Mark Mellman: The truth of false memories

We assume our memories are accurate. 

A 2011 survey found 63 percent of the public saying, “Human memory works like a video camera, accurately recording the events we see and hear … .” The problem: Not one academic expert on memory agrees with this proposition, accepted by nearly two-thirds of Americans, because the scientific evidence clearly undermines any such claim.

Such beliefs animate the anger and disappointment directed at Brian Williams and others whose memories do not necessarily comport with reality.

Biology demands that we lower our expectations of newscasters, politicians, eyewitnesses and voters. Our memories do not work like video cameras and we cannot expect anyone to remember everything accurately. 

Thousands of studies have shown that memories of real events can be easily altered, and a number have demonstrated that entirely false memories can be implanted without the conscious awareness of the subject.

In one study, participants read descriptions of four events, one of which was false. Some time later, nearly three in 10 recalled the false event — getting lost in a mall as a child — as true. Indeed, subjects sometimes “remembered” the event that never happened in vivid detail. Later replications of the study found between 20 and 40 percent inaccurately recalling the false memory.

Another group of researchers presented subjects with a doctored photograph showing them riding in a hot air balloon. Fifty percent “recalled” the false event.

Experiments show that simply being asked to imagine an event having happened to you increases the likelihood you will believe it actually happened and increase your confidence in that memory.

The powerful role of poor memory is on display in courtrooms as well. The Innocence Project determined that 75 percent of the 239 felons who have been exonerated based on DNA evidence were originally convicted due to inaccurate eyewitness testimony. 

It’s important to recognize these alterations in memory can be neither conscious nor volitional. Subjects in these experiments have no idea their memories are being altered. And there is no benefit to them in the change — getting lost in a mall as a 5-year-old is no ticket to stardom. It’s not even an interesting conversation piece.

No one seems exempt from these false memories. After implanting false memories in people with exceptional autobiographical memories — those who can, for example, recall exactly on what date various events happened — a team of psychologists at the University of California, Irvine, concluded that such “memory distortions are basic and widespread in humans, and it may be unlikely that anyone is immune.”

Even world-renowned neurologists like Oliver Sacks are susceptible. Sacks’s autobiography detailed his involvement in a bombing incident during World War II. After the book was published, his older brother explained that Sacks could not have “remembered” the incident; the brother was the one who had been through the experience, when Oliver was at school.

In fact, the memory began with a letter to Sacks from his brother, which Sacks incorporated into his own memory. Over time, the letter was transformed from a report about the experience to a first-person “memory” of it. Sacks still cannot see how the memory of the bomb exploding can be false. He feels no difference between this memory and others he knows to be true; he felt like he was really there. 

Anyone who has sat through a focus group has heard voters erroneously recall events, campaign ads, news stories and which candidate said or did what. These folks are neither stupid nor liars. They just use the same brain the rest of us do, which sometimes can’t quite remember accurately.

There is a real difference between consciously misrepresenting the truth and the failure of memory to work the way we expect it to. The problem is, it is difficult for the rest of us to discern the difference in any particular case. 

Mellman is president of The Mellman Group and has worked for Democratic candidates and causes since 1982. Current clients include the minority leader of the Senate and the Democratic whip in the House.