The first chapter of a book entitled The Science of False Memory by C.J. Brainerd and V.F. Reyna explores how false memories can be created when we are convinced of the truth of our experiences, no matter how false they are in reality, whether by random misremembrance or by others planting false memories, examining a few cases: A series of adults came forward in 1992 claiming to have recovered repressed childhood memories of sexual abuse. A 1994 New Jersey Supreme Court case in which a preschool teacher who had previously been convicted on 115 counts of child sex abuse with 20 kids was overturned after a group of scientists concluded that the abuse allegations stemmed from interviewers planting suggestions into the kids’ heads. A group of patients in 1995 sue a psychiatrist in Minneapolis for planting false memories of childhood trauma during therapy sessions and plaintiffs are awarded millions in damages by the court. The following year, the NIJ issues a report detailing how roughly 90% of the wrongful convictions could be linked to false memory reports in the form of positive identification of an innocent suspect by an unreliable eyewitness. A 1998 case of a Chicago psychiatrist’s insurance carrier and the hospital where his clinic for multiple personalities was located settled out of court for $10.6 million with a patient who accused the man of malpractice, alleging that he planted false memories of multiple personalities, childhood sexual abuse, and of involvement in a cult into the patient and their children. Over the course of the 1990s, over 200 homicide convictions were tossed by Cook County, Illinois courts when the confessions were judged to be based off unreliable eyewitness reports with their origins in suggestive and aggressive interrogation techniques used by investigators who probably cared more about securing a conviction than finding the truth. There are two main types of false memories: errors of commission and errors of omission, the former involves false details being inserted into the testimony and the latter involves details being left out of the testimony, but most studies surrounding false memories concern errors of commission, which occurs either due to chance corruption of memory files over time or due to suggestions being planted so strongly that the “witness” or “victim” eventually accepts them as truth. I think this is interesting because it shows us that our recollections may not always accurately reflect the reality that they try to represent. Among other things, I also think that attention factors into how memories can get corrupted. For example, the change blindness phenomenon as shown by how one can completely miss a person in a gorilla costume moving across the visual field amidst a basketball game. Because one’s attentional resources are finite, they can only spend them on a fraction of the information that is available, thus some stimuli, especially if they are disjointed in the context of the situation they’re in, can be missed even when they’re in full view of the observer. Thus, one may misremember details of an event or remember something that never happened.
https://www.questia.com/read/124128167/the-science-of-false-memory
