experiences with particular foods in their childhood, their expressed preferences
for those foods, and their eating of them, was affected months later (Geraerts et
al., 2008).
False memories can also be deliberately created by asking leading questions
that encourage someone to invent an answer concerning something they never
experienced. In a famous example, psychologist Elizabeth Loftus showed partic-
ipants a film of a traffic accident and asked how fast the cars were going when
they either smashed into, collided with, bumped, or hit each other. Those who
heard ‘smashed’ gave higher speed estimates and a week later were more likely
to ‘remember’ broken glass in the film when there was none (Loftus and Palmer,
1974).
False memories are most problematic when people ‘remember’ sexual abuse that
never happened, or identify suspects they never saw (Loftus and Ketcham, 1994).
There have been tragic cases in which therapists allegedly recovered repressed
memories of sexual abuse under hypnosis and convinced their patients that
the events really happened when they did not. The processes involved are still
poorly understood and there is no agreement over whether memory repression
or suppression, or ‘motivated forgetting’, really happens or not (McNally, 2012;
Staniloiu and Markowitsch, 2014). In such cases, it is often possible to find out
the truth of what happened by some kind of independent verification, but this
still does not mean that there is a sharp dividing line between ‘real’ memories
and ‘false’ memories. So how come we can normally be so confident about our
own memories?
Real memories tend to be more detailed and more easily brought to mind than
false memories. Sometimes real memories can be identified because we can put
them in context with other events or remember when and how they happened –
a skill called source monitoring. This is not important for learning skills and facts.
For example, you may reliably and correctly remember the speed of light, the
capital of Germany, and the name of the man next door, without needing to
remember when or where you learned them, but for autobiographical memory
the context is important. If the memory of an event in your life is detailed and
plausible, and fits with other events in time and place, then you are more likely to
judge that it really happened.
We probably all hold false memories, and even valid memories may consist of
accurate elements mixed with plausible concoctions and embellished with
invented details, because autobiographical memory is nothing like a static archi-
val device by which memories can be encoded, stored, and retrieved; rather,
remembering is a process of active reconstruction shaped as much by our cur-
rent goals and priorities as by the realities of the past (Conway, 2005). Striking
overlap has been found in the neural activity associated with remembering past
experiences and imagining possible future experiences, and parallels have also
been observed in how memories and future imaginings are structured and expe-
rienced in relation to factors like emotion, level of detail, and psychopathology
(Schacter et al., 2012). Memory also has profoundly social aspects in the sense
that past experiences are not easily divided into ‘mine’ and ‘yours’, and every social
act of recollection changes the next (Saunders, 2014). Some have even suggested
that a memory about something in your past is not a belief about the past, but
constructed in order to justify, to yourself and others, why you hold a particular
‘human memory can be
remarkably fragile and
even inventive’(Geraerts et al., 2008, p. 749)