For the novel, see False Memory (novel)

It has been suggested that Synthetic memory be merged into this article or section. (Discuss)

A false memory is a memory of an event that did not happen or is a distortion of an event that did occur as determined by externally corroborated facts. The introduction of this article does not provide enough context for readers unfamiliar with the subject. ... Image File history File links Please see the file description page for further information. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into False memory. ... For other uses, see Memory (disambiguation). ...

Background

It is common experience that human memory may be unreliable to some degree, whether by failing to remember at all or by remembering incorrectly.

Our sense of identity, of who we are and what we have done, is tied to our memories, and it can be disturbing to have those challenged. Amnesia, Alzheimer's disease, and post-traumatic stress disorder (also known as “shell-shock”) provide examples of dramatic loss of memory, with devastating effects on the sufferer and those around them. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Amnesia or amnæsia (from Greek ) (see spelling differences) is a condition in which memory is disturbed. ... Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a term for certain severe psychological consequences of exposure to, or confrontation with, stressful experiences that the person experiences as highly traumatic. ...

Memory is a complicated process, only partly understood; but research suggests that the qualities of a memory do not in and of themselves provide a reliable way to determine accuracy. For example, a vivid and detailed memory may be based upon inaccurate reconstruction of facts, or largely self-created impressions that appear to have actually occurred. Likewise, continuity of memory is no guarantee of truth, and disruption of memory is no guarantee of falsity. Finally, memory is believed to be a reconstructed phenomenon, and so it can often be strongly influenced by expectation (one's own or other people's), emotions, the implied beliefs of others, inappropriate interpretation, or desired outcome.

Discussion

If a person remembers an event that lacks another witness or corroborative physical evidence, the validity of the memory may be questioned—but not dismissed. It might be said that absence of evidence does not in fact constitute the non-existence of evidence, but validation has the highest priority. For instance, one might say that they have witnessed scores of an enemy army over the hillside. As difficult as it may be to disprove such a statement outright, the statement cannot be validated until the enemy army is actually validated by corroborating witnesses.

Complications arise when a memory involves trauma inflicted by another. If it is in a reputedly involved third party's interest to deny an incriminating memory, the memory cannot be dismissed merely on the strength of such a denial. Likewise, the memory alone does not warrant an accusation of the third party—hence need for external corroborative evidence.

The origin of false memories is controversial. Hypnosis can be used to form false memories because this technique can lead to fantasizing and can increase the subjective certainty of fantasy. Research suggests that at least some false memories are formed through rehearsal, or repetition, of an event that has been confirmed as fantastic: after repeatedly thinking about and visualizing an event, a person may begin to “remember” it as if it had actually occurred. Upon questioning, such a person might confidently recall the event when in fact it is merely previous visualizations that make it seem familiar. Rehearsal is the strongest mechanism of moving short-term memory into long-term memory. Naturally, the rehearsal of incorrect information leads to the formation of an incorrect long-term memory. This applies to both implanted and real memories. For example, many people have experienced the phenomenon of learning that a childhood memory actually happened to a sibling. Short-term memory, sometimes referred to as primary, working, or active memory, is that part of memory which stores a limited amount of information for a few seconds. ... Long-term memory (LTM) is memory, stored as meaning, that can last as little as 30 seconds or as long as decades. ...

Research suggests that memory involves reconstruction, not just recall. For example, a child remembers standing beside a fence overlooking an eerie looking valley. As an adult, the real eerieness of the valley may be falsely remembered as containing a dead body, when in fact the child witnessed a homeless man sleeping under the trees. This particular memory would represent an inaccurate reconstruction.

Many proponents of recovered memories emphasize the importance of distinguishing between ordinary and traumatic memory. Studies show that memories can be implanted, but we lack studies on implanted traumatic memories and their related effects—such as post-traumatic stress disorder and dissociative identity disorder—because such studies would be unethical. A false memory is a memory of an event that did not happen or is a distortion of an event, as determined by externally corroborated facts of the event. ... Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a term for certain severe psychological consequences of exposure to, or confrontation with, stressful experiences that the person experiences as highly traumatic. ... Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is a diagnosis described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition, Revised, as the existence in an individual of two or more distinct identities or personalities, each with its own pattern of perceiving and interacting with the environment. ...

False memory syndrome

False memory syndrome (FMS) is the term for the hypothesis describing a state of mind wherein sufferers have a high number of highly vivid but false memories, often of abusive events during their childhood. This condition has been studied, and sufferers have confessed to “entirely made up stories.” However, the DSM-IV does not recognize FMS, although the forgetting of traumatic events constitutes several of the manual's diagnostic criteria for PTSD. The debate over FMS centers largely around the topic of child abuse, wherein alleged victims are said to experience dissociation, which causes repression of the traumatic memory until later in life, when the memory resurfaces either naturally or with the aid of a professional. Many advocates of FMS argue against both methods of memory recovery, claiming that such professionals as therapists and psychiatrists accidentally implant false memories. Specific therapies considered by some to be pseudoscientific, such as past lives therapies have been explained with reference to false memory syndrome. The term and concept were popularized, though not invented, by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF). The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association, is the handbook used most often in diagnosing mental disorders in the United States and other countries. ... Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), is a term for the psychological consequences of exposure to or confrontation with stressful experiences, which involve actual or threatened death, serious physical injury or a threat to physical integrity and which the person found highly traumatic. ... This article is about the psychological state of dissociation. ... A pseudoscience is any body of knowledge purported to be scientific or supported by science but which fails to comply with the scientific method. ... The False Memory Syndrome Foundation was formed by a group of parents who had been accused of child abuse, their lawyers, and sympathetic academics who promote the hypothesis of False Memory Syndrome and dispute the validity of recovered memories. ...

The Courage to Heal is a book that has received much controversy over the years, as some believe it encourages the recovery of repressed memories as a healing technique. Some retractors have blamed the book for encouraging them into memory confabulation.[1] The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (first published in 1988) is a book written by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, aimed at a female audience who have suffered child sexual abuse and who seek to overcome the associated trauma generated by it. ... A repressed memory, according to some theories of psychology, is a memory (often traumatic) of an event or environment which is stored by the unconscious mind but outside the awareness of the conscious mind. ... A retractor is a person who had previous claimed something, but has later withdrawn that claim. ...

Ultimately, it is undeniable that true memories are often forgotten. The difficulty comes in deciding whether a memory which has been recovered or spontaneously recollected, is accurate and correctly interpreted, or not.

Prominent examples

Sexual abuse

False memory has figured prominently in many investigations and court cases, including cases of alleged sexual abuse. There is no scientific way to prove that any of these recollections are completely accurate. This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...

In the 1980s, day care sexual abuse hysteria based on recovered memories resulted in the imprisonment of some of the accused parents. Most of these convictions were reversed in the 1990s, and there are cases in which recovered-memory therapists have been successfully sued by former clients for implanting false memories. [2] It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Satanic ritual abuse. ...

Many individuals who were led to believe in things that they later were able to show did not happen have retracted allegations of such abuse (for instance, [3]). Known as "retractors" they are sometimes vilified as being "in denial" about the "real abuse they suffered and want to forget about" by advocates of recovered memory therapy (see below), a suggestion which many find offensive.[4] Denial is a defense mechanism in which a person is faced with a fact that is too painful to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence. ...

Alien abduction and reincarnation

Other reputed instances of therapist-implanted false memory involve alien abductions and reincarnation therapy. These cases are cited as proof that certain methods can induce false memories. Psychologist Stephen Jay Lynn conducted a simulated hypnosis experiment in 1994, asking patients to imagine they had seen bright lights and experienced lost time. 91% of subjects who had been primed with questions about UFOs stated that they had interacted with aliens. [5] The Abduction Phenomenon is as umbrella term used to describe a number of kidnap individuals--sometimes called abductees--usually for medical testing or for sexual reproduction procedures. ... Reincarnation, literally to be made flesh again, as a doctrine or mystical belief, holds the notion that some essential part of a living being (or in some variations, only human beings) can survive death in some form, with its integrity partly or wholly retained, to be reborn in a new... Professor Charcot was well-known for showing, during his lessons at the Salpêtrière hospital, hysterical woman patients – here, his favorite patient, Blanche (Marie) Wittman, supported by Joseph Babiński. ...

Harvard University professor Richard McNally has found that many Americans who believe they have been abducted by aliens share personality traits such as New Age beliefs and episodes of sleep paralysis accompanied by hypnopompic hallucinations. These experiences prompted the individuals to visit therapists, who would frequently suggest alien abduction as a cause. The individuals readily accepted the explanation and in laboratory experiments exhibited stress symptoms similar to those of Vietnam veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.[6] The experiment led McNally to conclude, "Emotion does not prove the veracity of the interpretation."[7] Harvard redirects here. ... New Age describes a broad movement characterized by alternative approaches to traditional Western culture. ... Sleep paralysis is a condition characterized by temporary paralysis of the body shortly after waking up (known as hypnopompic paralysis) or, less often, shortly before falling asleep (known as hypnagogic paralysis). ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Vietnam veteran is a phrase used to describe someone who served in the armed forces of participating countries during the Vietnam War. ... Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a term for certain severe psychological consequences of exposure to, or confrontation with, stressful experiences that the person experiences as highly traumatic. ...

Satanic ritual abuse

In the United States, in the 1980s, a wave of false allegations erupted as a result of the use of recovered memory techniques in cases of Satanic ritual abuse. Hundreds of psychotherapists began teaching that adult stress was a sign that a person was sexually abused by their parents and neighbors. Using putative techniques to "recover" these lost memories, hundreds of people eventually were convinced by their therapists that they were abused by Satanic priests, these Satanists being their own family or kindergarten teachers. Hundreds of people were convicted of these "crimes" and put in jail. From the late 1990s onward a skeptical reappraisal of these recovered memory techniques has shown that these were not recovered memories at all, but rather created memories. Most of the people convicted on such charges have since been freed. Satanism Associated organizations Church of Satan First Satanic Church Prominent figures Anton LaVey | Blanche Barton | Peter H. Gilmore | Peggy Nadramia | Karla LaVey Associated concepts Left-Hand Path | Pentagonal Revisionism | Suitheism | Survival of the fittest | Objectivism | Might Is Right Books and publications The Satanic Bible | The Satanic Rituals | The Satanic Witch...

Criticisms of recovered memory therapy

Although there is genuine concern that important memories may be buried and need uncovering, there is concern that the goal of neutral truth may be forgotten, compared to the belief that they must exist and be found, and that lives are therefore devastated by the pressure to find such memories when such events often may not have happened, or may be misinterpreted.

Critics, such as FMS advocates, claim that recovered memory therapists often have a non-neutral interest in proving that such experiences happened, and use techniques similar to those used by cults and interrogators which are known to produce mental confusion such as:

• keeping information from their clients that could place their recovered memories in doubt
• assuming by default that repressed memories exist in the client
• relying upon techniques based upon suggestibility rather than ones which neutrally explore the client's experience
• mentally isolating people from their previous social support (families and so on)
• viciously attacking opponents, insinuating that they are practitioners of Satanic ritual abuse or that they endorse the sexual abuse of children

Critics of recovered memory therapy, like Richard Ofshe, Ethan Watters (Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, And Sexual Hysteria) and Elizabeth Loftus (The Myth of Repressed Memory), view the practice of "recovering" memories as fraudulent and dangerous. They base this assertion on several claims: A person is deemed to be suggestible if they accept and act on suggestions by others. ... Richard Ofshe is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. ...

• Traumatic experiences which obviously have happened, such as war time experiences, are not "repressed"—they are either forgotten or remembered clearly in spite of attempts to suppress them.
• The "memories" recovered in RMT are highly detailed. According to RMT literature, the human brain stores very vivid memories which can be recalled in detail, like a video tape. This belief contradicts virtually all research on the way memories work.
• The patient is given very extensive lists of "symptoms" including sleeplessness, headaches, the feeling of being different from others etc. If several of these symptoms are found, the therapist suggests to the patient that they were probably sexually abused. If the patient denies this, they are "in denial" and require more extensive therapy. This is a form of Catch-22.
• During the questioning, patients are openly encouraged to ignore their own feelings and memories and to assume that the abuse has happened. They then explore together with this therapist, over a prolonged period of many months or even years, how the abuse happened. The possibility that the abuse has not happened at all is usually not considered.

According to these critics, RMT techniques used for "reincarnation therapy" or "alien abduction therapy" are comparable to the techniques used in Satanic ritual abuse therapy. To verify the false memory hypothesis, researchers like Elizabeth Loftus have successfully produced false memories of various childhood incidents in test subjects. This is viewed as further evidence that comprehensive false memories can be produced in therapy. The false memories in these studies, however, are ordinary memory (like convincing people they were lost in a mall as a child) and not traumatic memories. It would be highly unethical to subject people to traumatic experiences for experimental purposes when studying traumatic memory. Psychological trauma is a type of damage to the psyche that occurs as a result of a traumatic event. ... Look up war in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Recovered memory therapy (RMT) is a psychotherapy that was developed in the 1980s as a way to recover “lost” childhood memories of abuse, as well as other memories of neglect and abuse. ... Recovered memory therapy (RMT) is a psychotherapy that was developed in the 1980s as a way to recover “lost” childhood memories of abuse, as well as other memories of neglect and abuse. ... A sketch of the human brain, imposed upon the profile of Michelangelos David. ... For computer memory, see computer storage. ... The term symptom (from the Greek syn = con/plus and pipto = fall, together meaning co-exist) has two similar meanings in the context of physical and mental health: Strictly, a symptom is a sensation or change in health function experienced by a patient. ... For the novel by Stephen King, see Insomnia (novel); for the Norwegian movie and its American remake, see Insomnia (movie). ... A headache is a condition of pain in the head; sometimes neck or upper back pain may also be interpreted as a headache. ... Denial is a psychological defense mechanism in which a person faced with a fact that is uncomfortable or painful to accept rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence. ... Catch-22 is a term, inspired by Joseph Hellers novel Catch-22, describing a general situation in which an individual has to accomplish two actions which are mutually dependent on the other action being completed first. ... Elizabeth F. Loftus (born October 16, 1944 in Los Angeles, CA) is a psychologist who works on human memory and how it can be changed by facts, ideas, suggestions and other forms of post-event information. ...

References

• Amos, Jonathan. "Alien 'abductees' show real symptoms", BBC News, 2003-2-18. Retrieved on 2005-12-26.
• Ceci, S.J., Huffman, M.L.C., Smith, E., & Loftus, E.F. (1994) Repeatedly thinking about non-events. Consciousness and Cognition, 3, 388-407.
• Hyman, I.E., Husband, T.H., & Billings, F.J. (1995) False memories of childhood experiences. Applied Cognitive Psychology 9, 181-197.
• Loftus, E. & Ketcham, K. The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse, St. Martin's Griffin, 1996. ISBN 978-0312141233.
• Ofshe, Richard and Watters, Ethan Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994
• Pendergrast, Mark. Victims of Memory: Incest Accusations and Shattered Lives, Upper Access,Inc, 1995. ISBN 0-942679-16-4.
• Perina, Kaja. "Alien Abductions: The Real Deal?", Psychology Today, March/April 2003. Retrieved on 2005-12-26.
• Roediger, H.L. & McDermott, K.B. (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words that were not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition. 21, 803-814. Full Text (PDF).

2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... December 26 is the 360th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar, 361st in leap years. ... 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... December 26 is the 360th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar, 361st in leap years. ...

See also

• Bridey Murphy
• Body memory
• Confabulation
• Lost in the mall technique
• McMartin preschool trial
• Michelle Remembers
• Kern county child abuse cases
• Memory bias

Bridey Murphy is the name of a woman that U.S. housewife Virginia Tighe (April 27, 1923 - July 12, 1995) claimed to have been in her previous life. ... Body memory is the theory that the body itself is capable of storing memories, as opposed to only the brain. ... Look up confabulation in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... The Lost in the Mall technique, formerly known as the Familial Informant Narrative Procedure, is a procedure which can be used to create false memories. ... The McMartin preschool case was an example of day care sexual abuse hysteria. ... Michelle Remembers was written by Dr. Lawrence Pazder, a late (April 30, 1936 - March 5, 2004) Canadian psychiatrist, and co-author and psychiatric patient Michelle Smith. ... During the years 1983-1986, numerous child molestation cases were tried in Kern County, California. ... Memory biases may either enhance or impair the recall of memory, or they may alter the content of what we report remembering. ...

External links and references

• Memory distortion in decision making
• American Psychological Association: Study of false memory
• New methods in police lineups
• Whitfield, Charles L. (1995) Memory and abuse: remembering and healing the effects of trauma.
• Skeptic's Dictionary on false memories
• False Memory Syndrome Foundation
• British False Memory Society
• Demonstration of a "false memory" test at Northwestern (uses Macromedia Flash, requires audio)
• Jim Hopper's scientific research and scholarly resources page
• Article about Marcia Johnson's research on memory distortion

• [[8]] Netherlands False Memory website

• [[9]] Summary/history of recovered memory debate

• [[10]] US website protesting Rec mem therapies

• [[11]] US website compiled by parents angry about children's therapy

• [[12]] Australian False Memory Association website

• [[13]] Australian website re recovered memories

• [[14]] NZ Casualties of False Sexual Allegations website