FALSE MEMORIES
A story of Winston Smith was told by George Orwell in 1994. He worked in the propaganda office of a regime that is totalitarian. The job of Smith at the ministry of truth that was fictional was to alter documents and to destroy photographs, and to make the past to fit the present needs. Along with soviet communism, 1984 went. It was thought that with internet nobody could interfere with the past but that was wrong because Slate did tamper with the past. The work of the ministry of Truth was described by George as follows: A number would be printed again immediately all the corrections which were appropriate in any number had been collated and assembled and the copy that was original was destroyed and the copy that was corrected was put in the files instead. This alteration was applied to books, newspapers, pamphlets, films, cartoons, photographs and to any documentation that had any political significance. The past was updated day by day and through this, any party prediction could be shown by evidence in the documents to have been correct. Slate can’t alter all records the way the ministry of Orwell did but with technology on digital, photographs can be doctored effectively. (Saletan, 2010).
Elizabeth Loftus was in her office listening to a story in a tape recorder. Chris 24 years old who was the story teller was talking about a visit to a shopping mall of a university in Spokane at the age of 5. He was saying that he went to a toy store and they got lost and he thought that he would never see his family again but an old man helped him to find his parents. All these events that Chris described were false; Jim the elder brother to Chris had made up the story as an assignment for Loftus psychology class. Jim had given Chris the basics of the story and pretended the story was true. Loftus together with her colleagues would plant memories that are false and of all kinds- attacks by animals, chocking, drowning, and possession by demons, etc. When Loftus finished her schooling, many people took memory as a device for recording because it could store imprints of what a person had experienced and these imprints could be retrieved when one was prompted by images or questions. Loftus started to show that this was untrue because images and questions didn’t retrieve memories but also altered them. Loftus replicated the process to prove that memories could have been planted and finally she succeeded. The credulity of the legal system was shattered by her experiments. She continued to plant memories and turned to a new project which resulted to making the world happier and healthier. (Saletan, 2010).
What Loftus wanted with her life was to experiment on people. In her third year at Stanford, she got a chance to design and analyze experiments of her own. Semantic memory was her topic and her aim was to find out how the brains of people stored words and retrieved them. She administered inputs and measured outputs. Questions were the inputs and the response time was the output. She could ask her subjects to state a yellow fruit and sometimes a fruit that was yellow. From this the inference was that such information was organized by the brain by the noun and not the objective. Loftus decided to carry out an experiment on crime and she could use the memory science to help the system of justice. The initial step was to find project that would be paid for by somebody. Transportation department was offering money to study accidents by car. Accidents involved eyewitnesses but they were not crimes. Loftus really wanted to be involved in a court case and she called up the defender’s office of Seattle and she helped as a memory expert. She watched the case unfold and it was a case on murder that hinged on memories that were conflicting and this case ended in acquittal. (Saletan, 2010).
Loftus received a phone call in 1990 from attorney in San Fransisco that a man by name George was charged with child murder based on his daughters’ recollection. The murder happened occurred 21 years before and at that time, Eileen’s memory was not more than a year old and she had repressed it according to the prosecution. According to Loftus, there was no basis for the theory of repression. The attorney of George had a theory that was different; that Eileen did mot see the crime, she had blended murder details in her head and that the press reported it with a picture that was imaginary of her father committing the crime and therefore she developed a memory that was false.Loftus explained how over time the memories erode and became distorted. Loftus was forced by the prosecutor to admit that she had not studied memories like that of Eileen. Loftus had made a prove that memories could be altered and not invented wholly and her work seemed not relevant and George was convicted. (Saletan, 2010).
When the government of China tried to alter the memories of massacre of Tiananmen Square in 1989, Loftus used her brainwashing knowledge to expose the deception. Loftus risked her job to find out how things happened in the case of Jane who was an alleged child abuse victim. In her books, she wrote that our memories can be altered and change what people think they know is not necessary the correct thing. She didn’t believe the sanctity of memory and truth and she believed that memory modified itself constantly. Memory could be adjusted conveniently. She believed that memories that were false sent innocent people to jail and this was not acceptable. Attorneys recruited Loftus to be a consultant in the jury as they became familiar with her psychology expertise. The federal commission of trade asked Loftus to assess the advertisement power of misleading the customers and she dissected the tactics of the marketers and she was able to teach them. Loftus and Braun collaborated on articles about power of advertising to alter memories. They referred to this power as insidious and said that people should be taught about it. (Saletan, 2010).
Loftus insisted to the idea of tampering with the memory because she wanted to help people. She needed a purpose of her own to embrace tampering of memory. She said that people’s memory of the past events change in ways that are helpful leading them to be happier. She said that it is not advisable for people to cling to those memories that disturb them and spoil their lives. If people’s lives are not marred by memories of past sufferings and ills, life would become so good. In 1979, Loftus and James published two articles advocating for consent to procedures on experiments. A lot of patients developed side effects that had been predicted by doctors and to solve this problem, Loftus and James suggested that anyone going through a procedure should be told all risks associated with it and those who request detailed information they should be provided with it. The main purpose of informed consent was for the protection of the patients. Loftus didn’t see herself as a memory doctor but an experimenter. (Saletan, 2010).
Loftus published her proposal on behavior therapy in 1998.The purpose was to exploit power of imagination that are self fulfilling. Loftus began carrying out investigations on whether memories that are false could affect behavior. The behavior had to be measurable, simple, and which could be tested in the lab. Loftus and her colleagues experimented first with hard boiled eggs and pickles and they asked their subjects indicate their fob preferences in the questionnaire. A week after, the issued out reports that were computer generated telling the subjects that they had fallen sick in childhood because of eating those particular foods. A quarter of the subjects believed that incident after they read the reports. After Loftus saw the results, she thought if false memory could help people eat a diet that is healthier. She experimented with chips, chocolate and ice cream of strawberry. Potato chips failed but the ice cream worked. The experiment on fattening food was the study that was more celebrated which proved that false memories about foods that are fattening have consequences that are healthy. (Saletan, 2010).
Memories seemed innocuous when Loftus began to test therapeutic memories by planting false memories. They were about foods and not about politics and families. When she testified against sexual amuse recovered memories, such memories might be false was her concern. Memories of abuse hurt the women who remembered them regardless of their falsehood or truth. Her objection grew on recovered memories and she argued that even if some memories were true, they could still cause harm. Science was developing ways of killing such memories by the end of 1990s. Patients were made to recall incidents that were traumatic and then administration of drugs could be done to prevent the memories from consolidating. It is indicated by studies that in 2003 and 2003, a drug, propranolol, could be used to reduce the disorder of post-traumatic stress. Loftus understood the effects of propranolol, the main one was to dampen the content of emotion of memories that are traumatic but it also dampened content that is factual. There was no way to differentiate altered memories from original memories. Loftus and her colleagues made a conclusion that it is impossible to reliably tell if a particular memory is false or true with no independent corroboration. (Saletan 2010).
References
Saletan, W. (2010): The ministry of truth: a mass experiment in altering political memories- slate group.
Saletan W. (2010): Removable truths: A memory expert’s indestructible past– slate group
Saletan W. (2010): Leading the witness: Contaminated memories and criminal injustice– slate group.
Saletan W. (2010): The recipe: A cookbook for memories of sexual abuse– slate group
Saletan W. (2010): Truth or consequences: Exploiting psychology in law and advertising– slate group.
Saletan W. (2010): The road to therapy: Finding good uses of mental manipulation– slate group.
Saletan W. (2010): Training humans: Better living through memory modification– Slate group.
Saletan, W. (2010): The future of the past: Cleansing our minds of crime and vice– Slate group.
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