at least for our while. you're watching news from berlin coming up next we've got a documentary film for you the memory illusion when our minds play tricks on us i'm terry martin thanks watch. hi neal and i'm game to you know those that 17 trillion them down and talk killed world wide each year but it's not just the animals that will suffering it's the environment if you want to know how when clicked off the priest and the huntress changed us as a new thing to listen to our podcast on the green fence. we

cherish our memories. they help us recall our 1st love affair our 10th anniversary and the rest of our life story. they tell us who we are. or do they. memory is being probed by a new generation of scientists and they're posing uncomfortable questions. can we trust how we remember our own lives. jennifer thompson was a north carolina college student of 22 when someone broke into her apartment. it was a night she would always remember. around 3 am when i heard feet moving around

in my bedroom and man quickly jumped up on my bag and i have to my throat and tommy sharpie was going to kill me. thompson was raped at knife point but somehow in her terror she carefully memorized details about her assailant when i willed myself to actually stay connected to my skin and i started memorizing everything i could did he have a scar on his face did he have a piercing or did he have a tattoo somewhere how tall was he anything that if i survived i would be able to help the police catch him. thompson came through police procedure with flying colors she helped prepare this composite drawing then chose a suspect from a lineup eventually the case went to trial in a north carolina courthouse where she was asked if she remembered the man who had attacked her. thompson was dead certain. i suggested to her cause. to the right over there the defense table i hated him i wanted him to

die and i've been told that they did it no one had ever seen a better witness are better than me. in court when a judge asked cotton if he had a final statement before jail cotton requested to sing a song to calm himself i just stood up and i start singing. the new moon made me because my future is so unknown to me 10 day. ronald cotton spent over 11 years in prison before newly uncovered d.n.a. evidence led to another suspect and he was released. jennifer thompson had identified the wrong man. thompson's memory error was one of many. these people all went to jail judged

guilty. but years later they were exonerated and freed by d.n.a. evidence found at crime scenes. d.n.a. has helped overturn more than 350 criminal cases in the u.s. and canada alone. in 70 percent of these eyewitnesses had identified the wrong person. and the d.n.a. exoneration cases the case gets overturned there incredulous they can't believe this wasn't the person they're false memory is a very genuine memory it's the way memory works. wells is an internationally acclaimed expert on eyewitness memory. he paid his way through university as a little shark. memory scientists had known for over 2 decades that eyewitness identification was far less reliable than thought. but it took d.n.a.

exonerations like ronald cotton to start convincing the law that science was right . we knew a lot by 1990 that memory is not a law like a video system that changes that it's fragile but it was largely ignored by the legal system and they saw it as academic and heads flying around in their lab. testing is changed everything in this field. has d.n.a. exonerations sword wells was invited to sit on a major expert committee examining the reliability of eyewitness memory. wells demonstrated just what scientists were doing in their labs what i'm going to do. in this experiment well show several subjects a 92nd video shot in an airport and ask them to pay attention.

then he interviews the subjects much as police would did you see anything unusual yes and what was that the man at the the taking counter there switched bags can you. describe this person maybe like his 30. very short hair it was a white male. he is wearing the next wells shows a standard police photo lineup and ask them to identify the culprit but i don't think can you. think so i think it's either water search sex. or they're paid one or number 6 and if i had to choose the one i would pick number one. what the participants don't know is that the real thief isn't even among the photos. but when they finally make a tentative choice wells offers positive feedback yeah yeah yeah you did good job.

ok so your number sets the job with a 6 was going to the well you're very you're very observant person the question is has he boosted their confidence i think i would be about maybe 90 percent confident that was the man still alive it's. 8590 percent that's. ok finally wells shows them a photo of the real thief so this is the person you picked right and suppose i tried to suggest to you that it means that person no no i would never. but in fact years the call for this is the lineup that i showed you and that's the person you picked actually this is the guy wow ok. there's the guy oh well one of the things i did was i said you know good job right

you remember me saying us when you positively unfree and forced me i did think that i was right right and so that made you more confident yes when you said that i had a good job then yeah i did right but still you wells and other experts say this kind of feedback during police lineup was routine in the u.s. and canada until recently forced terrible consequences for certain. you know de officer might say something like good that that's who are suspect that positive feedback will inflate the confidence of the witness and make them a more persuasive and powerful witness by the time they get on the stand basically i'm stamping in that person who they packed into their memory so that person starts to increasingly become their memory. why do our memories change like this is there

a neurological explanation. neuroscientist and jogging addict steve ramirez says the deeper problem is that when a memory is recalled especially in its early stages it's highly vulnerable to change. when we recall a memory is put into this weird state where it becomes susceptible to modification or a kind of. each time that we recall it becomes vulnerable and changeable so it's a physical process that manifests as. activated neurons that are in activated its links forming between the reason our our memories change is because the brain has a form of plasticity or the ability to change with experience that is constantly on so everything that happens to us is capable of changing the brain to some extent and in some ways the retrieval of a memory is in and of itself

a change that is in and of itself an experience as if you're including something completely new from scratch it's not necessarily that the justice system is doing it out of malice it's that it's it can be implanting different kinds of memories that were not there at the time of a crime so it could be used to put somebody away from. psychologist elizabeth loftus has testified that many trials to point. the frailties of eyewitness memory. she says and eye witnesses memory is like a crime scene it must be protected from any possible contamination during police interviews and lineups. if you contaminate the fingerprints then you don't have very good fingerprint data and likewise if you contaminate the memory trace your own have very good memory evidence. that's what happened to jennifer thompson's memory when she chose cotton at the 1st photo lineup after some indecision over 2 photos. as i looked at the 6 photographs

very quickly discount. 4 and i think in my mind i narrowed it down and i picked a number 3 and i told him i was positive he told me that's who he thought had been and i really appreciated that because i felt so relieved and cord it was absolutely unshakable. because he told me i was right in thompson's case she was reinforced after the photos she was reinforced again after the life line up telling her that again she was right by the time of that trial. was her memory. ronald cotton exoneration was big news in north carolina. it became the 1st state to pass legislation requiring mandatory reforms for eyewitness testimony. among these reforms the officer conducting a police lineup must be unaware of which person in the lineup is

a suspect other states soon followed just as memory scientists had long urged. fast changing memory science isn't only challenging assumptions in the courtroom. it's also posing intriguing new questions about the human mind. what does it say about all of our memories of our families our friendships and ourselves. any of us reliable witnesses to our own lives. i still remember that day like yesterday i was with my friend eleanor downtown and it was my colleague marty and i was shocked turned on if he. most people have emotional memories of where they were and what they were doing during certain events such as 911. j.f.k.'s assassination. the

fall of the berlin wall or the death of princess diana the events that feel seared in their brains. these are called flashbulb memories and we have great confidence in them but were surprisingly wrong says cognitive neuroscientist elizabeth phelps. in the days after 911 phelps this team surveyed over 3000 people about what they recall doing that day. we asked you a question to how did you 1st hear about the tac who were you with where were you. then phelps gave them a similar survey after 13 and 10 years it turns out even flashbulb memories are often illusory overall people remembered the central event well the exploding towers but the rest of their memories often changed over time. if we compare memories through what you told me happened to you personally right after

the attack versus a year later about 40 to 50 percent of the time the details of those memories are different almost half. here we asked people you know what were you doing and this person the 1st time in the 1st service said i was in the kitchen making breakfast a year later they said i'm in the dorm room folding laundry we had one participant who we asked who were you with and initially she said i was with my husband the time after that she said i was alone my house was playing golf we can't know what really happened you're all we know is that you're not consistent over time so one of those stories is right. people stories usually changed after one year and from then on they were utterly certain that's what had happened. 3 years later your fairy confident that your memory is 100 percent accurate most of the shift happened in the 1st year and then after that that sort of became the story i was in new york that day 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 story of course of course i'm sure but you know data tells me i'm probably 50 percent. 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 julia shaw is a psychologist at university college london in england she's 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 toughens and while it's not true. elizabeth phelps this colleague neuroscientist joseph made a video illustrating phelps's idea that our forever changing memory is forever reliable say. with a bit of a 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 leave it. to. us broadcaster brian williams and hillary clinton both falsely recalled being under gunfire and conflict with foreign countries. where they deliberately exaggerating or just misremembering their own stories. the fact remains that memories as they are retold relived every 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 details 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. memory 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. it's 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 the explosion not who you're with if you were ironing in the dorm room or in the kitchen. but felt 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 this probably happens to all different types of memory not just flashbulb memories as we get older our confidence in our recollections gets higher better accuracy so we are more confident 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 and 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 to put shocks 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 posters 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 experience is fear it often freezes in place. but we're not scared it will run around exploring its environment. so how would the mouse behave. so as you can see the animal isn't scared from the getgo of this particular environment and then it's running around and when 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 was put by. 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 of 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 brain. 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 loved disparate guests. who planted 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 and tell us that 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 happen 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 also privately asked the subjects parents for one emotional incident from their childhood that she could bring up.

over the summer that's the intolerable or. shock 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 pretty. far out was one even 14 years old you know you did a physical fight and it's your parents that have an enclosure in the. right. so i miss you and 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 i asked 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 40. in colona.

and it's. tragic remember that whether it was. during the civil. war. in the 2nd session shaw continues the memory exercises and some details begin to emerge. oh mike maybe you remember a little closer where in the park let's cheer i can maybe remember getting it like a verbal fight with someone who did. this girl called her it was a little girl you can. get it's ok well 2nd think about grace. by the 3rd interview the subject has filled in most of her supposedly lost memory. kind of. 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 charles team convinced 70 percent of her 60 subjects that they had committed criminal or violent acts that never happened. we even 'd had participants reenacting the crimes that never happened showing me how they threw a weapon or how they attacked 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 there was actually. so in that he preferred a 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 memory . we don't know for instance if that original memory is permanently everest or if you're just rewriting on top of that memory but the question now is what's actually happening at that neuronal level what's happening when a memory is being recalled when it's being updated with new information the honest answer is that by asking that question we now 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 of something that actually happened but in your brain it is now the same

in this english of all from. 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 these talking about for instance all that since very much me may 13th 2015 of the 1st dance was are 23rd 2015 both of those took place on friday. tyler and chad who can bottom are identical twins but they have one major difference tyler has thanks sam highly superior autobiographical memory. this means he can remember distant events and dates in his own life like most of us recalled yesterday. tyler and chatter being quizzed by

university of california irvine researcher not viewed go far enough to see how their memories compare they're both top a students would have been on august 16th 2014. or i'm guessing 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 cat that 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 thursday. was when we went to the ronald reagan museum. and then that night we went back to brayley went to divine for dinner ok with 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. i remember that day because the cycles just running really lame and the driver is going really fast well remember that the numbers on the trucks 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 2015 i was. no july 29th and i saw last song. 81161. and stepped down from the back of the truck.

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 shoelaces touch 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 the there are and there are some big there's a big fat clue there that we have to use and figure out how to use it i don't even know how i do it and i mean i did people ask me i give them the answer like wall around 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 go help in some way to. find the response but they don't they don't need the help so we're hoping that we can do some really sophisticated imaging today 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. 'd goes colleague neurobiologist michael yassa is examining the 2 brothers with the latest m.r.i. technology to see how their brains compare 'd. so this one also gives us a lot of this are made about parts of the brain that are really important some

memory called the campus this is a special scan that says it's not part of the brain. 'd studies indicate that certain brain pathways seem stronger in adult stem subjects than other people the hippocampus is a region that is somewhat enlarged. in the adults that we've looked at it was interesting but there's also changes in the connections the connections between the temporal lobe and the front to look. it's. seems to be at least 20 stands at 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 session. 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 because maybe there's

a genetic variants maybe there's environmental changes maybe there's salient 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 stunned by watching the plane you know go down. ph

stamps objects. could remember seeing footage of this crash that they could not have seen in fact these individuals were just as susceptible to developing false memories in these experiments as a control group if they can be susceptible there may be no group that is really amusing 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 they got 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 recede and not have them be at the forefront of your mind ready. this can be a problem for many people with sam those who study them say they're often haunted by vivid memories you may remember the loss of a loved one. it was an intense emotion and we cry when you remember

a dentist 10 or 15 years old as you feel about it but it's not there for them it's there it's just so the emotional experience of 10 years ago just how they have excessively strong memories of all of the bad things that happened 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 finds 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 you

know 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 and emotional well being. and self-esteem. we should all except 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 heart 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 really to get my thoughts together he was in the doorway and i of course burst out in sobs and somehow got the words out you know i spend every minute of the rest of my life telling you i'm sorry could you ever find in your heart to forgive me. i said jennifer. forgive me. i knew she had testified honestly. she had she was just wrong. a lot of people whole way through and bridges in their heart and you know when i lay there that night i think about that i say 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 joe's arms that day and hugged each other a parking lot and and 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 a better. i was one of those people mostly. and it made me want to stand. and hear that and then saying situation some of that weight. cotton and thompson worked to change north carolina's law and succeeded in 2008 since then some 20 states have reformed their eyewitness procedures many have begun educating police judges and juries about the science of memory with 4 states passing eyewitness reform since 2017 even. gary wells says things are better but getting everyone on board is a long shot over half the u.s. 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 stake and i would stay of cation oh that's just the tip of the iceberg the. the the $350.00 or so d.n.a. exonerations those are just in cases where there is biological evidence that could be tested people have been trying to estimate the wrongful convictions that might occur every year 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.

a major city with no programming. that's bethlehem in qana virus time but no visitors it means knowing come. that is given woodcarvers some new my day. because hope is the last thing they loose in bethlehem. 3000. 90 minutes on d w. the story of prejudice and propaganda. they were called the rhineland bastards. their mothers were germans living in the

occupied dry land their fathers soldiers from the french colonies. baffled german children had a hard time and because they were a reminder of the german defeat. they grew up in a climate of national pride and racism to fuck the european population felt that it was important to be mighty and to stay one time. exclusion and contempt culminated in forced sterilization under the nazis. this documentary examines the few traces that remain of their existence. searched 11th on d w. this

is g.w. news live from berlin the e.u. states britain to contain a new strain of the coronavirus the move paralyzes traffic at british ports which are now effectively cut off from the continent the u.k. is battling the coronavirus mutations sweeping the country south and could be formally infectious. also coming up germ.