Sign up for our daily briefing
Make your busy days simpler with Axios AM/PM. Catch up on what's new and why it matters in just 5 minutes.
Stay on top of the latest market trends
Subscribe to Axios Markets for the latest market trends and economic insights. Sign up for free.
Sports news worthy of your time
Binge on the stats and stories that drive the sports world with Axios Sports. Sign up for free.
Tech news worthy of your time
Get our smart take on technology from the Valley and D.C. with Axios Login. Sign up for free.
Get the inside stories
Get an insider's guide to the new White House with Axios Sneak Peek. Sign up for free.
Catch up on coronavirus stories and special reports, curated by Mike Allen everyday
Catch up on coronavirus stories and special reports, curated by Mike Allen everyday
Want a daily digest of the top Denver news?
Get a daily digest of the most important stories affecting your hometown with Axios Denver
Want a daily digest of the top Des Moines news?
Get a daily digest of the most important stories affecting your hometown with Axios Des Moines
Want a daily digest of the top Twin Cities news?
Get a daily digest of the most important stories affecting your hometown with Axios Twin Cities
Want a daily digest of the top Tampa Bay news?
Get a daily digest of the most important stories affecting your hometown with Axios Tampa Bay
Want a daily digest of the top Charlotte news?
Get a daily digest of the most important stories affecting your hometown with Axios Charlotte
Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios
There’s remembering. There’s forgetting. And then there’s false memory, our memory of an event that never actually happened.
Why it matters: Everyone is vulnerable to false memory. Sometimes it’s subtle: thinking you saw a yield sign when you saw a stop sign. But sometimes it’s life-altering: eyewitness testimony that leads to the wrongful conviction of innocent people.
People can be “very confident in things that never happened,” Duke neuroscientist Roberto Cabeza tells Axios.
What's new: In an age of AI, deepfakes and doctored photographs, misinformation can subtly sculpt our memories. And researchers are concerned about how immediately replaying photos and videos will affect how we remember experiences.
- Even blatantly doctored photographs — with written disclaimers — of the 2012 London Olympic torch relay and the 2011 Royal Wedding led a subset of viewers to believe more violent protestors had been present and more people arrested at these events than actually were.
How it works: Our memory system often fails not only because we forget things that happen, but also because we remember things that didn't happen, says Cabeza.
- The brain can distinguish between false and true memories. Cabeza found that high confidence for true memories was associated with greater medial temporal lobe activity, while for false memories it was associated with greater frontoparietal activity in the brain.
- One explanation for this difference is that recollection is strongly associated with the medial temporal lobe, while familiarity is associated with frontoparietal regions.
This flexibility of our memory systems means that not only can memories be altered, but entirely false memories can be planted.
- For decades, Elizabeth Loftus, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine, has pioneered work on false memory to prevent mistaken eyewitness testimonies, consulting on hundreds of criminal cases, including the O.J. Simpson, Ted Bundy and Rodney King trials.
- “You need independent corroboration to know whether you’re dealing with a real memory or a false memory,” she tells Axios.
Yet planting false memories isn't necessarily a bad thing, according to Loftus. She found that subjects who were led to believe they loved asparagus as children subsequently were more interested in eating asparagus at a restaurant and were willing to pay more for asparagus in a grocery store.
- “You can use these suggestive techniques to influence people’s nutritional choices, maybe make a dent in the obesity problem in our society. And I think that can be a good thing.”
Go deeper: