterations and misapprehensions our memories can be subject to. While this is by no means an exhaustive study, I hope that it will nonetheless give you a solid enough grounding in the science involved. And perhaps it will leave you wondering just how much you truly know about the worl
d, and even about yourself …

  1. I REMEMBER BEING BORN

  Infant mobiles, tea with Prince Charles, and Bugs Bunny

  Why some of our childhood memories are impossible

  ‘I REMEMBER BEING born’ – 62 million hits on Google. ‘I remember being a baby’ – 154 million hits. ‘I remember being in the womb’ – 9 million hits. People show a huge amount of interest for early childhood and even pre-childhood memories. We all want to grasp for our earliest memories and understand the impact they may have had on us. And perhaps we also want to know just what our memories are capable of during our infancy. Some people, like Ruth who responded to a Guardian online question on this topic, are keen to share their earliest recollections:

  I was in a dark, warm place and I felt very secure. I could hear a steady, rhythmic blip blip blip sound (mother’s heartbeat) and I was comforted by it. Suddenly something terrible happened and it frightened me (mother’s screams, I’m sure). Then the blip blip sound returned and I thought everything was OK. Again the terrible thing happened and this time I knew it would happen again and again. I was terrified! My body was being painfully pulled and squeezed, mother was screaming and I thought something terrible, horrible and awful was happening! Then I came out and the doctor said something to me that was friendly and welcoming. I didn’t know the words but I got his message! … If my mother were still alive I would ask her if there was a large window in front of us with the sun shining brightly through it and if the doctor had a black moustache and was short and fat.1

  Ruth is one of countless people who claim they can recall their birth. It is also common for people to claim to have memories from when they were babies, apparently remembering what their nursery or crib looked like, or recalling specific events. Over the course of my career I have heard many examples of this. ‘I remember all the little airplanes on the mobile above my bed.’ ‘I remember getting stuck in my crib and being scared because I was caught in the latch!’ ‘I remember that my favourite toy was a blue musical bear – I would pull the string and it would help me go to sleep. And how could I possibly know that, if not from memory, since we got rid of the bear when I was two?’