The video addresses the intricacies of human memory, specifically focusing on how memories, both true and false, are formed and manipulated. The speaker discusses different types of memory, with particular attention to semantic memories (facts) and personal memories (events and experiences). The discussion emphasizes that false memories can be implanted—how individuals may remember events that never occurred, such as being attacked by an animal or committing a crime.

The presentation highlights the research on memory distortion, including the misinformation effect, where misleading information can alter a person's recall of an event. The speaker shares findings from experiments where false memories were induced in participants. Notably, the research extends to real-world implications, such as soldiers in training "experiencing" events that never happened and the psychological and behavioral consequences of false memories, including dietary changes.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. paradigm [ˈpærəˌdaɪm] - (noun) - A typical example or pattern of something; a model. - Synonyms: (model, pattern, archetype)

Because I've been studying memory for more than 50 years now, and in the course of that career I've developed a couple of paradigms for examining human memory.

2. misinformation [ˌmɪsɪnˈfɔːrməʃən] - (noun) - False or inaccurate information, especially that which is deliberately intended to deceive. - Synonyms: (deception, falsehood, untruth)

And one of those paradigms is called the misinformation paradigm.

3. corroboration [kəˌrɒbəˈreɪʃən] - (noun) - Evidence that confirms or supports a statement, theory, or finding; confirmation. - Synonyms: (confirmation, verification, validation)

The FBI investigated many, many of these claims and never found any kind of corroboration.

4. deception [dɪˈsɛpʃən] - (noun) - The act of deceiving someone, which involves making someone believe something untrue. - Synonyms: (trickery, deceit, fraud)

Do you need this kind of deception, this sort of trojan horse deception?

5. trojan horse [ˈtrəʊdʒən hɔːrs] - (noun) - A person or thing intended secretly to undermine or bring about the downfall of an enemy or opponent. - Synonyms: (deceptive scheme, trick, ploy)

It invades you like a trojan horse because you don't even detect that it's coming.

6. neuroimaging [nʊəroʊˈɪmɪdʒɪŋ] - (noun) - Technologies that allow visualization of brain activity and structures. - Synonyms: (brain scanning, brain imaging, MRI)

How about the brain? If we could do some kind of neuroimaging, would the neural signals be different for a true memory?

7. manipulation [məˌnɪpjʊˈleɪʃən] - (noun) - Controlling or influencing a person or situation cleverly or unscrupulously. - Synonyms: (control, influence, handling)

There were something like 423 subjects who, at this point, had been subjected to these manipulations

8. technological advances [ˌtɛkˈnɒləʤɪkəl ədˈvænsɪz] - (noun phrase) - Progress and development in the field of technology. - Synonyms: (innovation, development, progress)

And things are going to get even worse with deepfake technology that is going to get into the hands of so many more people.

9. push poll [pʊʃ poʊl] - (noun) - A seemingly biased survey meant to influence the opinions of respondents under the guise of conducting a legitimate poll. - Synonyms: (manipulative survey, biased poll, deceptive poll)

You know, these push polls maybe

10. rich false memories [rɪʧ fɔːls ˈmɛməriz] - (noun phrase) - Detailed and vivid false memories that are usually mistaken by people as true. - Synonyms: (fabricated memories, vivid false memories, detailed false recollections)

Could develop these, what we now call rich false memories

The misinformation effect - Elizabeth Loftus - Nobel Prize Summit 2023

Thanks and it's a pleasure and an honor to be here to talk to you about some of the work that I've done in the area of memory because I mean, we all know how important memory is. Without it, you wouldn't know how to make the coffee in the morning or find the car keys or take the metro or however you got here. Also as scientists we make a distinction between a couple of different kinds of memories that are stored in our memory banks. So there are semantic memories, or you might call them fact memories, like we are in Washington DC right now. That's a fact in our memory or something like paxlovid is a good treatment for Covid or global warming is happening, but what I study are personal memories. So things like I knew I was going to have to go back. Things like we just saw some really cool magic trick or maybe a month ago or so I saw a crime and I want to tell somebody about it, but memory doesn't always work perfectly.

And so I'm going to ask you, do you think I could make you remember? Do you think I could make you remember that you were attacked by a vicious animal as a child if it didn't happen to you? Do you think I could make you remember that as a teenager you committed a crime and it was serious enough that the police actually came to investigate. Do you think I could make you remember that a week ago you played a game and you cheated in the game and you took money out of the game bank when you weren't entitled to that money? Do you think I could make you remember these things? Could I pour these ideas into your mind and make you remember these things personally if they didn't happen to you? I asked that question and a lot of people say no way. I mean no way I'd confess to a crime I didn't do. No way I'd think I was attacked by an animal if I wasn't. But we'll see how you feel in another ten minutes or so.

Because I've been studying memory for more than 50 years now, and in the course of that career I've developed a couple of paradigms for examining human memory. And one of those paradigms is called the misinformation paradigm. So what happens in these scientific studies is people see some event, you know, a crime, an accident. I've been particularly interested in legal events and later on they get some post event information, often misleading information about that event. And then we'll test people and ask them what they personally remember about their experience.

And so we've shown lots and lots of people simulated accidents. For example, in one of my older studies, we showed people an accident where a car goes through an intersection with a stop sign. Later on, they're going to get some post event misinformation. Here's the question that planted the misinformation. Did another car pass that red Datsun while it was at the intersection with the yield sign? I want you to appreciate how clever this question is, and I think our magician will appreciate it, too. You think this is about whether another car passed, and you're thinking about that part of the question. And while you're thinking about it, I slip in the information that it was a yield sign. It invades you like a trojan horse because you don't even detect that it's coming. And later on, lots and lots of people will tell us they saw a yield sign at the intersection, not a stop sign.

We've done these kinds of misinformation studies with people who experienced naturally upsetting events, not these staged or simulated events. We've planted misinformation in the minds, for example, of soldiers who are learning what it's going to be like for them when they are, if and when they are captured as prisoners of war. And these horrific experiences that are done for a good reason can be manipulated with post event information.

So now I've treated you to a quick summary of about 50 years of work on something that we call the misinformation effect. There's a kind of a cartoon drawing. You expose people to misinformation, you put them in a misled condition. It lowers their memory performance. And why is that important? It's important because out there in the real world, misinformation is everywhere. We get it when we talk to other people. We get it when we're interrogated by somebody who maybe has an agenda and even inadvertently suggests things that aren't true. We get it when we pick up newspapers or online news and we are exposed to some misleading information.

Well, at some point during this process of studying misinformation, I came upon an even more extreme kind of memory problem, false memory problem. It turns out, particularly in the nineties, people were going into psychotherapy with one kind of problem, maybe anxiety, maybe depression, and they were coming out of this psychotherapy with a different problem. They had a belief and these memories of having been traumatized as children, sometimes in satanic rituals where they were forced into all kinds of horrible activities. Animal sacrifice, baby breeding, baby sacrifice. The FBI investigated many, many of these claims and never found any kind of corroboration.

So I wanted to study the process by which people could. Could develop these, what we now call rich false memories. And this old paradigm that we had developed where we could turn a stop sign into a yield sign. I mean, it just wasn't going to cut it. I needed to develop a new procedure, something that's now called the rich false memory procedure, where there's no event to begin with. But we're going to ply people with suggestions about the past, and we'll see what they then remember about their childhood or their more recent past.

Our first study planted a false memory that when you were about five or six years old, you were lost in a shopping mall in a particular place with a particular people there, that you were frightened and crying, ultimately rescued by an elderly person and put back together with your family. After we published these findings, other scientists came forward and we, too, and planted false memories of things that would be more traumatic or upsetting if they actually had happened. Like you nearly drowned and had to be rescued by a lifeguard, or you were attacked by a vicious animal, or you committed a crime as a teenager.

And it was serious enough that the police came to investigate all of these things planted in the minds of otherwise healthy, ordinary adults. How often does this happen? A mega analysis that analyzed data from a collection of these studies. There were something like 423 subjects who, at this point, had been subjected to these manipulations. And about 30% of the time, people developed a false memory, and an additional 23% of the time, they developed a false belief that this had happened to them, even though they didn't have that sense of recollection.

We've shown that these false memories have consequences for people. If I plan a false memory in somebody that they got sick eating a particular food as a child, they're not so interested in eating that food. We did this with hard boiled eggs. We did this with pickles. We did this with strawberry ice cream. And we've even put foods in front of people, and if they develop a false belief or false memory, they don't eat as much of these offending foods. Kind of a nice dieting technique, I think, here.

So you may have lots of questions about all this, like, well, is there any way to tell the difference between a true memory and a false one? Maybe true memories are more emotional than false ones. But we found no false memories can be felt with just as much emotion. How about the brain? If we could do some kind of neuroimaging, would the neural signals be different for a true memory? And a false memory. We explored this with functional magnetic resonance imaging, and the overwhelming finding is the similarity in the neural signals for true memories and false memories.

Do you need this kind of deception, this sort of trojan horse deception? And the answer to that is no. We can plant these false memories in all kinds of ways without any deception. And our recent work on push poles, I think, illustrates this to some extent. You know, these push polls maybe. Well, first of all, you know what polling is because we get annoyed sometimes when the phone rings and somebody wants to know how we're going to vote. Well, a push poll is masquerading as a legitimate technique for gathering information, but really what the caller wants is to slip some information into your mind, an actual example.

Would it make any difference in terms of how you plan to vote if I told you that John McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child? A push poll that was actually done, would it make any difference in terms of your willingness to vote for Obama if I told you he was really lenient on sex offenders? Well, we've now studied this push polling with my irish collaborators. We gave people information about a politician, a female politician, background information or education or policies and so on. And afterwards, we're going to use a push poll, and we'll find out whether it affects their willingness to vote for her and their memory about her.

I mean, the push poll was very simple. If I told you that this politician had been accused of cheating on her income tax, or we might even make it a little more elaborate and talk about the ways in which she was accused of cheating on her income tax. And what we found is the push poll not only affected the way people said the likelihood they would be to vote for this person, but they also started to remember that she had committed tax fraud.

So, you know, this mind technology really raises a whole bunch of ethical questions. When should we use this technology, if ever? And when and how are we going to regulate it? So when I look into the future, well, the short term future, we are now able to doctor photographs, and so many of us can. That's another nifty way to plant false memories, just expose people to doctored photographs.

We've done this a number of times, and things are going to get even worse with deepfake technology that is going to get into the hands of so many more people and take us way beyond that original example where you could make Barack Obama look like he was saying and doing anything you wanted him to say and do, but it was really the speech and activities of an actor. Think about with AI the amount of push polling, for example, that would be possible.

So I started here by asking you, could I make you remember? Could I pour these ideas into your mind? Could I make you remember that you were attacked by a vicious animal if you weren't, that you committed a crime as a teenager if you didn't, that you cheated in a card game when you didn't? I didn't talk about that. Work. Some great work coming out of Britain. All of these things have been planted in the minds of otherwise healthy, happy adults. Yes.

So I've got one take home message. If I've learned anything from 50 years of working on memory and memory distortion, it's this. That just because somebody tells you something and they say it with a lot of confidence, just because they give you a lot of detail about it, just because they cry when they tell you the story, it doesn't mean that it really happened. You need independent corroboration to know whether you're dealing with an authentic memory or one that's a product of some other process.

Not quite. Not quite. Thank you. I was going to end there, but I've got 19 seconds, so I'm going to share my favorite quote from Dolly, who once said, the difference between true memories and false memories is like jewels, it's the false ones that seem the most real and the most brilliant. If I could meet Sahl, which I can't, because he's died, but I can't yet. Anyhow, I would have to say you weren't quite right. It's not that the false ones are more brilliant and more real than the true ones, but they are equally real and equally brilliant. Thank you for your attention. Thank you. Thanks.

Misinformation, False Memories, Psychology, Science, Technology, Education, Nobel Prize