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People Can Be Convinced They Committed a Crime That Never Happened
- rbrogan 12y ago"The fact that the students appeared to internalize the false events to the extent that they did highlights the fundamental malleability of memory" Is it true that the memories themselves are false or is it the remembering process that is influenced to produce false beliefs about what happened?
- click170 12y agoConsider the anomaly of Deja Vu. Did this moment actually happen previously and your remembering it again, or is a chemical reaction in your brain tricking you into thinking you've had this thought before?
- jacquesm 12y agoDeja-Vu is actually something else, it's a phenomenon that is apparently triggered by the different lengths of travel that information can take through the brain, causing the same information to be presented twice, once directly from the source and once indirectly.
- anigbrowl 12y agoAny chance of a reference for that? I'm in the middle of adapting a story about this and haven't heard this idea before, I'd love to learn more about it.
- jacquesm 12y agoLet me look that up, it's been a while. One moment. Edit: ok, found it: http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/deja-vu4.htm http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/deja-vu4.ht... "Another theory is based on the way our brain processes new information and how it stores long- and short-term memories. Robert Efron tested an idea at the Veterans Hospital in Boston in 1963 that stands as a valid theory today. He proposed that a delayed neurological response causes déjà vu. Because information enters the processing centers of the brain via more than one path, it is possible that occasionally that blending of information might not synchronize correctly. Efron found that the temporal lobe of the brain's left hemisphere is responsible for sorting incoming information. He also found that the temporal lobe receives this incoming information twice with a slight (milliseconds-long) delay between transmissions -- once directly and once again after its detour through the right hemisphere of the brain. If that second transmission is delayed slightly longer, then the brain might put the wrong timestamp on that bit of information and register it as a previous memory because it had already been processed. That could explain the sudden sense of familiarity." The article contains a lot of other theories about the origin of Deja-Vu as well but that one seems to have stood the test of time very well.
- anigbrowl 12y agoThanks Jacques!
- corin_ 12y agoIf you read it from another source and remember anything else about deja vu, don't suppose you recall anything about this: I don't think I've experienced a pure deja vu since I was a child (so 10-15 years), but since then I do get - not frequently, but every now and then - what I call "double deja vu"s, i.e. instead of thinking I've seen/whatever something before, I think I've had deja vu of something before. So it feels like this is the 3rd time, not the 2nd. Never found any information on or even many other people reporting this though.
- jacquesm 12y agoThere is a strong correlation between people experiencing frequent deja-vu and epilepsy. The reason I remembered all this is that a friends child was diagnosed with epilepsy a while ago and I read everything I could on the subject and one of the offshoots of all that reading was a bunch of stuff about deja-vu. Maybe that would be a good starting subject for some 'light reading'.
- corin_ 12y agoThanks, as far as I'm aware I don't have epilepsy but my brain definitely has some other odd wiring.. Will look into epilepsy more anyway :)
- sighsigh 12y agoThis is how social justice (everyone is racist and must atone) and Catholicism (everyone has sinned and must atone) works. This has been know for centuries.
- vinceguidry 12y agoIt's not quite that simple. Original sin was conceived of as a way to explain and deal with the everyday depravity of the time period. It was often described that people had weird, strange urges they couldn't understand or control. Christian atonement (prayer is nothing if not a form of meditation) was thus an early form of personal development. Later on, after people and modern society started to mature this got recast as a tool for social control. Social justice philosophy does not make the claim that everyone is racist / sexist. The claim is that injustice and prejudice are institutionalized, and so there exist entire lines of thought, patterns of behavior, and such that arose out of the institutionalized bigotry that never would have existed without it. To take a currently-topical example, the comic book store article. The author of the article came violently face-to-face with institutionalized sexism and what happens when you allow the economy to structure itself with a completely free hand. You can debate the merits of whether this structure is right or wrong, whether comic book store owners should feel guilty about it and obligate themselves to change, and that's an important discussion to have; but the real issue is the fact that nobody knows about these consequences until they have this kind of enlightening moment. Sexism is institutionalized in a way that nobody really digs into or understands it and can live their entire lives without appreciating the consequences it has on everyone. Is everyone racist / sexist? The question itself is a red herring, the real issue is this institutionalization.
- sighsigh 12y agoTo the audience, like I care about HackerNews points, down vote me to oblivion, plebiscite. To address your point, you say social justice doesn't claim everyone is racist, and them you say the racism is institutional... and then you mysteriously fail to define who makes up the institutions and who those institutions affect. (While implying it's everyone) The audience is left to subjectively define that to make you seem right. If everyone isn't racist and the racism is institutional, are there extra-institutional people wandering the earth, too enlightened to be bothered with such trivial institutioniness? What's the secret? Is it the yoga pants, the flannel, or the liberal arts degree? Define your actors. Precisely.
- SandersAK 12y agoI don't understand. Didn't we know this already? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23196385 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23196385 Even further back from that, there have been studies where researches can do this with children very easily.
- bashinator 12y agoI don't understand what point you're trying to make. Is further research not needed? Is there any reason not to continue to raise the level of awareness by the general public to this phenomenon?
- swatow 12y agocould you explain how the study you quoted relates to the study in the article? I don't see any clear relation.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- dghf 12y agoIs convincing people they committed a crime really ethical? My self-image as a pretty peaceable, pretty honest person is fairly important to me: if I suddenly "remembered" a time when I stole from or attacked someone (with a weapon, no less) I'd be certainly upset, possibly traumatised. Can anyone really give meaningful consent for an exercise like this? They paid the participants $50, but presumably they couldn't tell them exactly what was going on, or it wouldn't have worked.
- nsajko 12y agoWell, if the research can prove and point out to the general public that this kind of false memory already widely affects serious matters such as criminal investigation it is probably okay.
- eutectic 12y agoAs a society we seem to weight positive harm much more heavily than negative consequences averted. It might not be the best way of looking at things but it seems to be a deeply ingrained aspect of human nature.
- pwr22 12y agoWell in this case it is weighing up potential benefits for everyone forever vs some negative for a few people. How we respond to that depends on our individual ethical dispositions
- colordrops 12y agoWhat if we could cure cancer and heart disease by physically debilitating a few dozen people? Would that also be okay?
- firethief 12y agoOf course. Debilitating a few dozen people is nothing compared to the harm caused by cancer and heart disease, and if we had a choice between the two it would be wrong to pick the greater evil. Is the premise of the question that choosing inaction adverts culpability, in a situation where either outcome is abhorrent? But inaction has only the appearance of innocence: if you really have the choice of which outcome will occur, you cannot absolve yourself of responsibility by going with a default. The fact that the greater evil is the status quo doesn't make it a more ethical choice.
- dsugarman 12y agoThere is a bagel place near where I grew up that had a strange link to a double homicide. Basically one partner owed another partner half a million dollars and the owed partner, along with his wife, wound up dead. The other partner faked his death and fled to California. The police arrested the murdered couple's son and convinced him that he killed his own parents, threw him in jail and locked away the key. It was 17 years before he would be let free of crimes virtually everyone in the community knew he did not commit. [1]http://murderpedia.org/male.T/t/tankleff-martin.htm http://murderpedia.org/male.T/t/tankleff-martin.htm [2]http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/nyregion/01tankleff.html?gwh=1940B18B67DFECF05D75D975E34A9FB6&gwt=pay&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/nyregion/01tankleff.html?g...
- jacquesm 12y agoHe's extremely lucky in that he didn't get sentenced to death. What an incredibly ugly story.
- jonsen 12y agoReminds me of the excellent movie Under Suspicion http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Suspicion_(2000_film) http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Suspicion_(2000_film)
- cehrnrooth 12y agoThere was a great article in the New Yorker about police interrogation techniques and how they can influence people to confess to crimes (and the studies that explain why people would falsely confess). [1]http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/09/the-interview-7 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/09/the-interview-7
- statingobvious 12y agoThere's also this article: [The Reykjavik Confessions – The mystery of why six people admitted roles in two murders - when they couldn't remember anything about the crimes.](http://www.bbc.com/news/special/2014/newsspec_7617/index.html http://www.bbc.com/news/special/2014/newsspec_7617/index.htm...) It gives a great inside how the investigation may have affected the suspects.
- TillE 12y agoThis is probably the most important point I remember from "The Demon-Haunted World", in which Carl Sagan repeatedly demonstrates that human memory is completely unreliable, and that false memories can even be accidentally created by a therapist. People who say they've been abducted by aliens usually aren't lying; they genuinely believe it.
- mjklin 12y agoThe book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) by Tavris and Aronson delves into this in great detail. Well worth a read.
- Zelphyr 12y agoMakes me wonder if this might be put to more productive use. Like, convincing people that they don't habitually talk during movies thus making them stop?
- Retra 12y agoMaybe we could convince people that they are 'good drivers.'
- xnull1guest 12y agoMost bad drivers I know are convinced they are 'good drivers'...
- mikeash 12y agoRight, the problem is self-awareness. You'd want to convince bad drivers that they are bad, hoping this makes them try to improve.
- spiritplumber 12y agoThis is the most Kafkian thing I've read all day.
- waps 12y agoIt's one of the things that seems extremely weird if you consider humans to be what they say they are ... and dead normal if you realize what humans actually are. How memory works, according to humanity : we store all data input in our mind, where it stays. Every now and again some data disappears or is overwritten. 5 seconds of thinking about how a mind looks and what it does will leave you with 100 very hard questions about how you could possibly make that happen in a neural network. How memory works, the real version : you "learn" memory. When a person is presented with a pointer to a specific point in time or a specific event, his mind then reconstructs the memory by repeatedly asking the question "what happened next ?". All the data produced comes from the predictor, not from actual memory. So what is actually stored in your memory ? Well useful things. Not an index of dates combined with what happened. But "I start my day, then wash my teeth, then make a piece of toast, then ..." "What did you do yesterday ?" ("conversation" in someone's mind starts happening : "well obviously I woke up. Then what ? I washed my teeth. Ok, then what ? interrogator interrupts You ate a biscuit your mind Ok that sounds reasonable, and I'm not all that sure at all. He may be right. I'll go with it) Memory changed. Next time you remember it will be a lot easier to go with the changed memory. When you remember something, the memory is not "recalled" like on a computer, but recreated from scratch. You start with a specific event (that itself may or may not have happened, but it must be quite normal for it to happen so the predictor doesn't see it as too unlikely). Because external persons can both contribute and interfere with the recreation process it can be used to change memories (your mind doesn't separate multiple inputs, so if a person is talking when you're recalling, it influences the recall process). You want your memory to be accurate, spend a while with extremely limited inputs first. Because of how the predictor works, it "synchronizes" with other people's predictors (nothing magical, it simply predicts what the other person's mind is doing and takes that into account). But that results in that if you have extreme uncertainty about an event and the person you're talking to feels very strongly about it, your mind will be quite likely to follow the other person's convictions. Keep doing this, and you can convince someone they're a monster (note: requires that the interrogator believes that to be true, builds trust and avoids firing the "bullshit detector" and even then large changes require quite a bit of time) There are a few more of these things that are quite normal, given that our minds copy others' behaviors, but people find extremely hard to believe. The one I have refused to believe for the longest time was that people who get abused, whether by a military, simply be economic situation, or even when kidnapped, initially want to get out. But if the situation persists, the no longer want the abuse to stop. They want to become the abuser (because that person is the person their mind most often gives attention to). For a behavior copy "machine", this is expected and normal. In psychology this simple fact has been known for centuries. Many other counterintuitive facts become easy to explain (e.g. why commercials work).
- erikig 12y agoI'm going to send a link to this article to the MPAA, RIAA and my ISP the next time the claim I was downloading/sharing something illegally.
- fiatjaf 12y agoMemory and imagination are linked, and they can be confused, but they are not the same and can be distinguished by a trained mind.
- dghf 12y agoWhat sort of training? What's the evidence it works? Do you have a link, or can you provide more details?
- GoldenHomer 12y agoAnd those people are called white-guilt liberals.
- smegel 12y agoAnd juries can be convinced of crimes that never happened: rape, where tears count for far more than real evidence ever would.
- Joeri 12y agoThis happens conversely as well, where the person would remember a rosy version of events in which they themselves acted quite badly in actuality. Just because a person believes they did not do something bad doesn't mean they didn't. It has led me to automatically put into doubt stories people tell me that I did not witness myself.
- LinaLauneBaer 12y agoOne more reason to not talk to the police... Relevant explanation by an expert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
- ricardonunez 12y agoThe first time I watched that video I got disturbed of how easy you can get in trouble. I asked a lawyer friend and he told me the stories you see in the news are more common than people think.
- kazinator 12y agoIf false memories can be planted in those who are accused, it can be done to witnesses too, so that they swear that the shriveled nonagenarian in the courtroom is the same person as the guard in that Nazi camp more than sixty years ago.
- pknerd 12y agoOh it can be sumup in a single word,Politics
- toddrew 12y agoWe played a trick on my friend Jerry that I worked with in the military. The previous night we had a few drinks and then called it a night and walked home together. Jerry, in the morning mentioned to someone that his shoulder really hurt, but he couldn't remember hurting it. We came up with a plan that morning to convince Jerry that he had been sideswiped by a taxi, and got into a fight with a taxi driver. We emailed everyone we were with the night before, explained to them what we were doing, and started planting that idea in Jerry's mind. At first he claimed that it never happened. He kept saying he knew we were just fucking with him. More and more people corroborated the story. We even had a military police officer call him on the phone to inquire about the incident. We got his boss to sit him down and have a talk with him about his problem with alcohol (he doesn't drink that much). Eventually as the story was repeated to him by everyone, especially people with authority, Jerry went from: "this never happened.. I only had two beer last night" to: "hmm... maybe I was really drunk after all... but I don't remember anything" to: "Yeah... I remember everything now! How could I have forgotten before? Crazy!?!?" He turned our story into real memories and even started adding his own details to the story. We thought that was hilarious. That night we all got together and told Jerry that it was all just a joke. He couldn't believe it. He argued with us that he was sure it did happen. He remembered it. When he finally accepted it he felt really dumb, but it was a really fun day at work for us, so definitely worth it.
- crpatino 12y ago> ... he felt really dumb, but it was a really fun day at work for us, so definitely worth it. Congratulations!!! Probably every convicted rapist though something equivalent at some point, so you are in good company to be sure.
- Dreckcath 12y agoI think this is a reasonable, logical approach. Having a grand scheme on how things should go is good before you start acting on it step by step.
- Smartersynchro 12y agoWhat are they trying to achieve with this study? Teach people how to falsify a testimony?