You probably feel pretty attached to your memories — they’re yours, after all. They define who you are and where you came from, your accomplishments and failures, your likes and dislikes.
Your memories help you separate friends from enemies. They remind you not to eat too much ice cream or drink cheap tequila because you remember how horrible it felt the last time you indulged.
Or do you?
One conversation with Elizabeth Loftus may shake your confidence in everything you think you remember. Loftus is a cognitive psychologist and expert on the malleability of human memory. She can, quite literally, change your mind.
Her work is reminiscent of films like “Memento” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” where what you believe happened is probably far from the truth — whether you’re the eyewitness to a crime or just trying to move past a bad relationship.
“She’s most known for her important work on memory distortion and false memories,” says Daniel Schacter, a psychology professor at Harvard University who first met Loftus in 1979 and describes her as energetic, smart and passionate. “It’s made people in the legal system aware the memory does not work like a tape recorder.”
In fact, Loftus’ research shows your memory works more like a Wikipedia page — a transcription of history created by multiple people’s perceptions and assumptions that’s constantly changing.
One of Loftus’ first experiments, published in 1974, involved car accidents. In the lab she played videos of different incidents and then asked people what they remembered seeing. Their answers depended greatly on how she phrased the question.
For instance, if she asked how fast the cars were going when they “smashed” into each other, people estimated, on average, that the cars were going 7 mph faster than when she substituted the word “hit” for “smashed.” And a week after seeing the video, those who were asked using the word “smashed” remembered seeing broken glass, even though there was none in the film.
Even a seemingly less important word in the sentence can make a difference in an eyewitness account, Loftus found. In a subsequent study she asked people if they saw “a broken headlight” or “the broken headlight.” Those who were asked about “the” broken headlight were more likely to remember seeing it, though it never existed.
Police officers’ biggest mistake is talking too much, Loftus says. “They don’t, you know, wait and let the witness talk. They are sometimes communicating information to the witness, even inadvertently, that can convey their theory of what happened, their theory of who did it.”
This is particularly troubling when witnesses are identifying a perpetrator in a lineup. One of Loftus’ studies found even facial recognition can be “contagious” — if a witness overhears another witness or police officer describe a misleading facial feature, they are more likely to describe the criminal with that feature. …
Perhaps Loftus’ most powerful — and controversial — work came in the 1990s when she first began manufacturing false memories.
In 1990, Loftus got an intriguing call from the defense attorney for George Franklin, father of Eileen Franklin. In her mid-20s, Eileen Franklin claimed she remembered seeing her father rape and murder her best friend as a child. The prosecution said she had repressed the memory up until that point.
Loftus testified at the trial about the fallibility of memories but could not say whether she had ever studied repressed memories such as Eileen Franklin was maintaining. George Franklin was convicted, and Loftus went back to the lab.
After doing some research, she became convinced a therapist might have led Eileen Franklin to suspect her father in the murder. Therapists were essentially guiding patients to remember false events, Loftus believed — asking leading questions and telling their patients to imagine an event that might have happened.
For example, if a woman came in with an eating disorder, her therapist might say “80% of patients with an eating disorder were abused. Were you?” Then the therapist might ask the patient to think about who might have abused her and when.
While Loftus couldn’t definitively prove that repressed memories weren’t real, she could show that it was possible to implant a memory of a traumatic event that never happened.
Loftus recruited 24 students and their close family members for her 1995 study “The Formation of False Memories.” She asked each family member to provide her with three real childhood memories for their student, and then sent these memories in a packet, along with one false memory, to the study participants. The false memories were about getting lost on a shopping trip and included real details, such as the name of a store where they often shopped and siblings they were likely with.
The students were told all four memories were real and had been supplied by their family member. After receiving the packet, the students identified whether they remembered each event and how confident they were that it had happened to them. In follow-up interviews the researchers asked them to recall details from the events they remembered.
Seven of the 24 students “remembered” the false event in their packets. Several recalled and added their own details to the memory.
“It was pretty exciting to watch these normal, healthy individuals pick up on the suggestions in our interviews, and pick up the false information that we fed them,” Loftus says.
Loftus continued her experiments, convincing study participants they had broken a window with their hand, witnessed a drug bust, choked on an object before the age of 3 and had experienced other traumatic events. And she continued to testify in cases involving repressed memories.
“I don’t think there’s any credible, scientific support for this notion of massive repression,” Loftus says. “It’s been my position that, you know, we may one day find (the evidence), but until we do, we shouldn’t be locking people up.”
Loftus soon began to wonder if she could influence other behaviors. What if she could convince people they had a negative experience with unhealthy food as a child? Would they eat less of it as an adult?
Using her finely tuned “recipe” for memory implantation, she guided study participants to believe they had gotten sick eating strawberry ice cream as children.
A week later, researchers asked about the ice cream incident. Many participants had developed a detailed memory — what Loftus calls a “rich false memory” — about when they had gotten sick. Subsequent studies showed this memory affected the participant’s actual eating behavior. ….
It is exciting and unexpected that you can change what seem to be a deep and permanent personality traits, habits or preferences just by adjusting your own memories. Adjusting memories is not as difficult as you might think when you understand that we don’t remember actual events. When we remember something, we recall the last time we remembered it. The details can change over time with each remembering, in order to fit logically with the other details we have collected and juggled.