8 ms·

In another study, family members of research subjects provided the experimenters with childhood photos of the subjects, and the experimenters photoshopped one i

by SamBam 4y ago

In another study, family members of research subjects provided the experimenters with childhood photos of the subjects, and the experimenters photoshopped one image into a hot air balloon ride. [1] Over the course of a few interviews where the subjects tried to recall memories related to the photos, half of the participants developed clear, or partially clear, false memories of the hot air balloon, despite it never having happened, and adding invented details that they truly believed. When the photos were revealed to be faked, many of them were flabbergasted, having convinced themselves that it had happened. 1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03196318 https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03196318

bombcar 4y ago
The Mandela effect is likely a variation on this. Our memories are much worse than we think they are. Anyone who has ever dealt with eyewitness testimony knows this, and that's immediate memory.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  "The Mandela Effect" was a literal psychic medium saying that some people lived in a different dimension in their earlier lives, and also the weirdest excuse for people who didn't care about South Africa or Apartheid to explain their lack of knowledge about what happened there after the got the basics in grammar school.
  - mc32 4y ago
    The Mandela effect is a form of false memory and often involves confabulation. This often happens with people discussing movies and misattributing actors or scenes to contemporary but different films or actors, etc. It also happens with real life events.
  - TallGuyShort 4y ago
    That may be how the term was coined, but that is not the common usage in my experience. Simply Googling 'Mandela Effect' will yield many examples of widespread misconceptions and false memories that you can easily verify with a few peers. Just because one explanation is implausible doesn't mean the effect isn't real. False memories are pretty common. I've noticed that I can vividly recall experiences in other countries but my memory has altered itself to match the side of the road I'm currently used to driving on, and have confirmed this experience with others.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      That last part is a really good example to use for people who have switched countries.
- niom 4y ago
  The root cause is impressionable subjects accepting priors from questions into the set of priors used to reconstruct memories. Formulating good questions that contain as few priors as possible is difficult, and the reaction of the interrogator to the subject's response will reveal additional priors. Most interrogators are probably not really all that invested into getting as close to the subject's ground truth anyway and are simply looking to by-and-large confirm a pre-established narrative.
  - withinboredom 4y ago
    In interrogation school, you learn how NOT lead a subject to the answer you want to hear, but to try to get at what they believe is the truth (what did you do? Who did you do it with? Who else did it with you? When did you do it? When else did you do it? Where did you do it? Where else did you do it? How did you do it? What else did you do… and repeat). If you can ask these questions without asking any yes/no questions, congrats, you’ve got the basics of interrogation. Now just construct a timeline in your mind, keep track of subtle inconsistencies to come back to, and you’ve got more of the basics down. Interrogations during school (with trained actors) we had to extract 80% of the information and write a report on it containing 90% of the information we extracted, with no notes, up to several hours after the interrogation. Interestingly, I learned how to “tag” memories as authentic (so I could write about them later) which has had interesting implications later on in my life.
    - oidar 4y ago
      > Interestingly, I learned how to “tag” memories as authentic (so I could write about them later) which has had interesting implications later on in my life. Do tell.
      - withinboredom 4y ago
        I write meeting notes after every meeting, including details on participants disposition, what was discussed, potential misunderstandings, etc. I usually don’t share these. Anyway, occasionally someone will “bring up” a meeting detail later on and be confused by it. This isn’t malicious, but sometimes it can be so far from what was actually discussed that people question their own memories and something slightly different arises from the ashes. I used to point out what was actually discussed, but I learned that doesn’t usually come across that well (you’re now questioning a teammate’s memory and aptitude, and requires a bit more delicate politics than I care to involve myself with). These days, I just sit back and watch it play out. It’s pretty rare-ish.
- bumby 4y ago
  Our memory is not like a video recorder that captures details. Instead of focusing on details, it tries to gather the gist of events and we (sometimes creatively) fill in the gaps with details. But there are people with true photographic memories who faithfully remember exact details. I think it was the book Subliminal where the author discusses how these people often struggle to put those details into a larger contextual understanding. They get the details but miss the gist.
  - jonny_eh 4y ago
    There are also those with near-perfect memory that use those memories to create elaborate, poetic, and hilariously long YouTube videos about nostalgia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=779coR-XPTw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=779coR-XPTw
  - wahern 4y ago
    > But there are people with true photographic memories who faithfully remember exact details. The traditional notion of photographic memory is being able to recall any and every aspect of a scene upon a single viewing. But in countless experiments where a researcher asks the subject about some obscure detail, nobody has ever been able to demonstrate this--i.e. they may have happened to spot a particular detail, but keep iterating the experiment and they regress to the mean. To memorize something, a person has to focus their attention on the object such that they can draw associations--inside the scene, outside the scene, etc. Perhaps this can indeed be subconscious. "Conscious" and "subconscious" are such nebulous words, and people's experiences of them so varying, that disputing that it could be done subconsciously requires a degree of certitude I don't think anybody (scientist or otherwise) could rightly possess. There are indeed people with ridiculously amazing memories, including astounding visual fidelity. But it's misleading to say that it's "photographic". These people aren't glancing at a scene, blinking their eyes, and committing the whole thing to memory like a camera. Rather, their brains seem to be adept at scanning and drawing an incredible number of associations between visual elements and objects within the scene, but never the entirety of a sufficiently complex scene unless given a commensurate amount of time. And in fact, it turns out that with sufficient effort and practice many if not most people can begin to exhibit such astounding feats of memory. > I think it was the book Subliminal where the author discusses how these people often struggle to put those details into a larger contextual understanding. They get the details but miss the gist. Perhaps you're referring to the fact that people who exhibit extraordinary episodic memory (i.e. like the stereotypical autistic savant who can remember what they ate on any prior date, though most aren't autistic, AFAIU) usually have normal or sometimes deficient semantic memory. Note that episodic memory isn't the same thing as visual memory. Visual memory can be both episodic and semantic--e.g. if you're a visual-spatial thinker.
- bazoom42 4y ago
  The Mandela effect (where people think they remember Nelson Mandela dying i prison) is likely because they confuse him with Stephen Biko, another South African anti-apartheid activist which died in prison. Biko was a cause celebre at the time, a movie was made and Peter Gabriel wrote a song about him.
  - simondw 4y ago
    The Mandela Effect is named for that false memory, yes, but it's more general. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_Effect): > Other examples include memories of the title of the Berenstain Bears children's books being spelled Berenstein,[16][17] the logo of clothing brand Fruit of the Loom featuring a cornucopia,[18] and the existence of a 1990s movie titled Shazaam starring comedian Sinbad as a genie.
Jensson 4y ago
But they failed with half the people. I wonder how many don't develop false memories like that?
- some_random 4y ago
  I suspect that the failures had more to do with the people not being vulnerable to this particular memory than them not being vulnerable to memory implantation. For example, if your parents had trouble putting food on the table day to day the idea that they managed to buy a hot air balloon ride for you is obviously absurd.
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    Plausible. But it'd still be an interesting research question in its own right. I wonder if it's related to hypnotic suggestibilify.
    - f1shy 4y ago
      May well be the case. The susceptibility to hypnotic suggestions depends on the receiver and the giver of the suggestions, and who the relation between the two is. Maybe in some cases there was, for some reason, more trust in the person showing the fotos, and in other cases less. Would be very interesting to know.
  - withinboredom 4y ago
    How did they know the subjects had never been in a hot air balloon before? I’d apparently been up in one as a child, but didn’t remember it until I went up in one as an adult (verified with parents fwiw). So it’s certainly possible some percentage of subjects may just needed a trigger and had actually been up in a balloon before.
    - bumby 4y ago
      But that wouldn’t explain that exact implanted memory. If you went up as a 5 year old, that shouldn’t impact a false memory drawn from a picture of when you were 20.
injb 4y ago
What did the other half do?
- bityard 4y ago
  They could tell by a few of the pixels that the photo looked shopped
thakoppno 4y ago
That study seems somewhat unethical to me. There’s no way to do this without informed consent and I can imagine feeling really disturbed should something like this happen to me. The result is interesting but I have difficulty understanding the lens bio-ethicists applied designing and approving this.
- Swizec 4y ago
  > I can imagine feeling really disturbed should something like this happen to me Now realize that this can happen with therapy. As your therapist helps you deal with trauma, some of it can be false memories. Like in that case where a woman became convinced her dad molested her as a child. It was later proven that he did not and she was likely never molested at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramona_false_memory_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramona_false_memory_case edit: I mis-remembered (ha!), it was later judged that the father didn't do this, but you can't prove a negative so that's the best we'll ever get
  - sparky_z 4y ago
    Where's the part in that article where it was proven he did not? There was certainly a miscarriage of justice, but it sounds like everything still ended in a he-said-she-said. From your description, I was expecting an eventual proof of innocence and didn't see it. There's even a quote from the jury foreman insisting that the verdict shouldn't be interpreted the way you're interpreting it.
    - thakoppno 4y ago
      That would require proving a negative. I agree with your conclusion that nothing is truly proven.
      - sparky_z 4y ago
        We're not arguing over the existence of God here. Sure, you can never truly prove a negative, but you can never truly prove a positive either. New evidence leading to exoneration (above and beyond a mere finding of "not guilty") is still a coherent and useful concept to anyone who isn't philosophizing their way up their own ass. There could have been something like DNA evidence eventually showing a different perpetrator, or proof that he was in a different country when the alleged incidents occurred. The sort of thing that would make it instantly clear to any reasonable observer that the recovered memories did not reflect reality. I was primed to expect an eventual finding like that, but there wasn't one.
WanderPanda 4y ago
Holy sh*t! Starting to run shasum across my photo library asap
- f1shy 4y ago
  But you must do that in your brain!
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    Just print out the shasum output and hide it somewhere where you might come across it by chance a couple years later. When you rediscover it, check it against the current shasum output to see if someone manipulated your photo library (and thus your memory). At least that's how Hollywood would do it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mattpallissard 4y ago
I'm reminded of a Seinfeld episode; "Jerry, just remember, it's not a lie if you believe it"
- Sharlin 4y ago
  One of my favorite ev-psych hypotheses is that humans evolved to be so good at lying to themselves so that they could believably lie to others.
  - 77pt77 4y ago
    This is where evopsych starts getting too close to psychoanalysis, and therefore bullshit. Humans have this tendency to use some tool way beyond its realm of applicability.
caslon 4y ago
It's plausible that some volume of people had gone on a hot air balloon before and just not had pictures taken of the experience.
- 77pt77 4y ago
  It's amazing that yours is the only comment even contemplating that.
- SamBam 4y ago
  It was the parents who provided the photos and verified that the kid hadn't been on a balloon in the first place.
lo_zamoyski 4y ago
What I'm interested in is the other half. And could personality and character traits predispose people to fabrication? For example, a person can imagine a scenario that never happened on the basis of a photoshopped photo, but why would one person confuse what is imaged with what is remembered while another person would not?
jongjong 4y ago
That's surprising. I can understand mixing up memories; for example, remembering something you did but confusing the location of where it took place with that of another memory which took place in a different but similar location - But to actually recall doing something you've never done in a place that you've never been to seems like a whole different level. I have a visual memory and so I always assumed that other people also relied on visual imaginary to recall past events. Now I'm wondering how can someone possibly recall any past event if they can't visualize it happening. Is the past just words and sentences that pop into your mind? How can you verify the authenticity of a memory from mere words? How can you be fully confident in your own memories if you can't scrutinize them from different angles in various levels of detail?
- boredhedgehog 4y ago
  Presumably it would be a mixture of existing images. A balloon ride seen in a movie, but with yourself inserted. The way one imagines a chimera, having seen its component parts.
- sanroot99 4y ago
  You should check this out, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
- SamBam 4y ago
  Having a "visual memory" has nothing to do with it. (Everyone who can see has visual memory, except possibly aphantasiacs, and it's generally the strongest of most people's memories.) If you can imagine something happening in your mind's eye, then you can also see how your visual memory can be created. You're "seeing" something in your head that is not actually happening. This vision can turn into a memory. Heck, I have a recurring daydream that I have so often I can think of it as a memory. There's no indication that any of the subjects in these various studies were not using visual memory, and the descriptions they used of their memories matched that.

by SamBam 4y ago

bombcar 4y ago

The Mandela effect is likely a variation on this. Our memories are much worse than we think they are. Anyone who has ever dealt with eyewitness testimony knows this, and that's immediate memory.

pessimizer 4y ago
"The Mandela Effect" was a literal psychic medium saying that some people lived in a different dimension in their earlier lives, and also the weirdest excuse for people who didn't care about South Africa or Apartheid to explain their lack of knowledge about what happened there after the got the basics in grammar school.
- mc32 4y ago
  The Mandela effect is a form of false memory and often involves confabulation. This often happens with people discussing movies and misattributing actors or scenes to contemporary but different films or actors, etc. It also happens with real life events.
- TallGuyShort 4y ago
  That may be how the term was coined, but that is not the common usage in my experience. Simply Googling 'Mandela Effect' will yield many examples of widespread misconceptions and false memories that you can easily verify with a few peers. Just because one explanation is implausible doesn't mean the effect isn't real. False memories are pretty common. I've noticed that I can vividly recall experiences in other countries but my memory has altered itself to match the side of the road I'm currently used to driving on, and have confirmed this experience with others.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    That last part is a really good example to use for people who have switched countries.
niom 4y ago
The root cause is impressionable subjects accepting priors from questions into the set of priors used to reconstruct memories. Formulating good questions that contain as few priors as possible is difficult, and the reaction of the interrogator to the subject's response will reveal additional priors. Most interrogators are probably not really all that invested into getting as close to the subject's ground truth anyway and are simply looking to by-and-large confirm a pre-established narrative.
- withinboredom 4y ago
  In interrogation school, you learn how NOT lead a subject to the answer you want to hear, but to try to get at what they believe is the truth (what did you do? Who did you do it with? Who else did it with you? When did you do it? When else did you do it? Where did you do it? Where else did you do it? How did you do it? What else did you do… and repeat). If you can ask these questions without asking any yes/no questions, congrats, you’ve got the basics of interrogation. Now just construct a timeline in your mind, keep track of subtle inconsistencies to come back to, and you’ve got more of the basics down. Interrogations during school (with trained actors) we had to extract 80% of the information and write a report on it containing 90% of the information we extracted, with no notes, up to several hours after the interrogation. Interestingly, I learned how to “tag” memories as authentic (so I could write about them later) which has had interesting implications later on in my life.
  - oidar 4y ago
    > Interestingly, I learned how to “tag” memories as authentic (so I could write about them later) which has had interesting implications later on in my life. Do tell.
    - withinboredom 4y ago
      I write meeting notes after every meeting, including details on participants disposition, what was discussed, potential misunderstandings, etc. I usually don’t share these. Anyway, occasionally someone will “bring up” a meeting detail later on and be confused by it. This isn’t malicious, but sometimes it can be so far from what was actually discussed that people question their own memories and something slightly different arises from the ashes. I used to point out what was actually discussed, but I learned that doesn’t usually come across that well (you’re now questioning a teammate’s memory and aptitude, and requires a bit more delicate politics than I care to involve myself with). These days, I just sit back and watch it play out. It’s pretty rare-ish.
bumby 4y ago
Our memory is not like a video recorder that captures details. Instead of focusing on details, it tries to gather the gist of events and we (sometimes creatively) fill in the gaps with details. But there are people with true photographic memories who faithfully remember exact details. I think it was the book Subliminal where the author discusses how these people often struggle to put those details into a larger contextual understanding. They get the details but miss the gist.
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  There are also those with near-perfect memory that use those memories to create elaborate, poetic, and hilariously long YouTube videos about nostalgia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=779coR-XPTw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=779coR-XPTw
- wahern 4y ago
  > But there are people with true photographic memories who faithfully remember exact details. The traditional notion of photographic memory is being able to recall any and every aspect of a scene upon a single viewing. But in countless experiments where a researcher asks the subject about some obscure detail, nobody has ever been able to demonstrate this--i.e. they may have happened to spot a particular detail, but keep iterating the experiment and they regress to the mean. To memorize something, a person has to focus their attention on the object such that they can draw associations--inside the scene, outside the scene, etc. Perhaps this can indeed be subconscious. "Conscious" and "subconscious" are such nebulous words, and people's experiences of them so varying, that disputing that it could be done subconsciously requires a degree of certitude I don't think anybody (scientist or otherwise) could rightly possess. There are indeed people with ridiculously amazing memories, including astounding visual fidelity. But it's misleading to say that it's "photographic". These people aren't glancing at a scene, blinking their eyes, and committing the whole thing to memory like a camera. Rather, their brains seem to be adept at scanning and drawing an incredible number of associations between visual elements and objects within the scene, but never the entirety of a sufficiently complex scene unless given a commensurate amount of time. And in fact, it turns out that with sufficient effort and practice many if not most people can begin to exhibit such astounding feats of memory. > I think it was the book Subliminal where the author discusses how these people often struggle to put those details into a larger contextual understanding. They get the details but miss the gist. Perhaps you're referring to the fact that people who exhibit extraordinary episodic memory (i.e. like the stereotypical autistic savant who can remember what they ate on any prior date, though most aren't autistic, AFAIU) usually have normal or sometimes deficient semantic memory. Note that episodic memory isn't the same thing as visual memory. Visual memory can be both episodic and semantic--e.g. if you're a visual-spatial thinker.
bazoom42 4y ago
The Mandela effect (where people think they remember Nelson Mandela dying i prison) is likely because they confuse him with Stephen Biko, another South African anti-apartheid activist which died in prison. Biko was a cause celebre at the time, a movie was made and Peter Gabriel wrote a song about him.
- simondw 4y ago
  The Mandela Effect is named for that false memory, yes, but it's more general. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_Effect): > Other examples include memories of the title of the Berenstain Bears children's books being spelled Berenstein,[16][17] the logo of clothing brand Fruit of the Loom featuring a cornucopia,[18] and the existence of a 1990s movie titled Shazaam starring comedian Sinbad as a genie.

Jensson 4y ago

But they failed with half the people. I wonder how many don't develop false memories like that?

some_random 4y ago
I suspect that the failures had more to do with the people not being vulnerable to this particular memory than them not being vulnerable to memory implantation. For example, if your parents had trouble putting food on the table day to day the idea that they managed to buy a hot air balloon ride for you is obviously absurd.
- hackerlight 4y ago
  Plausible. But it'd still be an interesting research question in its own right. I wonder if it's related to hypnotic suggestibilify.
  - f1shy 4y ago
    May well be the case. The susceptibility to hypnotic suggestions depends on the receiver and the giver of the suggestions, and who the relation between the two is. Maybe in some cases there was, for some reason, more trust in the person showing the fotos, and in other cases less. Would be very interesting to know.
- withinboredom 4y ago
  How did they know the subjects had never been in a hot air balloon before? I’d apparently been up in one as a child, but didn’t remember it until I went up in one as an adult (verified with parents fwiw). So it’s certainly possible some percentage of subjects may just needed a trigger and had actually been up in a balloon before.
  - bumby 4y ago
    But that wouldn’t explain that exact implanted memory. If you went up as a 5 year old, that shouldn’t impact a false memory drawn from a picture of when you were 20.

injb 4y ago

What did the other half do?

bityard 4y ago
They could tell by a few of the pixels that the photo looked shopped

thakoppno 4y ago

That study seems somewhat unethical to me. There’s no way to do this without informed consent and I can imagine feeling really disturbed should something like this happen to me. The result is interesting but I have difficulty understanding the lens bio-ethicists applied designing and approving this.

Swizec 4y ago
> I can imagine feeling really disturbed should something like this happen to me Now realize that this can happen with therapy. As your therapist helps you deal with trauma, some of it can be false memories. Like in that case where a woman became convinced her dad molested her as a child. It was later proven that he did not and she was likely never molested at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramona_false_memory_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramona_false_memory_case edit: I mis-remembered (ha!), it was later judged that the father didn't do this, but you can't prove a negative so that's the best we'll ever get
- sparky_z 4y ago
  Where's the part in that article where it was proven he did not? There was certainly a miscarriage of justice, but it sounds like everything still ended in a he-said-she-said. From your description, I was expecting an eventual proof of innocence and didn't see it. There's even a quote from the jury foreman insisting that the verdict shouldn't be interpreted the way you're interpreting it.
  - thakoppno 4y ago
    That would require proving a negative. I agree with your conclusion that nothing is truly proven.
    - sparky_z 4y ago
      We're not arguing over the existence of God here. Sure, you can never truly prove a negative, but you can never truly prove a positive either. New evidence leading to exoneration (above and beyond a mere finding of "not guilty") is still a coherent and useful concept to anyone who isn't philosophizing their way up their own ass. There could have been something like DNA evidence eventually showing a different perpetrator, or proof that he was in a different country when the alleged incidents occurred. The sort of thing that would make it instantly clear to any reasonable observer that the recovered memories did not reflect reality. I was primed to expect an eventual finding like that, but there wasn't one.

WanderPanda 4y ago

Holy sh*t! Starting to run shasum across my photo library asap

f1shy 4y ago
But you must do that in your brain!
- wongarsu 4y ago
  Just print out the shasum output and hide it somewhere where you might come across it by chance a couple years later. When you rediscover it, check it against the current shasum output to see if someone manipulated your photo library (and thus your memory). At least that's how Hollywood would do it.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

mattpallissard 4y ago

I'm reminded of a Seinfeld episode; "Jerry, just remember, it's not a lie if you believe it"

Sharlin 4y ago
One of my favorite ev-psych hypotheses is that humans evolved to be so good at lying to themselves so that they could believably lie to others.
- 77pt77 4y ago
  This is where evopsych starts getting too close to psychoanalysis, and therefore bullshit. Humans have this tendency to use some tool way beyond its realm of applicability.

caslon 4y ago

It's plausible that some volume of people had gone on a hot air balloon before and just not had pictures taken of the experience.

77pt77 4y ago
It's amazing that yours is the only comment even contemplating that.
SamBam 4y ago
It was the parents who provided the photos and verified that the kid hadn't been on a balloon in the first place.

lo_zamoyski 4y ago

What I'm interested in is the other half. And could personality and character traits predispose people to fabrication? For example, a person can imagine a scenario that never happened on the basis of a photoshopped photo, but why would one person confuse what is imaged with what is remembered while another person would not?

jongjong 4y ago

That's surprising. I can understand mixing up memories; for example, remembering something you did but confusing the location of where it took place with that of another memory which took place in a different but similar location - But to actually recall doing something you've never done in a place that you've never been to seems like a whole different level. I have a visual memory and so I always assumed that other people also relied on visual imaginary to recall past events. Now I'm wondering how can someone possibly recall any past event if they can't visualize it happening. Is the past just words and sentences that pop into your mind? How can you verify the authenticity of a memory from mere words? How can you be fully confident in your own memories if you can't scrutinize them from different angles in various levels of detail?

boredhedgehog 4y ago
Presumably it would be a mixture of existing images. A balloon ride seen in a movie, but with yourself inserted. The way one imagines a chimera, having seen its component parts.
sanroot99 4y ago
You should check this out, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
SamBam 4y ago
Having a "visual memory" has nothing to do with it. (Everyone who can see has visual memory, except possibly aphantasiacs, and it's generally the strongest of most people's memories.) If you can imagine something happening in your mind's eye, then you can also see how your visual memory can be created. You're "seeing" something in your head that is not actually happening. This vision can turn into a memory. Heck, I have a recurring daydream that I have so often I can think of it as a memory. There's no indication that any of the subjects in these various studies were not using visual memory, and the descriptions they used of their memories matched that.