The Science of False Memories

and it is kind of a simplification. But but still we are made up of memories where where all these these uh these recollections of things that have happened, things we've learned, and they form who we are. So the idea that some of those memories are false memories is really fascinating. Yeah, because it means that part of what we are is not factual. It's a fabrication and and and it's and even more to the point, it's one thing if you build some fabrication into who you are.

I'm a support Yeah, yeah, I try and believe something that's not real every day, something new, you know, uh and uh and build it up to him at least fifty fifty. But but but the idea that there are parts of us that we think are true, that are false. That's that's the really fascinating and or chilling thing. Yeah, and uh, what we're talking about is specifically a book called Seventh Sins of Memory by Daniel Schockter. And he was on a panel that you saw at the World

Science Festival covering memory and what happens with memory? Yes, in New York City. Uh, as it was. Yeah, it was a fascinating talk. We referred to to some of the stuff that was brought up in our previous episode on on memory. What do we talk about? That's what happens when you record as many podcasts. That's that's a yeah, false recall there. But but but but Yeah, as we've discussed before, memory is uh is not this perfect thing. It is a they in a sense, you could say

that it's it's a flawed system. It would be more accurate to just say a memory is ephemeral because a lot of the flaws that are there are a part of its operating system, Like we can't remember everything, so you're gonna forget things, um and uh, and in memories are we were always having to update information. So there's

a potential for disaster there. And I know that we've talked about this before that when you have a particularly strong memory that has to do with like saying nine eleven, right, you know, where were you on nine eleven, that your potential for recall is actually hindered by the fact that you're a magdala isn't on high alert your emotional center of your brain, so your hypocampus is not necessarily really accurately recording things at that moment because your amingdala is

kind of taking over. So that's just one example of how, um, you know, you can come away from an experience having really strong emotional feelings and saying, yes, I was there and I was wearing this shirt and so on and so forth, but um, you're actually hamstrung and your billy to bring up those particular details, even if you feel certain that that's the way it went down, right, and uh. And it's also important to stress that memory is a

rather complex system. It's not just a situation of oh, here's the part of my brain that does memory, and it's doing memory right now. There it goes it remembered something and then wrote a new memory. Now we have There are several different types of memory, and they're all sort of working in a in a chorus and uh, uh you know, I mean it's it's very much like an orchestra scenario where no no particular instrument is playing the tune that everything together creates the song that you're hearing.

So you have things like episodic memory for events, semantic memory for facts in general knowledge, uh, priming memory for unconscious activation of memories and reminders. Conditioning from that Pavlovian experience where the dog here's the dinner bell and starts salivating even though the meal hasn't members in it. Yeah, and the priming one is something we're gonna talk about

a little bit too, But that one is interesting. What you're saying is you're can meeting sort of unconscious memories, ain't even really aware of of this database that you're building up. So in his book, Shackter lays out what he calls the seven Deadly Sins of memory, and uh,

it's a fascinating look at it. I mean there's some bleed over between one and another, but uh, like the three first that he goes through transience and that's just basically I'm not going to remember, um, this fact from ten years ago because my brain forgets things over time. That's that's pretty simple. Like when you and and then

there's gonna be this uh basic absent mindedness. And this is where you don't remember what somebody told you because you were you know, involved in another task or you were driving and uh, you suddenly got distracted. You say, you're listening to this podcast while driving, and suddenly you have to you have to deal with some sort of near wreck experience. You're maybe hoping me not, but you're probably not going to commit to memory, at least not

committed strongly. Um, whatever you're listening to on a podcast or radio. Uh. Then there there's a also blocking And this is what happens when you're like, oh, um, what was the actor in the Yeah, the actor and the thing which I do all the time, what was what was that film with Val Kilmer in it where he has a sword? You know that that kind of thing. And you'll sit there and will be agonizing, you know

what was that person's name? And someone will be like look it up an IMDb and you're like, no, I have to think of myself. And for me, I'm always like that guy that was wearing shoes and like never giving anybody good clues and so from there he breaks out some of the things that can happen. Some of them are are sins that basically color memory, like suggestibility,

which is really fascinating his own right. This is this is like, for instance, the scenario where um, the police are grilling a witness to a crime and trying and trying to find out like who is the who they saw at the scene, and they will sometimes sometimes even kind of unconsciously hint that this is the person you should pick, so sort of like leading the witness leading in the courtroom before, where it's like that line of

questioning is really putting that idea in your head. Yeah, like if I was to say, so, Julie, your favorite food is pizza, right, well, yes it is actually yes. I mean that's kind of a horrible example, but but I'm leading you. You know, It's like the the answers and the question. The answer that I want is in the question that I ask you, like cheese, like sauce? Do I ever? And then there's also just persistence, which is for instance, a traumatic memory that keeps showing up.

But the one that we're going to discuss in detail today is misattribution. This is a particularly fascinating. This. This is like memory distortion on steroids can be. Sometimes it can be pretty simple, like a day to day thing. There's a predictability factor that we rely on when we're bringing up a memory, right, we're taking it out of the drawer, and misattribution seems to fall prey to our need to fit details into a framework right, even if

the pieces don't fit. Um. There's a kind of familiarity that exists, right because you you have some of the facts right, you have some of the facts wrong, but your mind wants to try to square that and um, so you know, even though it's it could be wrong, it feels right to you because on some level you're familiar with some of the details. And there a bunch

of examples of what misattribution can be. Like one of the most most obvious ones would be an example of where you try and remember, um, like where you met somebody or a year and you end up the memory is fine, except that there's a detail wrong in it, or a couple of details wrong, and it's basically got gotten a little mixed up, that your order has been

slightly mixed up. From the kitchen they bring they bring you the burger you ordered, but they give you fries instead of the side salad that you requested, right right. So you actually recall something, but you might map it to the wrong place or time or to the wrong person, and then you've got an imagined event that you ascribe

to a reality. Which this is really fascinating, where we end up remembering something as fact, like we remembering something as action that we merely imagined or thought about doing. And the great example of this is something happens to me way too often, and that is where I'll leave the house and I'll actually lock the door, but then I'll check it again, double sure that I locked it, or sometimes walked to the car and then walk back and then check that I locked it again, which is

just unexcusable to come back for the third time. But it's but I can't I can't remember if I thought about locking it or I did lock it. The same with the things like blowing out the candle in the bathroom or turning off a burner. These are vital things we need to do, and we're making the middle note, do it, do it, do it, But then after the fact, we can't remember did I just think about doing that? Or did I actually do it? Did I imagine myself

doing it? And um, if you go on the World Science Festival site, you'll actually see a clip of this example in In the example, it's not necessarily the person imagining themselves doing something or himself doing something, but it's this clip of this guy talking about how for many years he harbored this resentment against his cousin for ruining his eighth birthday party by swinging the bat, the pinona,

all the candy out. So he sees his cousin at some point, you know, a couple of years ago, he's now an adult, and he says, remember that time that you completely ruined my eighth birthday party? And his cousin says, what are you talking about. I was away at summer camp at your eighth birthday party. And he said that he immediately realized that he had concocted this, this memory, and it's just just like that. He thought, Oh, that's completely right, this he was at summer camp. And I

think that's fascinating. And I know that there are examples for myself that you know, I've done the same thing. Um, And for whatever reason, our minds kind of conjure these these alternate realities. These are these are basically um binding errors, um binding failures. Even in memory binding and and again they you basically have two kinds um I mean memory binding is the is the gluing together of various components

of an experience into a whole. Is the bringing together of the different um the saw had the main dish, the garnish, and the condiments into the complete order. And in a binding failure, the the time that the event occurs at the action or the object, et cetera, is not bound to the particular time and place. And again it can It can deal with with real events and just sort of mix them around or imagined or just

purely thought about events. Yeah. Yeah, So that's really interesting that you'd have to have that sort of sequential binding in your head. Otherwise things kind of go awry if you don't have that glue in place. In the books, Actor describes an experiment where younger and older adults were shown one object and then as to imagine a second object. All right, So in the first case they had them imagine, say, a magnifying glass. So that's easy to imagine, you know,

it's like a stick with a round thing. At the top that you look through to see, you know. Um. And then they imagined that they saw that they actually saw a magnifying class there it is, so the actual object with it. And then they imagined a lollipop, and a lollipop is also a stick with a own thing at the top, but with an entirely different purpose. Um. Then they also did a dissimilar thing where it was

like a screwdriver and a coat hanger. And when they looked at at the results, they found that that older adults were more likely to say they'd actually seen the lolly, which yeah, But but they had a number of tests subbosely that were actually said, yeah, I saw the law, you showed it to me. So the examples of of the thing we imagine in the thing we perceived becoming confused, which is more it's more likely when there is some

sort of semantic link between the two. Yeah, yeah, Well, and again there's that familiarity, right, it's the context, and it gives a sort of fire to your convictions. And you do see that more in the elderly, who rely on that sense of familiarity to corroborate their memories, and they have a harder time recalling specific recollections. You also see this sometimes uh like the misuh the misattribution of the source of a memory, and that this may have

happened to a number of you. Where are you So you hear something from a friend and then you misremember it as being something you saw on the news, which can get you into some trouble sometime if you're you know, in a dinner party and you're like, oh, yeah, such, such and such, and then people were like, I don't think that's right. I think you you may have got the wrong You're like, no, I saw that on Fox News.

It must be true. Well, seeing I was thinking about that, and I was thinking, that is why language is so flawed for us. And of course it's great because it's what we have to communicate with each other with. But I was thinking, here's here's a good example of something like the health care bill in the United States. This conversation began to happen around it, and there are all sorts of bits of information, information that's unleashed and and

some of that has been misremembered, intentionally or not. And you have these conversations going on and it's being processed by the public at large, and then mass confusion ensues and you're talking about things like the death panels and all that. Yeah, yeah, I really have any any any origin. In fact, it was more about people coloring the debate

with exaggerated ideas or just misconstruing information. And maybe they weren't trying to do that intentionally, but I think it's fascinating that you have this black and white document that exists, and yet the reality that's been created around it, or had been created around I guess depending on how you look at it, uh, is quite different from what the

actual document is. And a lot of this I think again has there's that suggestibility factor and um this uh also this the the wrong source, right, because you could sit around in a dinner party and mistake what someone might say at the table for fact that was you know, reported Fox News or NBC, and so it just really muddles the conversations that we have and the reality of of um of what we're all looking at. You know. Yeah.

Another possibility is that if you're watching say twenty four hour news show, and you don't really end up in remembering whether you heard something on an opinion based section or um a more a factual news report. Um, you know it's the same. Gonna go with a you know, a newspaper did you get on the opinion page or from the like the ap stories right? Or a blog right that it's that a blog that's been researched and documented or is it just someone's blog that says I

hate Monday's right. Well, I like in my own research

for articles, here at how stuff works. Like, sometimes I'll find myself in a situation where and we'recalling a fact from the research I've done, and I have to I try to steer away from even looking at sources that I that could potentially be problematic because ideally, like I've heard, like some people can argue that, say, a Wikipedia article is a good starting place for legitimate research because even though you you have to cast out on the article itself,

since anybody can update it and in quality varies sometimes right in quality very significantly. There's some fine Wikipedia articles out there, but then there are some that are just really incorrect, really flawed, or poorly written. So some people say start there, then you know, use that as a jumping off place for real research. But the problem there is that you'll run across other facts you'll start putting together an article or something, and then you'll put something

in and you'll misremember the source. So something you ended up thinking is from say this New York Times article or something published in a perior view journal is actually from the Wikipedia article or a blog referring to one of the uh, the primary sources and uh, and it

just gets confusing. So it's a topsy turvy world. All right, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're gonna look at a little something called a memory conjunction error and how you and I could possibly be ripping off things without us even knowing we're doing it. This podcast is brought to you by Intel, the sponsors of Tomorrow and the Discovery Channel. At Intel, we believe

curiosity is the spark which drives innovation. Join us at curiosity dot com and explore the answers to life's questions. And we're back. So memory conjunction air. This is another fascinating aspect of misattribution UM where two memories are combined into one. Generally, this is going to revolve around words and faces and uh, and with with words especially, it's uh, it's important that there's some sort of semantic link there is that the example of Varnish and Spaniel, and sometimes

people mistake that for Spanish. Right they've seen or they've seen that sort of sequence and they think, oh, I heard the word Spanish. Yeah, there's list of a semantic link there, but more of a like a linguistic link. I guess that's the sound of the words. You know, like you're you're You're probably not going to have a memory conjunction error involving like two things that are completely different.

But say you didn't know anything about wrap and you were introduced, because it will it will actually like happen with you know, people you're introduced to, Like if you're in a in some sort of line of work or just in your social life, find yourself meeting a lot of new people, you may have a memory conjunction error um when you try to recall information about them later, Like say you're introduced to Snoop Dogg and Little Wayne, both rappers, and if you weren't familiar with them, you

might instead remember that you met one person like a name like little Dog or you did it correctly or a little Snoop Snoop or something yeah, so um and But then even crazier is it can occur with faces where you'll meet two people with similar faces and then you'll commit to memory a face that is um a combination of the two, which is so great, Yeah, and so like that your mind would construct this third person

out of the two people. Like a lot of what we're talking about with memory, it does raise some problematic questions when the memory is important, because it's one thing if you just met some people at a party and then you get their names mixed up, or you know, if it's some piddling thing you know where you you accidentally say that you're, you know, the source of some little news it was in New York Times when it

was really Washington Post or something. But when people's lives are on the line, when you have criminal investigations and witness testimonies. Yeah, And one of the best examples of this is Donald Thompson, who is a memory researcher himself. Yeah, Australian guy, and uh, he was arrested one morning in connection with this rudal right, horrible saw it on this lady who said, this is the guy, he was there,

this is the one arrested him. She was so sure of it that police were actually able to track him down by the way he looked right like she had this idea of him cemented in her mind. Yeah, and so they brought him in. But the thing is, Donald Thompson had this just air tight alibi because he would at the time of the attack, he was doing a live TV interview and I ironically enough, he was talking about the the the ephemeral nature of memory and about

false memories while this is going on. But the person was like, no, that's him, this is the guy, that's right. So while while she was being attacked, while she was being raped, she was that that television program was on, and she actually encoded his face onto the rapist face. Yeah, it was a misastribution of of the face to the wrong context or the wrong context to the right face, which I mean, it's such a simple example of of this, uh,

but but just such a telling one. The idea that she saw the face on the TV and then that becomes the face fixed in the memory of the event. Well, and then she had mentioned though that the big takeaway from this is that I eye witness testimony is just egregiously flawed. In the nineteen eighties, more than seventy five thousand criminal trials per year were decided on the basis of eyewitness testimony. This is from Daniel stractor Um who

wrote about this in several different articles. Uh. And then another point that he likes to make is that in an analysis of forty cases in which DNA exonerated wrongfully imprisoned people, thirty six of them were put in the clinker because of eyewitness testimony. So it's really one of those things you need to back up and actually look at the system and how it's conducted um eyewitness testimony and UM and in fact, Janet Reno I believe tried to reform this system and has to a certain degree.

And most police departments now when they do lineups, they don't necessarily bring everybody in the room. Uh. And the reason is is because even though you could have the say someone um stole your wallet, even even if you had the thief in that lineup, there could be someone that looked a lot like that thief. In your mind is misremembering and then uh fingering the other person who

is innocent because they look like the thief. So now they're starting to take people in one at a time so that your mind doesn't get too confused and you can actually sort of fare it out, you know, yes or no, is this the person that did it? But even then, as we've discussed, the memory memory in them is complex and flawed enough as it is, without the

without the the the investigation process, making it even worse. Yeah, yeah, and yeah, you cannot do away with with uh this you know, wholesale, because this is the person you know, to which this act was uh, that this act happened to. So you've got to have some sort of credence and those details that some of that is going to be true.

There's another story that the chapter brings up in his book that that I found particularly fascinating, and this involves a British photographer who they just referred to by the initials Mr. And this is the early nineties photographer you know, deals with with a lot of faces in his time. And he's I believe it was in London. He's, you know, a lot of crowds around, and uh, he suddenly noticed that he started seeing some more celebrities than usual, you know.

And you live in any big city or even a you know, small smaller cities, occasionally you're gonna see somebody and you're like, oh, is that is that Brad Pitt? Is that you know William Schatton out front? Turner? Yeah, Bonnie's my my wife, Bonnie, her dad looks kind of like Ted Turner. Um. So he has been mistaken for Ted Turner on on a few occasions where people are like, I think they've actually come up and asked him before. That's awesome. I hope he runs with that, just pretends

like he always has a Bison burger in his hand. Yeah. But but this guy said, you know, he was noticing it a little more often than his than his normal because there's one thing to be like, oh I think I saw that actor on on the tube this morning. Uh. No, he was. He was seeing it regularly, and he'd be out with his wife and he would he would be like, is that who I think it is over there? And she would like be like, no, I don't think that's anybody. I think you're mistaken, And he got so strong that

he was. He would be he just feel compelled to go and approach these people and and be like you're you know, you're Brad Pitt or you're you know whoever, and they would look at him like he was crazy. So he went to the doctor and he found out that he had multiple sclerosis, which had compromised his frontal lobe, which is involved in the consolidation of information from short term to long term as well as like spatial navigation.

When you see a face that looks sort of familiar, we all have this happen, you know, where at first glance, it looks like someone we know or a famous person, and then we realize it's not. So when you see the face, there's a part of the brain that identifies it as a familiar face. Yeah, like your pattern recognition software. Yeah. And then but there's another section that has all the ideas and all the biographical information that kind of fact

checks the initial report. What so one part says, hey, I think that's Brad Pitt over there, and the other part of your brain says, no, that's not Brad pet because he actually looks a little different and he would never dress like that, you know, thanks like that. In this British photographer, Mr, the frontal lobe damage had made it so that his brain didn't sufficiently scrutinize the signals that were generated by the weakly activated facial recognition system.

In his brain. So was it the fact checker that was down? Yeah, but or basically the the connection between the two the signals were. It's kind of like in the in like a movie where one person is telling the other what to say to like a radio headset, and the signal gets distorted so that the ancication from this hilarity us and hilarity us we're in this case um not not exactly hilaritous no, no, no, But I do think it's interesting that his his database, his backup

database with celebrities, you know, as a photographer. Yeah, well, I think and also I mean celebrity is they're the modern deities of our pop culture. So even though we don't know like Madonna, we have seen so many images of her, and we have biographical information, we have biographical informations, so it's almost as if we do know her, even

though we don't have personal knowledge of her. Um. And it's just this tail us just so fascinating too, because it underlies just how complex memory is, that there are multiple systems going on in something as simple as saying, hey, is that who I think it is? Oh no, it's not right, and that you could have some of the smother wiring just not quite right, and then of a sudden you're seeing Madge everywhere. So let's get to plagiarism

and uh yeah, amnesia. This is pretty fascinating and scary, especially for us since we work uh in a field of composed of research and writing well, and there's so much research that we're filtering on a day to day basis that Yeah. Um. I first became aware of it when we were talking about the music podcast not excuse me, not music, but dreaming and you know what, what can

happen in our dreams? And Paul McCartney when he wrote Yesterday, he wrote it in a dream, woke up and immediately went to the piano and he was fearful that he had actually ripped that off, which is called kryptome kryptomnesia. Uh yeah, there's a there's a great scene in the by the way, Yeah, um, not in this and maybe he had access into the world through his dreams and

still there from a parallel universe, parallel Paul. There's a there's a great example of this in the HBO series trem ay Um that takes place in New Orleans does with the Aftermathickatrina, where there is a violinist and she's trying to write her first song, and she she worked really hard on this, and she's so proud of it when she finished, and she plays it for a couple of friends and they're like, oh, that that's sounds good, and they don't have the heart to break it to

her that she just played a Bob Dylan song. Uh see. And and so that's exactly what ends up happening with people. Crypto Amnesia is when we produce from memory another person's writings, writings or ideas, and and we end up having a memory misattribution going on, and that we don't remember that it was this other person's ideas. We we idea, we think it's our own, we think it's a novel thought. And you can see this just at the very basic levels.

If you've ever been in a meeting and you've said something or you've heard someone else say something, and then like you know, on to five minutes later, someone else says, hey, I've got this idea, and they say the exact same thing. It happens all the time. I'm sure I've done that. I'm sure I've ripped off people ideas and meeting before you just don't even know that you're doing it right, because you're processing this is new information to you. Um. Yeah.

Unintentional plagiarism has been examined in a number of studies, and there there was one where people were asked to generate examples of particular categories of items, like a species of bird, and they were found that up without realizing, people plagiarized each other about four percent of the time, and subsequent studies using more like natural procedures have found even higher rates like that, sometimes as much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it involves that thing that we talked about before,

which is called priming, And that's the unconscious influence of memory. Right, your brain activates certain words or ideas and and just kind of files them away, and then when you go to create something novel concerning that topic, then then you're, you know, unconsciously bringing up those exact words. And we've seen those time and time and again in history. In fact, Carl Young was looking through some of Nietzie's writings and found a couple of paragraphs that were completely ripped off.

He probably didn't even know it from another person. Uh, they were there, stunningly, some familiar and similar to each other that Uh, you know, there are times that people will take whole passages that they don't even realize that they've committed to memory and bring them up just you know, and it's sort of one of those things You're like, why can't I have that sort of uh memory recall when I want it and not when I want it?

But it's gonna gonna actually hurt my career, right, And I've been counted that too, in like in the newspapers. Remember one incident where a writer ended up being accused of plagiarism and and at the time, I was kind of like, wow, how why did they do this? Because this person would never do do this, you know, because it's as a writer you don't. I mean, it's the worst thing that could happen pretty much as far as your your actual career performance, because done intentionally, it's like

the lowest, laziest thing. But is this really underlines it? It's not always an intentional act it there. Sometimes it's just about the flawed nature of memory that we end up recalling a source word for word, uh, when we and think that those are our words on the page. Yeah. They had another example in the seven sins um a shocked her did and it was of George Daniels, who wrote Science in American Society, and it was it was

doing really well. I got released and you know, great reviews, and and then as he was sort of going through it, he realized that he had quoted directly from a number of sources, not ever meaning to thinking that those were his complete novel thoughts. And he was completely horrified and in fact came out and said, WHOA, I didn't realize that, you know, these sources had gotten in my brain to the extent that I was actually plagiarizing, which I believe them,

because you know, I think that he was. You know, he had that moment of let me look back at my my book that I created, and then all of a sudden, that false, the falsity of that memory started

to fall away. Yeah. For our final section here, one of the things that that really fascinated me reading about mis attribution is, like we we talked about before, it's the idea that these these memories form who we are, and the idea that there could be a false memory and they're making us up, composing who we are, and

we don't realize that it's false. But here's an even crazier idea, then imagine we could scan the brain and by scanning the brain tell if a memory is false or not, even if we have no idea, and this is it sounds very sci fi, but is in fact something that we can do and has been done. Chapter actually scans some brains with some test subject while just for fun, well while they were citing list of words, uh, and they were correctly and false recalling some of the

words in the list. And he reported that while the scans were very similar, they were quote cantalyzing hints of difference. Yeah, there have been a number of studies since then looking into exactly what's going on um and and the idea is that there's you know, there's that that fact checking process similar to the whole I see the face, and then another section of the brain determines whether or not that that familiar faces actually who we think it think

it is. Some more things are going on. So the idea is there's something in that activity and that fact checking that can be scan and and therefore there'll be some sort of little tell tale sign that that this

memory that you just recalled is flawed. So there's been a number of additional studies since then, and looking at them you'll see the results fall on both sides, but a number of them do point to the idea that there is a slight difference occurring when a false memory is brought to mind as opposed to a true memory, because you can see the basically the the fact checking section of the brain is weaker in false memories. Okay, yeah, sh doctor says this too, which I think is interesting.

Beyond an exercise and scientific fortune telling, these studies managed to trace some of the roots of transience to the split second encoding operations that take place during the birth of a memory. What happens in frontal and temporal regions during those critical moments determines, at least in part, whether an experience will be remembered for a lifetime or drop into the oblivion of the forgotten, which I think is fascinating that you can take these scans and you can

see a fall memory at work. Yeah, and it's the mere fact that it's like the the the illusion of a false memory becomes a part of the illusion of who we are, and then the machine can see through the self believing illusion. It's just mind blown to me. I think so too. And I think that that we should end the podcast by by doing a little exercise. And this was actually done on the panel that you attended, right, And this is this is a little test to see how good your memory is. And this is the one

that they used at the World Science Festival. It's a word list and I'm going to repeat some words and I just want you guys to to listen for a moment I really think about them. Here's the word list. Candy, sour, sugar, bitter, good, taste tooth, nice, honey, soda, chocolate, heart cake, eat pie. Okay, okay, this is the list. And this list, of course is bringing up a bunch of ideas for you, right, there are some associations for you. Um and what semantic link

going on? Yeah, there's a semantic link. There's there's a story that your idea is conjuring right now and shocked. He actually does this to the audience and then he reads out some of the words to test whether or not people have actually remembered or misremembered something on that list. Now, that's a long list, but it's interesting because there could be a suggestibility factor here, right, Okay, So here's the test. How about the word taste. Was the word taste on

that list? Yes, yes, okay, you're right correct? Good? What about the word point no correct dissimilar from everything on the list? Yeah? Yeah, that just kind of stands out, doesn't it. Okay, Um, we got a couple more words. What about the word sweet? Yes, no, it was not see,

but the semantic link is there. I just assume sweet because everything else was around right, right, But you can't help it, right because your your brain is already making the framework in that connection, that familiarity that we talked about that makes us feel certain about the decisions or

the memories that come up for us. So I don't know, I would love to hear from from the audience about whether or not they also I thought that sweet was part of that list, because in the audience that I think the majority of people, yeah, we were like, yeah, yeah, totally.

We heard that. Maybe some people were you know, hip to what he was doing, and they were, well, yeah, the panelists are like they all had that trush our cat smile, or they had their and their their iPad out and they were like jotting them down if they

they were said, which is cheating. But for the record, But hey, if any of you have any any comments on on this, if you have some experiences with false memory you'd like to share, be they simple things that occur every day, or if you have some of the fun nominal Star story you would like to tell us so we would love to hear about it. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter, we'll blow the Mind on both of those, and you can also drop us an email at blow the Mind at how stuffworks dot com.

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