“Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.”
- Adrienne Rich
Scientists now know the power of suggestion is more influential than previously thought. In a 2002 study involving undergraduates at Midwestern and California universities, Dr. Elizabeth Loftus and her team of behavioral researchers at UC Irvine got over a third of her subjects to say they shook hands with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland, by implanting the impossible suggestion– Bugs Bunny is not a Disney character. The study demonstrates the reconstructive nature of memory, and Loftus says the results show that it’s possible to convince people that they have witnessed something that has not actually happened. Her research has been cited in the US Department of Justice’s guide to eyewitness evidence and is helping to prevent wrongful convictions due to unreliable eyewitness accounts.
These results may be surprising to some, but not Loftus, who has been researching memory for over twenty years. Although no one knows exactly how memory works, Loftus says scientists’ ideas about memory are evolving from the theory that memories are permanently and immutably stored in the brain. Now, Loftus and many of her colleagues believe that memories are constantly being updated to fit “post-event information,” such as events, details, and comments that are experienced later.
According to this theory, memories are not stored like snapshots, but are instead like sketches that are altered and added to every time they are called up. Loftus has shown subjects who are given false information about an event or scene tend to incorporate it into their memories, and “recall” the false information as a part of their original memory even two weeks later. In other experiments, subjects asked to imagine scenarios can then become convinced that the imagined scenario is a real memory. This happens, Loftus says, when people forget the source of the information.