A few years ago, the actor Alan Alda visited a group of memory researchers at the University of California, Irvine, for a TV show he was making. During a picnic lunch, one of the scientists offered Alda a hard-boiled egg. He turned it down, explaining that as a child he had made himself sick eating too many eggs.
In fact, this had never happened, yet Alda believed it was real. How so? The egg incident was a false memory planted by one of UC Irvine's researchers, Elizabeth Loftus. Before the visit, Loftus had sent Alda a questionnaire about his food preferences and personality. She later told him that a computer analysis of his answers had revealed some facts about his childhood, including that he once made himself sick eating too many eggs. There was no such analysis but it was enough to convince Alda.
Your memory may feel like a reliable record of the past, but it is not. Loftus has spent the past 30 years studying the ease with which we can form "memories" of nonexistent events. She has convinced countless people that they have seen or done things when they haven't - even quite extreme events such as being attacked by animals or almost drowning. Her work has revealed much about how our brains form and retain memories.
While I wouldn't want to plant a memory of a nonexistent trauma in your own brain, there is a less dramatic demonstration of how easy it is to form a false memory called the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. Try the following thought experiment:
THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
Read the first two lists of words and pause for a few minutes.
List 1
apple, vegetable, orange, kiwi,
citrus, ripe, pear, banana, berry,
cherry, basket, juice, salad, bowl,
cocktail
List 2
web, insect, bug, fright, fly,
arachnid, crawl, tarantula, poison,
bite, creepy, animal, ugly, feelers, small
NOW WAIT A FEW MINUTES. Next go to List 3 at the bottom of the article and put a tick against the words that were in the first two.
How did you do?
Consider the story of Binjimin Wilkomirski, whose 1996 Holocaust memoir, Fragments, won worldwide acclaim for portraying life in a concentration camp from the perspective of a child. Wilkomirski presented readers with raw, vivid recollections of the unspeakable terrors he witnessed as a young boy. His prose achieved such power and eloquence that one reviewer proclaimed that Fragments is "so morally important and so free from literary artifice of any kind at all that I wonder if I even have the right to try to offer praise." Even more remarkable, Wilkomirski had spent much of his adult life unaware of these traumatic childhood memories, coming to terms with them only in therapy. Because his story and memories inspired countless others, Wilkomirksi became a sought-after international figure and a hero to Holocaust survivors.
The story began to unravel, however, in late August 1998, when Daniel Ganzfried, a Swiss journalist and himself the son of a Holocaust survivor, published a stunning article in a Zurich newspaper. Ganzfried revealed that Wilkomirski is actually Bruno Dossekker, born in 1941 to a young woman named Yvone Berthe Grosjean, who later gave him up for adoption to an orphanage. Young Bruno spent all of the war years with his foster parents, the Dossekkers, in the safe confines of his native Switzerland. Whatever the basis for his traumatic "memories" of Nazi horrors, they did not come from childhood experiences in a concentration camp. Is Dossekker/Wilkomirksi simply a liar? Probably not: he still strongly believes that his recollections are real.
We're all capable of distorting our pasts. Think back to your first year in high school and try to answer the following questions: Did your parents encourage you to be active in sports? Was religion helpful to you? Did you receive physical punishment as discipline? The Northwestern University psychiatrist Daniel Offer and his collaborators put these and related questions to sixty-seven men in their late forties. Their answers are especially interesting because Offer had asked the same men the same questions during freshman year in high school, thirty-four years earlier.
The men's memories of their adolescent lives bore little relationship to what they had reported as high school freshmen. Fewer than 40 percent of the men recalled parental encouragement to be active in sports; some 60 percent had reported such encouragement as adolescents. Barely one-quarter recalled that religion was helpful, but nearly 70 percent had said that it was when they were adolescents. And though only one-third of the adults recalled receiving physical punishment decades earlier, as adolescents nearly 90 percent had answered the question affirmatively.
Memory's errors are as fascinating as they are important. What sort of memory permits the kinds of distortions described in the Wilkomirski case, or the inaccuracies documented in Offer's study?
ANSWER: Read list 3 and put a tick against the words that were in the first two. Now go back and check your answers.
List 3
Spider, feather, citrus, ugly, robber,
Piano, goat, ground, cherry, bitter,
Insect, fruit, suburb, kiwi, quick,
Mouse, pile, fish
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Michael Michalko is the author of the highly acclaimed Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative Thinking Techniques; Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius; ThinkPak: A Brainstorming Card Deck and Creative Thinkering: Putting Your Imagination to Work. http://creativethinking.net/WP01_Home.htm
