so you know i have a story too and you know that's my story right now and i'm telling it for the time i'm telling it like it's a story not like it's my memory you sure through friends of course of course i'm sure but you know david tells me i'm probably 50 percent of. part of the reason we're wrong is that we can absorb and remember the astonishing richness of every life moment. so we fill in the gaps unconsciously and create a narrative story that makes sense for now. but that can make us defective at discerning truth from fiction say scientists who deliberately create false memories. dr julian shah is a psychologist at university college london in england. she is also the author of

an intriguing book the memory illusion. every time you remember something you activate that memory network in the brain you're actually able to change it slightly so next time you recall it you're only recalling the last time you recall it and over time those changes can compound and you can end up very far from the original version of your memories and you might believe it wholeheartedly full of confidence and while it's not true. elizabeth phelps is kali neuroscientist joseph made a video illustrating phelps's idea that our forever changing memory is for ever. say. let's say the war hero going on a 100 city tour describing all the great things that happened during the battle and the story gets more and more heroic as you go from city one to city 100 so by the

end it sounds so good to. us broadcaster brian williams and hillary clinton both falsely recalled being under gunfire in conflict foreign countries. where they deliberately exaggerating or just misremembering their own stories. the fact remains that memories as they are retold realistically experienced they are changed it's almost like a play to get a broken telephone so it's you know every time that you're retelling that story you're saying it over some detail is changed and the longer the time goes on the more changes you have are recollection of something that happened from 20 years ago is very different from what actually happened 20 years ago. the big question is what happens inside our brains to make us so confident when we're so wrong. is

stored all over the brain most day to day memory is captured in the hippocampus a small seahorse shaped organ in the brain. meanwhile very emotional or threatening events are also imprinted on the amiga. is a personal recollection for you or for event of your life hippocampus is always involved but it's something that's highly emotional so for instance like the terrorist attack of $911.00. you know the image below will also become active helping the hippocampus store the memory let's remember the central details of this a little bit better so that's the explosion not who you're with if you were ironing in the dorm room or in the kitchen. but phelps says the emotional intensity of that central memory may fool our brains into thinking our company memories are just as real we don't forget the important event itself we know that 911 happened we knew there was a terrorist attack and our memories for that actually are quite strong and the what

i think is happening is that the high confidence and vividness we have for that single event leads over to memories for details surrounding the events in some way . but that's just a normal part of memory right that's probably happens all different types of memory not just flashbulb memories as we get older our confidence in our recollections gets higher better accuracy goes lower so we are more confidence but our memories are false. the fact that we can remember so wrong while convinced we are right led some researchers to pose an extraordinary question can false memories be created deliberately. neuroscientist steve ramirez you did a much heralded experiment at mit that was right out of a science fiction film. but the stars were mice. the 2 scientists started by creating a fear memory by giving a mouse model. in

a box like chamber while identifying the individual brain cells in the hippocampus involved in making this memory. then the scientists genetically engineer these brain cells to respond to posts is of laser light. now they could switch that fear memory on and off. this is a brain scan thousands of times the size of the mouse's hippocampus. so there's the branches that were active everything that's going green here was active in the animal was making this particular fair memory. next they put the mouse in a different box where nothing bad had happened to it after a while they shot light into the mouse's brain to switch on the fear memory from the 1st box. but now the $1000000.00 question is does the animal behave as though it's recalling a fear memory even though it's in a safe environment. how could they tell when

a mouse experiences fear it often freezes in place. but we're not scared it will run around exploring its environment. so how will the mouse behave. so as you can see the animal isn't scared from the get go of this particular environment and then it's running around and we shoot late into the brain and reactivate the brain cells that we think process a fair memory the animal immediately goes into this freezing behavior if they still so this is evidence that we were able to successfully fall this animal into recalling a memory artificially. months later the scientists tried a daring 2nd experiment erasing a real memory by creating a false one. this time they put the mouse in a harmless chamber and identified the brain cells of this safe memory. then they put it in another chamber and gave it slight foot shocks. but at the same time they

switched on the memory of the earlier safe box. so what happened the next day when the mouse is put back in the 1st safe box. freezes in terror falsely believing that's where it was shot. a false fear memory has been implanted turning a safe environment into a frightening one. the idea of being able to manipulate memories promised for for instance trying to turn off negative memories in p.t.s.d. or maybe trying to turn the volume up on positive emotions. i think that when we create a false memory we're creating links between the areas of the brain that wouldn't normally be there so they would be there if we were to create a false memory in humans. so how do you create false memories in people without shocking them or shooting lasers into their brains. elizabeth loftus has done many famous experiments creating memory mirages in humans. she's planted

memories in people that they hated strawberry ice cream as a child. or that they love despair across. the planet a false memory that you know as a child you loved asparagus the 1st time you tried it we got people who imagine this and later on they were more interested in eating asparagus so that actually that that scientific paper became a paper with one of my favorite titles which is asparagus a love story. by exposing subjects to fake advertising she's convinced many that they remember seeing bugs bunny at disneyland when they visited. but bugs is not a disney character and has never been there. they'll often then go on to tell us that they they shook his hand or they touched his tail or they heard him say what's up doc you can get people to become more confident that they actually had an

encounter with a character. that they didn't and couldn't have encountered i don't study forgetting i study in a way the opposite when people remember things that didn't happened false memories can be expressed with a great deal of confidence especially when they're a product of suggestion. following elizabeth loftus is memorable footsteps scientist julia shah published a dramatic 2015 study done it canada's university of british columbia it showed how easy it is to obtain false confessions of committing a crime. started by asking 60 student volunteers to participate in a memory study. but she also privately asked the subjects parents for one emotional incident from their childhood that she could bring up.

in something that's that's all they really were. sean then brings up a 2nd childhood memory where they committed a minor crime that involved police in their own hometowns with their friends only this memory isn't true for some of the other events but your parents are part crap they are out this one in 14 years of initiated a physical fight and the rights of your parents sort of have an enclosure in the far. right. i guess you pretty i don't. i don't like i don't know why you took. on this honestly i so here for this purpose but i've just introduced the 2nd memory the false one but she doesn't know that and then when she of of course naturally can't remember anything given that it didn't happen i then as a helpful researcher offer that we can do this guided imagery technique which helps to retrieve lost memories so picture yourself at the age of 14. in colona.

and it's. try to remember that the weather. turned civil. war. in the 2nd session shaw continues the memory exercises and some details begin to emerge. oh my community you remember a little closer where in the park once i can maybe remember getting it like a verbal fight with somebody. it's a girl called. girl i didn't. get it ok was that me saying about grace. by the 3rd interview the subject has filled in most of her supposedly lost memory. kind of vision of it i see myself wearing this. i think maybe too much i think the cops showed up and.

so it ended up being much easier than we were expecting to convince these people who'd never had please contact that they had committed a crime that never happened. overall team convinced 70 percent of our 60 subjects that they had committed criminal or violent acts that never happened. we even had participants reenacting the crimes that never happened showing me how they threw a weapon or how they attack someone physically it was astonishing. after the 3rd session i'm told participants the truth some had trouble believing the memory was false. it is. actually. so me do you prefer to call certainly there was resistance from some participants takes that that

actually this was a false memory rather than a true memory and that's the thing about false memories is that they feel like real memory they feel real to you you're playing with the original and you're tweaking it and you no longer have access to version want you no longer have access to what you originally coded you only have this new adjusted which started at least mentally. we don't know for instance if that original memory is permanently ever used or if you're just very bright being on top of that memory but the question now is what's actually happening. what's happening when a memory is being recalled when it's being updated with new information the honest answer is that by asking the question when i reach that edge of what we know. don't know generally in the brain false memories and true memories look exactly the same so for all your concern and for all in f. m.r.i. scanner would be concerned that is a memory it's not a memory something that actually happened but in your brain it is now the same and

in this english of all from every memory. are we all vulnerable to these memory illusions or are some of us more vulnerable than others do some outstanding people have perfect memories total recall. when was your 1st dance social event talking about for instance all that since very much me may 15th 2015 but the 1st celebrated dance was our homer 23rd 2015 both of those took place on friday. tyler and chad he can bottom are identical twins but they have one major difference tyler has 8 sound highly superior autobiographical memory. this means he can remember distant events and dates in his own life like most of us recall yesterday. tyler in chatter being quizzed by

university of california irvine research or not he'd go far to see how their memories compare they're both top 8 students would have been on aug 16th 2014 or i'm just seeing some would have been was soccer and that was my 1st soccer tournament no. on the 162014 it was a saturday and we went and we adopted our current count then we have a sentiment that's right. remember the script when did you watch the women's n.b.a. game at staples center to 1724 teen thursday. was when we went to the ronald reagan museum. and then that night we went back to brayley winter divine for dinner with joe's clothes tyler has an obsession with garbage trucks which he films and shares

on you tube he remembers all their numbers thousands of them. was happening on july 26th 2030 all. i remember that day because the cycles just running really late in the driver is going really fast remember that the numbers on the strikes you are waist was 2662. trash was 2658 and every cycle was 27872718 we spent many hours combing through tyler's vast site to check if his truck numbers were right when did you fly to ohio in the summer of 20150 i was. no july 29th and i saw a lot of garbage trucks i don't normally see out in california and what was the number of the truck 82938.

dollars 81161. except it dumped from the back of the truck not the front. neurologist james mcgaugh has found about 80 people in the world with 8 sam so far. the renowned scientist says most have one thing in common obsessive traits like tyler's passion for garbage trucks. some of the men will not wear shoes that have shoelaces because she laces touched the ground in their germs on the ground if they drop their keys their house keys they have to wash them before they use them we see this as a central feature of the ability but we don't know what to make of it it is just there and there are some big there's some big fat clues there that we have to use and figure out how to use i don't even know how i do it and i mean i had people ask

me i give them an answer like wall and like yeah i mean i do that either information gets brought to me very seldomly do they say give me a minute not think about it and they don't do what we do when asked a question like that we look at the ceiling i don't know why we do that but somebody ask a tough question and we always look at the ceiling as though we're going to get help in some way to. find a response but they don't they don't need the help so we're hoping that we can do some really sophisticated imaging say why is it that one of them has the ability and one does not this raises a very very interesting opportunity what's going on in the brain one that is not going on and the other. goes colleague neurobiologist michael yassa is examining the 2 brothers with the latest m.r.i. technology to see how their brains compare.

so this one also gives us a lot of us are mation about parts of the brain that are really important some memory. the special scan that's part of the brain. 'd studies indicate that certain. pathways seem stronger in adult age stem subjects than other people they have a campus is a region that is somewhat enlarged. in the adults that we've looked at with each step but there's also changes in the connection the connections between the temporal lobe and the frontal. seems to be at least 20 percent and large. and it's one that is almost uniquely human and highly evolved that seems to be different. chad's dental braces interfere with his special. tyler scan indicates that his brain pathways are not larger than those of the general population at least at this age. but yasa is eager to do more scans once

chad's braces are off to see if they can spot other differences between the brothers brains when they're actually recalling the past. maybe there's a genetic variant maybe there's environmental changes maybe there's ceilings events in their lives that precipitated this ability maybe maybe maybe we still have no idea. whatever's behind these super memories even h. samurais are susceptible to having false memories implanted. in experiments elizabeth loftus gently suggested to each them subjects that there was news footage of the $911.00 crash of united $93.00 in pennsylvania but no actual footage exists. like subjects with normal memories about one in 58 sam participants remembered seeing this footage when asked to try and recall it later. it just seemed like something was falling out of.

i was just you know kind of stand by watching the plane you know go down. the a champ subjects. could remember seeing footage of this crash that they could not have seen in fact these individuals were justice and sceptical to developing false memories in these experiments as a control group if they can be susceptible there may be no group that that is really a mute from having these kinds of memory errors false memories happen to everyone even memories that are vivid and detailed and that you hold with 100 percent conviction can be false. now that means that every memory potentially is an illusion and that all your memories at least a little bit are false. so the big mystery is why would evolution encourage the survival of humans with such

mistaken and malleable memories. could there be some advantage to this. can we change our memories for the better. you don't need a neuroscientist to create false memories in a lab says elizabeth loftus. because we do it ourselves all the time. so there are studies that show that people remember they think i grades that were better than they actually were that they gave more to charity than they really did that they had kids that walked and talked in an earlier age and they really did we distort our memories in ways that maybe make us feel a little better about ourselves. sometimes you would like the sadness is maybe to receive and not have them be at the forefront of your mind ready. this can be

a problem for many people with age sam those who study them say they're often haunted by vivid memories you may remember the loss of a loved one. you know so it was an intense emotion and we cried but when you remember a dentist 10 or 15 years old yes you feel about it but it's not there but for the hamish there it's just so the emotional experience of 10 years ago just happy they have excessively strong memories of all of the bad things that happen to them and i wouldn't want to have. in fact depressed people may remember things more accurately than the rest of us say some scientists. they call this condition depressive realism. when we look at depressed people's memories we actually find is that they think about it in some ways actually more realistically because they remember equally the good and the negative and remembering things really well and accurately can be

a disadvantage it can lead to you being sad and not having a coherent positive view of your life and where you're going if you remember just tragedies from your life you're going to be depressed if you can reinterpret even bad events as having potentially positive outcomes right and then you can think about them differently that's going to actually help with your emotion emotional wellbeing and and self-esteem. we should all accept our clumsy flimsy faulty memory is because that's what makes us human our past is a fictional story i think what you remember creates and defines who you are. so can you change your life by changing how you remember it for jennifer thompson discovering she had wrongly sent ronald cotton to jail for her rape haunted her for 2 years. she finally reached out and contacted cotton hoping to apologize

and he agreed to meet her at his nearby church. and. before i really should get my thoughts together he was in the doorway and i of course. sobs and somehow got the word out you know i spent every minute of the rest of my life telling i'm sorry could you ever find in your heart to forgive me. jennifer. forgive me. i knew she had testified honestly. she had she was just wrong. a lot of people hold a truth in bridges in their home and you know what i mean then that night they think about that. jennifer. i just want us to be happy to move on in life and so after that you know she cried. and we ended up in each other's arms day and

parking lot and and um you know he's become one of my closest friend in the world. thompson and cotton went on to write a book together about their experience called picking cotton. they also work together to change eyewitness laws and free wrongfully convicted prisoners. instead of becoming bitter cotton chose to make other victims lives better. now one of those people must. and it made me want to stand. and fight for others that would then sanction choice for some of them that we. caught and then thompson worked to change north carolina's law and succeeded in 2008 since then some 20 states have reformed their eye witness procedures many have begun educating police judges and juries about the science of memory with 4 states passing eyewitness reforms since 2017.

gary wells says things are better but getting everyone on board is a long shot over half the us still hasn't passed eyewitness reforms based on scientific research. i don't think there's any doubt that people are still being convicted erroneous lead based on state and i would assume of cation we have not fully solved this problem so chances are there are several 1000 still in prison based on the state and i would just as cation oh that's just the tip of the iceberg . that's the 350 or so d.n.a. exonerations those are just the cases where there is biological evidence that could be tested people have been trying to estimate the wrongful convictions that might occur every. here and some estimates go as high as maybe 10000. a year in the united states alone. perhaps we can all learn from ronald

cotton and jennifer thompson they've managed to revise their own memories of what they've been through and by doing so they've changed their lives for the better. how do you live your life when you are 1st and foremost considered the daughter. went mikhail event on was just 3 years old the mother was kidnapped in argentina since then her mind has been consumed with searching in full public feeling. but may calculate their own doesn't want to be just the daughter of an abductee any more. than 30 minutes on g.w. .

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