Our memories are manipulated and it is likely that even the most emotional moments, such as the encounter with a great love or the birth of a child, did not happen as we remember them.
And it is not that there is a totalitarian dictator who has gained access to our brain to modify it at will; it is we ourselves who rewrite our past. According to a study by northwestern university (USA), memory takes fragments of the current moment and inserts them into the past to better fit our present world.
This work, published in the journal Journal of Neuroscience, it is further proof that our memory works little like a video camera and that our memories are not very reliable.
«When you think back to the moment you met your current partner, you may recall a feeling of love and euphoria,» Donna Jo Bridge, lead author of the study, said in a statement from Northwestern University. «However, you may be projecting your current feelings about the time of the original encounter with this person,» Add. Somehow, memories would adapt to a changing environment to help us deal with what is important for survival in the present.
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Researchers like ELisabeth Loftus, of the University of California in Irvine, have proven in various experiments that it is possible to insert false memories into a person.
On one occasion, he managed to convince a good number of people that they had caught their parents having sex and even suggested 16% of a sample until they believed they had witnessed demonic possession. To go further and introduce memories that, almost certainly, did not correspond to anything that happened in reality, Loftus convinced 16% of participants in another trial they had encountered bugs bunnya character from Warners at Disneyland. In a final twist, he carried out an experiment in which he managed to make 30% of the participants remember having met in Disneyland with a Bugs Bunny drugged that also licked their ears.
The novelty of Bridge’s study is that it tries to show the moment when the false memory is implanted within the existing memory. In addition, the authors of the work discovered that the editing room in which memories are edited as if it were a movie is the hippocampus.
To perform his experiment, he showed 17 individuals 168 objects located in different places on a computer screen against different backgrounds, from the bottom of the ocean to a rural landscape, and they were asked to recall their location. Next, the researchers asked the participants to locate the objects in the same place as in the initial case, but on a different background. In all cases, they failed. In a third phase of the study, volunteers were shown the objects at three locations in the original screen and they were asked to place them in the correct place. The options offered to them were the original location of the object, the place where they had placed it in the second part of the experiment, or a new location.
“The participants always chose the location they had chosen in the second part”, Explain Bridge. “This shows that their original memory of the location had changed to reflect the location they remembered on the new background. His memory updated the information by inserting the new information into the old memory.»he concludes.
Finally, when the researchers changed the experiment again and asked the participants to place the object in a new location different from the original one, the small change caused them to remember the place where it was located in the initial phase of the test. While doing these tests, the participants underwent a magnetic resonance imaging system to observe their brain activity and locate the place and time in which the memory modifications were taking place.
Source: The Spectator