pressure and leads our memory further astray toward false conclusions.
It is now possible to list all the ingredients needed to concoct a false memory: an emotional event, a dash of peer pressure, and a habit of frequently recalling a memory, which gives it the opportunity to become further distorted. When this happens, it is nearly impossible to distinguish false memories from true ones. If you would like to cause someone to generate a false memory, it would be best to do it in steps. First, confront the person in question with a distinct (but falsified) memory scenario—for example, that he or she once lost their parents in a store as a small child or that they got into trouble with the police as a teenager. Reinforce this with the fake claim that relatives would be able to back up this situation. Ask your test subject to imagine the event in question and then to think about it for a few days. Then grill them once more with questions, appeal again to their imagination, pressing them for details. Usually by the second sitting, detailed but false memories start to emerge. In this way, it’s not only possible to get a twelve-year-old to contrive absurd stories (for example, that he or she was abducted by a UFO13), it’s also possible to convince 70 percent of adult participants that they had once committed a crime, even if such a claim was completely fabricated.14
The start of this chapter showed what can happen if one spends weeks, or even months, performing such imagination exercises for false memories, and this very important point cannot be emphasized enough: don’t depend on your memory! It is never one hundred percent correct, and it has more likely than not been embellished, distorted, or partially erased by your own brain. You have been influenced by other people, and you are subsequently unable to tell a false memory from a true one. Even the brain is no longer anatomically able to distinguish one from the other since the activity patterns of true and false memories are nearly identical. There are, however, two small but fine exceptions. First: correct memories trigger more activity in the hippocampus and in the image processing regions (since one experienced the true memories, after all). And second: fake memories result in increased activity in the frontal cortex (presumably because the brain must exert itself somewhat in order to come up with an artificial memory image).15 However, the neural network is so similarly and expansively activated for both types of memories that it becomes impossible for you to be able to tell the difference anymore. As I mentioned earlier, at this point it no longer even matters whether you know that you have been falsely informed. Once an incorrect memory has fallen down into the well and been absorbed, it becomes as authentic as a true memory. Reality and truth are thus two wholly different things.
Memory rescue
BY NOW YOU are probably wondering what you can possibly do to save your true memory from being taken in by a fake one. In principle, there’s not much you can do because this memory system is quite robust and is going to go on leading you around by the nose. However, neuroscience has a few findings that show it’s possible, under certain conditions, for our memories to become even more robust.
Possibility 1: You grow older. Specifically, memory improves and people are less prone to develop false memories when, for example, they are warned about the pitfalls of false memories before taking a DRM test. If I were to have you repeat the same test that you took at the start of this chapter, you should have learned by now that you are sometimes going to fall into a habit of mental pigeonholing that you formed while you were saving information. Interestingly, this tendency to be cautious becomes more pronounced the older one gets. This is why it is possible for a sixty-six-year-old person to effectively shield themselves from new false memories if they have been duly warned on that topic before taking a memorization test. Younger people (ranging from eighteen to twenty-three years old) who receive the same warning still fall prey to false memories.16 Their brains are apparently more eager to go about constructing mental boxes, which serve to obscure the facts. Older brains, by contrast, feature more control mechanisms (or, to state it in a negative sense: they are already stuck in their own ways and are therefore less vulnerable).
Possibility 2: You take birth control pills. Women who use hormonal contraception perform just as poorly on the DRM test as women who are not on birth control. But they are less susceptible to any later misinformation. If you show them photographs from daily life scenarios and then later mention that the scenes appeared differently (for example, that a person is standing in front of a tree instead of a door), they will not incorporate this false information into their memories.17 The reason is presumably due to the fact that female sex hormones decrease one’s receptivity to minor details (especially when they are spoken about rather than seen). To put it another way: a woman on hormonal birth control leaves you not with a poem but with a photographic impression. Dear male readers, please keep this in mind when you decide to offer a gift to the woman of your heart or think that she won’t mind if you offer a lyrical description of yourself in place of a dashing photo. And one more warning, before you dope up your next testimony witness with oral contraceptives: whether the same outcome is true for men has never been studied. This is most likely due to a lack of willing male test subjects.
Possibility 3: Be aware of your memory’s weaknesses—preferably in the very moment that you are experiencing a new bit of information for the first time and then committing it to memory. Do not underestimate the fact that you often tinker with your memory and constantly distort it. When it comes to recalling something as precisely as possible, it may be harmful to try imagining it so intensely. Often the first (and the most likely unfalsified) memory is the best and most objective one, and witness testimonies can benefit from allowing witnesses to assess their level of certainty right off the bat. If your goal is to retain the original memory, less feedback is more.18 The more often we compare our memory with the comments, assessments, and perspectives of others, the more we distort it. This may sound awful, but there is an important underlying principle to it.
Why false is sometimes better
AT THIS POINT in the chapter you have learned—if nothing else—just how shoddy your memory is, at least, from the perspective of accuracy. At the same time, our brain has always been capable of saving information with exact precision. But it doesn’t. The reason is because a smidgen of false memory can have enormous advantages.
One advantage of this particular memory weakness is obvious: it saves time and mental effort if we don’t have to remember all of the details from a list of words or an event but only remember the corresponding context. If you see fifteen words that fit the category “car,” you might easily add an extra word from the same car-related category, but you will not add a word having to do with hobby gardening. In other words, it’s generally much more important for the brain to recognize the big picture than to hone in on the details. We don’t draw detailed information from our surroundings in order to piece it back together again like a puzzle. Instead, we tend to use individual bits of information (words, images, objects) as cues to which we then invent a matching framework of meaning. This allows us to navigate very quickly instead of getting bogged down processing a gigantic pile of details and information from our surroundings. This is why we are able to locate objects much more quickly if they seem to fit their setting19 (i.e., a pan in the kitchen instead of in the bathroom). It’s a mental shortcut of sorts that saves us energy, though unfortunately with a little less precision.
Imagine that you are tasked with understanding a situation by quickly and intuitively piecing together words or objects. For example, cross out two words that don’t fit into the following list:
House, tree, bush, cabin, apartment
What has to happen in order for you to be able to extract “tree” and “bush” from the other words? Concentrating on the particulars of each word is not as important as seeing their semantic characteristics (their meaning) in relation to the other objects. It doesn’t matter if, three days later, you can’t remember whether it was house, cabin, and apartment, or home, cabin, and apartment. The main point is that you still have the concept of “shelter” in mind. Interestingly, the brain region
