Consciousness Live! with Elizabeth Loftus (S4 E1)

0:00 yes okay we are live uh joining me today is a very special guest elizabeth loftus um thank you very much for joining me first of all i really appreciate i'm looking forward to talking with you and i wonder if you guys say thank you i wonder if you could say a little bit about who you are and what you do for those who might not know you i teach at the university of california irvine the irvine campus i'm in a number of different departments

0:34 a psychology department a criminology department and also the law school on the law school faculty and i study human memory very good okay and you've been at uh that at irvine for for a while now i guess it's uh i don't know exactly when you moved from what from washington is that right i did yeah i moved in 2002 so it's coming on 19 years here yeah very cool it's nice i'm from southern california myself so i have not near irvine per se but i know the

1:06 area oh where are you from where uh i was born in la mirada which is just a little bit east of l.a okay yeah and then it grew up in that area or whatever but uh went to school in the bay area in san francisco um but anyway so it's great to have you here i'm very excited to talk to you about your work um and i and so i guess i was going to ask you at the beginning how so i know that you got started i know what you're uh working on now but what you got started on was studying semantic memory is that right so and then you kind of switched over to autobiographical memory but that's where you started

1:39 i when i started studying memory i was studying semantic memory which um for your listeners who might not know this is a memory for words and concepts uh our memory for our knowledge of the world so you know knowing for example that sacramento is the capital of california is a bit of semantic memory and uh i started studying semantic memory because i began to work on a project with a professor while i was in graduate school continued that work on semantic memory

2:15 until uh a few years after i had finished my phd and that's when i decided i really want to study something that had a little more obvious practical applicability and that's when i started diving into uh eyewitness memory right and the the misinformation effect which i you were one of the first to identify with something you're very much associated with yes because those early experiments where we showed that information that people are exposed to

2:49 after some event is completely over can contaminate or distort or transform their memory it became known as the misinformation effect and i spent many decades well we're still doing studies of the misinformation effect yeah right and i think it's a pretty robust finding at this point i think it's safe to say that uh we have a lot of evidence for it and um it's incredibly robust in fact it affects people with even very good memory which i was surprised to find out even the so-called h sand population the highly superior autobiographical memory group so it's

3:23 not really i mean sometimes people view this as a kind of weakness on their part like oh you know i get these things wrong but it just seems like it's a feature of the memory system exactly it's a way we we update our memories in in in this case with misinformation but you know it can sometimes be damaging but uh this flexible memory system also can be helpful um in some ways for people right yeah i know i was just reading um a more recent i guess a piece of on yours on on

3:56 forgetting and the usefulness of forgetting and the ways in which it's punished sometimes um and especially in the criminal justice system right of coming up with alibis and so forth but uh that even even ordinary persons that haven't aren't under any suspicion at all have trouble coming up with alibis no i well that's the that's another side of the point here what that uh people people forget um people and and yet what sometimes when people say i don't remember uh they get accused of lying yeah right

4:31 lingering when in fact it just could be you know natural and normal for forgetting so i have worked on a number of cases where people get accused of perjury and out and out lying to uh law enforcement because they say i don't remember it it sometimes shocks me when when i see this happening right this is this is particularly uh partially because of the way they're trained right i think that the prosecutors are trained to see inconsistencies as evidence of lying or deceitfulness at least and that's that's probably a

5:04 mistaken way for them to view it i would say probably well it's one thing to have an inconsistency and sometimes we should be suspicious of those uh it's quite another thing when somebody says i don't remember that and he accused him of deliberately lying and and try to punish them and i think that's what that's what i and the graduate student who i worked with were trying to get across in that essay that you were alluding to i see okay right so that's there's a difference between forgetting the thing and then having an inconsistency

5:38 but but isn't it also uh the case that people they do have inconsistencies i mean i i'm recalling the the very famous case that you worked on with um with cotton uh what i think ronald cohn was that his name um and he his first story was he was with friends and then he remembered well he remembered later that he was with his family and so that was part of the reason why they viewed him with suspicion at the beginning because right yeah now i know that case very well and i met both ronald cotton the falsely accused defendant who spent time in prison and

6:13 the true rape victim jennifer thompson who who you know was devastated when she learned that she had misidentified him and he subsequently went to prison part of the problem for ron cotton is when when they said to him something like where were you you know two weeks ago on tuesday night or whatever it was you know he gave an answer and it turns out the answer was wrong he was not there at that time we've since done studies of people's ability to accurately on the spot

6:47 remember where you were two weeks ago tuesday and they're very bad at it right yeah exactly and this is not even under a high pressure situation but as you point out in that paper too is there's this assumption that sometimes is made that people when there's a lot at stake that they should be more accurate in their memory like when they're really like a lot hangs on this you're gonna you know uh but that's not the case right the high stakes don't enhance memory recall well it might be sometimes it can sometimes if it is important you'll you know you'll take the time to search

7:21 for corroborating or exonerating evidence but it's certainly no guarantee that you're going to be perfectly accurate just because it's important right yeah i think these are important lessons i mean i i guess that the way the criminal justice system is working is starting to incorporate some of these ideas it's maybe a bit slow but some of these ideas are working their way in to the way prosecutors and other people function and a large part of it um is due to the kind of work that you've been involved with i would say so i think that

7:54 it is surprising to me how how much further they still have to go though i guess even though some changes are being made well we must give credit to the many uh other people who work in this field who have worked tirelessly to um fine to discover to use their scientific methodology to discover what are good practices that are going to minimize the chances that somebody's going to make a mistake that's going to be devastating for an innocent person and out of all that work out of that

8:27 decades of work has come a number of recommendations you know each one might make a small difference but they can add up to make a big difference right uh and you know i'm talking about reforms like um using blind testing where the person who conducts the test does not know who the suspect is that's been a critical recommendation that has uh arisen out of all this scientific work in this area and now different agencies are starting to

8:59 implement that particular uh reform i mean that's kind of surprising that they're only just now starting to do that because that seems like a sort of uh let's tell i say obvious like that you can contaminate i mean in even more subtle ways like you know you mentioned the case once i saw you talking where like the person said to the uh the person was to identify the lineup well i saw you sort of glancing at that guy over there so why not focus on him a bit more you know sort of leading him to to uh identify and that's i mean whether it's you know

9:32 intentional or conscious or not on that person's part that's definitely a way to contaminate what the person oh well i can i can give these law enforcement clearly the benefit of the doubt not you know unless you have some other evidence accuse them of anything intentional but they have a suspect in mind they've got a hypothesis about what happened and um they're often not aware that they can communicate their thinking to the person they're interviewing right what's happened in that example that you just alluded to yeah right exactly so the more that they're aware of their influence

10:06 uh the more careful they can be but a lot a lot of it depends on uh we want to give them a benefit for the doubt but obviously um a lot depends on their personal outlook and what they're hoping to accomplish yeah so i wonder i want to get to some of this stuff in a little bit more detail but i wonder if i could just back up for a second and ask you what's your i guess definition of memory is because i see like in some of your work in some of your writings that there's at least three elements there's a there's the sensory element there's the belief element and then there's like a judgment

10:38 element um so i wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about how you think about just what the nature of memory in general is and what distinction memory as a process we are you know exposed information we inquire uh acquire bits of information into a a memory system it doesn't just sit there waiting to be kind of plucked out later but uh we can then it fades over time we can be exposed to new information that can also enter the system and can contaminate what is there but

11:10 you know memory is a is a process by which we store information and try to retrieve it later when we want to remember something or answer somebody's questions testify in court i mean that's in a nutshell what memory is right so i mean i guess the reason why i'm asking this is because i i see a lot of times when you're writing about this and even when you're speaking what you say is that your subjects remember and believe oh okay we do make a distinction

11:47 between having a belief that something is true and having a memory that something is true and happened to you and these are very different things right you you can believe that something is true without having any kind of sense of recollection so even even with true experiences you can believe that you were born and an umbilical cord had to be cut i i believe that's true of me i don't

12:20 have any memory of that experience and and that shows you an example of with a true event that where you could have a belief but but not an actual memory same thing is true with with false beliefs and false memories so some of the suggestive techniques that i've been work i and others have been worrying about have led to people patience to have a belief that maybe they were sexually abused by their father for 10 years even though they don't have any

12:52 feeling of recollection but you go a little further with people with highly suggestive techniques and now you can get them to start to actually feel like they're remembering things that aren't necessarily true so i hope that helps clarify a little bit this distinction between having a belief and having a memory sometimes we lump them together sometimes we are a talk about these two different subjective experiences yeah no that does help and so do you uh in your work with uh subjects

13:25 try to distinguish these two things i mean so how do you know that someone is remembering something i know you asked them questions about the clarity of the memory and things of that nature but is this the way you're trying to get out when you're asking those questions no well no actually in some of my later work where we planted a false memory that you got sick eating a particular food like you got sick eating strawberry ice cream as a child and then people don't want to eat strawberry ice cream as much anymore we actually asked them do do you do you believe it's true of you that you got sick

13:59 do you actually have a memory of a time when you think you got sick or do you think it didn't happen to you at all so sometimes get their own self report of whether they have a belief or a memory and i don't know whether you know how familiar you are richard with the the the kind of basic more theoretical work in the area of human memory but this distinction between a belief and a memory is kind of like the well-known um remember no distinction in the memory literature

14:33 where talving the famous memory scientist um i helped to popularize the idea of asking people um you you say you saw that word on the list do you actually kind of feel you know it was there or do you truly remember seeing it there and you can and you can tell me you know what color were the letters printed in it was it in early in the list or later in the list does it feel like you remember or does it just feel like you know and our distinction between a belief

15:06 and a memory is kind of analogous to that distinction that's had a long history yeah the the science of memory yeah that helps yeah that makes that make sense because um they they are clearly different and so i i think the studies are talking about a regular i give the list of words like candy and so forth yes it was sweet on the list and people tend to think that it was they picked that out of the lineup um and then so the distinction between do they just know it like or did they actually have this feeling of recalling it um and that's what the belief versus

15:39 memory thing is so that's and often you get them to do both or are you did you just single out the subjects according to whether they have one or the other of these two things or no we do we report what we're observing yeah oh what percent of people tell us that it's a full-blown memory and what percent tell us it's uh it's just a belief i see okay yeah because i guess uh i guess some of the criticisms that i've seen try to get harp on this distinction and say well maybe they're just believing it but they're not really like how do you do how do you know that

16:11 they're really remembering it and it seems like you can ask these kind of questions make these distinctions and so nail down which one it is that they're actually doing right sometimes you know sometimes let them classify when you explain to them the distinction but sometimes you know you infer it so um when they say for example that they saw sweet on a list of words when it wasn't presented to them at all and they've conjured up this false memory um

16:44 you if you say to them um do you remember whether it was printed in in red ink or or black ink and they give you an answer do you remember whether it occurred early in the list or towards the end of the list i mean often they'll give you an answer and so when they expand with this extra detail about this experience it's it's a clue that it actually feels like a memory to them right yeah that that makes sense um i mean i don't find these uh these kind of criticisms very convincing i find the

17:17 work that i mean not just your lab but like this has been all over the place right there's labs all over the world doing this kind of work now so i think this is a pretty solid result but i am interested to hear your response to some of these uh to some of these things which is why i'm asking um so now also i mean another very famous example of this is when you view the car crash and you ask them the leading questions how fast was it going when they smashed or how fast was it going when they hit and people give you different judgments there um but is this do you think again you can make this distinction between

17:51 that they they're believing it after the fact or they're literally remembering the cars going different speeds oh again we didn't we didn't ask that question back then but just the idea that uh a week later they're telling us they saw a broken glass that didn't exist right was a clue at the time that i was doing that early work that maybe those leading questions were actually contaminating their memory and and and and that that's what kind of shifted my thinking away from

18:26 we're not just studying how changing a word or two and how you question someone can affect what they tell you we're studying something much more profound how a word or two can actually contaminate the memory but it's just one way to do that people get contaminated when they talk to other people when they get media coverage about an event they might have witnessed um these are different ways that new information can distort or transform somebody's memory yeah because you might think that maybe

19:01 what's going on is they're confabulating they're sort of you know making up something embellishing adding details as opposed to recalling it uh but of course i mean i guess given what we know about reconsolidation of memories the idea would be that this information is then sort of put into the memory itself and then recalled later that's evidence that it's more well the reconsolidation people would think about this um but you know you could also ask the question you know whatever is going on in there whatever's going on in that brain uh if they're willing to get on the

19:35 stand and say you know the cars were going you know 40 miles an hour and it blew through a stop sign when all that's not true that's that's kind of what's important right exactly and the the the the amount of things that you can get people to falsely remember i mean some of them are quite comical and i've seen you know your response to people saying well some of these you know things may have actually happened and they're like you know the loss in the mall some criticisms of that was like maybe they were lost in the mall you're like fine well let's uh see if they can remember you know meeting bugs bunny or

20:08 being licked by by goofy so it's not simply i mean i don't think that that criticism really carries any weight because of these follow-up studies yeah once we did the lost in the mall study where we found we could plant a a memory that you were lost when you were five or six years old you know remember it's a particular place and a particular age and with particular family members present and you're crying and you're frightened and you're rescued by an elderly person you're reunited it's not just you were lost sometimes

20:40 somewhere in childhood that could be is quite as interesting as uh the result that we got which is getting some people to believe partially or completely in this completely made-up experience and and the main you know another criticism that we got back then was getting lost is common and so you can show you can do this with something that would have been more bizarre or upsetting and lots of other investigators and we too responded to that challenge and

21:15 you had you know one group in at university of tennessee planning a false memory that you nearly drowned and had to be rescued by a lifeguard or another group in canada planning a false memory that you're attacked by a vicious animal another group in canada planning a false memory that you committed a crime as a teenager and it was serious enough that the police came to investigate so you can plant all kinds of pretty rich detailed recollections into the minds of ordinary otherwise

21:49 healthy people the the uh police one that's from uh julia shaw's lab is that the one you're referring well that was that was uh when when she was at uh ubc working with porter in the paper was you know with sean porter right and she found quite a high percentage of people um following suede of the suggestion and developing the false memory right and so i mean one one of the other things that i hear people say sometimes is that well these techniques involve you know um the family being

22:22 co-conspirators and when you try to transfer this over to talk about you know childhood experience or something like that then obviously like in therapy they're not saying the parent is corroborating this or something like that um but i think one of the interesting things that you've done recently is to to find techniques that don't involve using the kind of the conspirator aspect that's true and you know some of the other techniques that were modeled after the kind of thing we saw going on in some questionable psychotherapy things like guided imagination

22:56 uh you don't remember anybody molesting you but you've got all the symptoms of somebody who was abused as a child why don't you just close your eyes and try to imagine who might have done this to you and where might you have been well what does that imagination exercise do to people who didn't have the experience and in a series of studies different investigators have shown that imagination can increase your confidence that you had the experience that you're merely imagining so then there's a dream interpretation

23:31 and i've seen sexualized dream interpretation lead people to false memories and in some studies we showed that you know you bring in a clinician to do some dream interpretation excuse me and you can get people to start to remember think they remember um the stuff that um they told you they dreamt about after you apply them with suggestion that that dream is tapping into a real memory so it's one of the so one of the

24:04 questions that i have is um i think the evidence against repression is significant at least in the way that freud thought of it right i don't think there's uh much evidence for that um if any actually but uh so one of the things you talking about one of your papers is the difference between forgetting and repression so people do forget things and then they do remember them later right so it's not impossible that someone could spontaneously remember something from from childhood 20 years later right that's not what you're ruling out here no you're you're absolutely right then people cannot think about things for a

24:39 long time they can be reminded of them and then it feels like a memory and it's it can be a you know a reasonably accurate memory people cannot think about even very unpleasant things right reminded of them and you just have to go to a high school reunion you can experience this for yourself but what's being cl that's ordinary forgetting and remembering what's being claimed in these cases many of which

25:10 entered courtrooms is something that is too extreme to be explained by ordinary forgetting and remembering um you were raped between the ages of 5 and 16 forced to have sex with the family dog all alleged uh allegedly repressed into the unconscious and you had no awareness of it until you were 19 or 18 or 19 and went into therapy just where is the proof ready routinely works like that

25:43 if ever right and in fact i think we we have lots of reason to believe that it's the opposite i mean from the phenomena of flashbulb memories and emotionally charged memories those sorts of things they're very difficult to to get over when they're really truly traumatic in the way that they're describing they don't tend to be the sorts of things that you you forget easily well yeah and when you're dealing with somebody who's had a horrible experience and particularly if they've got post-traumatic stress disorder that they've got the opposite problem they've got intrusive memories they can't stop thinking about uh these experiences

26:18 and that can be quite debilitating yeah so one one the one criticism that i've seen that i think that i would be interested to hear you talk about is this sort of reverse of this so the the results that um you have and others have discovered suggest that you know you can be or susceptible to these false memories misinformation etc this can be definitely done with in the therapeutic sessions but isn't there also the potential that abusers can alter memory of those

26:51 who have been abused um maybe not by but certainly with misinformation not by guided techniques or something like that but isn't isn't that a possibility as well that people could not remember having these things happen and because of misinformation provided by the people who are abusing them um you know people have asked me about erasing memories yeah we've actually tried to kind of take memories away from people it's a lot it's a lot harder to do what you can do is substitute a memory so in some sense when we make you believe that the car went through a stop

27:25 sign instead of a yield sign we're in some sense weakening that memory for the yield sign as we substitute this alternative detail that people are embracing and accepting as their own memory so in that sense you're in that sense you're sort of removing a memory um you know it's it's it's hard to imagine how an abuser is is going to be able to to do that i mean i in principle i suppose you

27:58 could um substitute one act for another and maybe get somebody to believe that um maybe get somebody to believe that uh they really only put their hand on your knee rather than put their hand on your upper thigh near the crotch i mean i by possibly repeating that in principle i guess you could uh do that right but it sounds like what you're saying is that that's a lot more difficult than the kind of things which uh we're talking about here

28:32 getting people to believe things that never happen as opposed to well getting people taking away a memory is is a little harder but substituting one detail for another is certainly possible so i was just thinking in principle and i kind of came up with this one example because it's kind of related to a case i'm working on now i've twisted all the details of course um you know let's say that a perpetrator put his hand in a sort of inappropriate spot and later on kept on telling uh the

29:07 victim that he put it in an innocent spot maybe maybe you could get the person to remember it as being more innocent right but you couldn't get them to forget or to think that that nothing had happened that there was no touching at all well you know it depends i mean as as that person no ti as that person went on in life and experienced many other traumas and difficulties and

29:39 the ups and downs of natural life be a touching incident that you know might fade in their memory right yeah i mean i i know this is relate this is slightly off the topic but i know that there's this question about what happens in the substitution case so if you if you go through the stop sign and then later you suggested them that it's a yield sign and then people um report back that you asked them what they saw they say i saw the yield sign um there's a question about whether what happened to the original memory

30:12 uh so is that information still retained is it written over or so did you have a view about that now because well first of all you've been doing your homework here i haven't because that was a that was a fundamental issue when you distort somebody's memory and make them believe in a detail that's different from the original detail what happened to the original memory trace and we duped it out in the pages of the journal of experimental psychology and other places you know for years trying to to ask what happened to those underlying

30:46 memory traces when new information invades you and you accept it and you know where i think it ended up and we stopped arguing and maybe around 1990s or something you know 20 years ago um is that when somebody gives you a wrong answer there are many roots to that wrong answer um there are many roots sometimes they didn't pay very good attention to the original and they've just adopted your suggestion and added it to memory sometimes they have a uh a conflict

31:20 they think i thought i saw one thing but this person is questioning me talks about a different thing i'm i think they probably know what they're doing i'll go with their detail that's resolving a conflict in favor of the erroneous information and and sometimes it does look like in the process of absorbing this new misinformation it does weaken your original memory so all of these things uh can be going on some of the time right so unfortunately the answer is

31:52 complicated yeah yeah but but scientists have not been you know just discussing all this quite as much as they did um back in the 80s yeah right i i read some of those papers and i then they sort of just disappeared i don't know if i i was wondering if that's because the issue was kind of settled or if uh people just lost interest but it sounds like what you're saying is well we sort of just found out that all of it happens exactly or wait right now that was my conclusion at some point everybody was a little right yeah exactly the best kind of debate out

32:25 there um yeah that's interesting so i mean obviously the sensory part then can one of the things that can happen is that you the way you the way you the sensory component gets altered right you might actually visualize the yield sign when you recall the memory as a result of the impulse information well that could happen yeah but if you want to talk about sensory memory that very early stage then i would talk to a different cognitive psychologist yeah no i don't mean like iconic memory or something like that what i mean is the

32:58 sensory component of these kinds of memories oh okay yeah right so i mean because i i think that part of what what you guys call a memory is that there's this there's the visualization part like you know the imagistic part not the sensory not in that technical sense of sensory membrane but at least like a sensory component um and then also the feeling of it being recalled or something like that plus the belief that this is something that happened and so i would just care i was just curious about whether that part of the memory can be altered uh because of the misinformation or

33:31 whether it's and and i was also thinking this because i read a couple papers by you and colleagues where you looked at the fmri data and we're trying to see what the difference between you know false memories and vertical memories are and they're they're very similar overall but there are some differences like individual cortex and so forth where you where where you would expect then there would be a difference in the imagistic component well there you know there were a few differences in the neuroimaging studies between a true memory and one that you believe is true but happens

34:03 to not be true but i i think the overwhelming impression from that work is the similarity of the neural signals and clearly um the differences are so small that you're not going to be able to take one individual memory and reliably classify it as a true authentic memory versus a of a false memory that arises from some other process so that's what the that's what the courts have to deal with they get somebody on the stand with a specific memory

34:36 are you going to stick them into an fmri machine and and you know have the machine decide whether it's real or not i don't think so not for a long long time so you don't even think if there were uh like machine learning like if you had multivariate pattern analysis of these sorts of things and then you sort of had a decoder train up on the vertical like remember something true remember something false you don't think that you could use those techniques to distinguish you know i think they have better luck with those techniques when you're trying to distinguish

35:08 somebody telling the truth versus a deliberate lie and i think they've had much less success trying to get a distinction between something that is true and something that's false but you believe it true right yeah that's a tough distinction but i was intrigued that there were at least some differences that you can see in the fmri although you're right i mean looking at the data they're over overwhelmingly similar right so to the naked eye they'd you couldn't i couldn't tell the difference between the two but i was wondering if some machine learning or

35:41 some algorithm could be trained to to sort of sniff out the differences that maybe well you talk to uh talk to wagner at stanford about that see what he has to say okay you know this is veering and you know i teamed up with people who really know how to do fmri and what and how to talk about it but um and i just had with their expertise when we did that uh joint work okay very cool yeah um so another thing that i think that came up a little bit earlier but i would like to circle back around to was the actual real world effects that

36:14 these false memories have so you mentioned the strawberry ice cream um you know and also you know you could get people to like healthier foods like asparagus and i know your joke about george bush and you'd like to get him to eat some broccoli so i think that's hilarious but uh yeah but these things having these real world effects i mean these are beneficial in a sense if you use them in the right way uh convincing people and i just read this paper by you on memory blindness where you can tell you can convince people that the pain wasn't as bad um yeah so although there are some mixed

36:48 results i guess at the end about how effective that was in them making a decision but nonetheless so these things actually manifest in the real world and so i mean i don't know what your views are ultimately about whether this is ethical to do or not but it seems like a good idea actually but that you know i started thinking about this when we had a collection of these results in the on the food memory that you've just alluded to where we could get people to uh develop a false memory that they got sick on a fattening food and they didn't want to eat the food that much or that they had a warm fuzzy memory

37:22 with a healthy food like asparagus and they're more interested in asparagus and i started thinking if if you could plant false memories control people's nutritional selections this be kind of a dieting technique couldn't these you know help reduce the obesity problem in our society maybe minimize the chances of that people will have diabetes and a shortened lifespan and all the things that go along with obesity uh and wouldn't that be a

37:55 good thing and you know in principle uh i i think it would be a good thing and and probably um it would be a technique that a lot of people would sign up for if if he opened up a shop and uh and offered it exactly yeah i know i would i volunteer for that i mean so what's the basic idea you you tell them that they um that they got sick eating a certain food or that they really enjoy it so take the strawberry ice cream i think we're done with peach yogurt too that's another famous one

38:27 right and this is all pizza well that was scaboria and colleagues who did the peach yogurt a beautiful study and a can you know he he passed away sadly but he was in canada and he had collaborators they planted a false memory that you got sick eating peach yogurt and even you know weeks and weeks later people weren't as interested in having peach yogurt and he actually allowed people to eat you know yogurt measured the containers and how much they weighed after the subject eight

38:59 and it was a beauty really okay i didn't know that so because i thought one of the questions was whether this would whether when you were confronted with the food itself in real life whether you would really follow through and so what you're saying is they they did that i didn't realize yeah they did that yes and they ate less of the peach yogurt that featu a feature of the peach yogurt work yeah it was a beautiful example and this was weeks later where they were still more reluctant to eat the peach yogurt yeah i think it was weeks maybe a month later i mean it was quite a while later wow okay i probably have the paper on my

39:34 computer if you want me to send it to you well thank you yeah i would like to read it um so and the same is true with the healthy foods so they're more likely to eat the healthy foods if you implant a memory that what they had that they liked it as a kid or they enjoyed it when they ate it well it was planting a warm fuzzy memory childhood memory involving asparagus we didn't actually have put the food in front of them but we we you know asked them questions about what they would intend to order if they had a chance to be you know at a restaurant on a you know a special occasion and

40:08 these were on the menu and they were more interested in asparagus interesting so but they have to buy the false memory right if you if they don't accept the false memory then you don't get the effect uh well i can't remember in all the difference definitely once they buy into it then you see this effect uh what happens with people who were exposed to the suggestion but didn't fall for it i i i think that middle group behaves a little differently in the different

40:39 studies that have been done on this yeah okay interesting i mean yeah i'm trying this on my son right now i was like well last time we ate this you really liked it [Laughter] okay well there you go yeah and it hasn't worked so far but i know some people are critical of this because they they're like oh well you know this is you know you're lying to the children and i don't i mean i like your responses like hello santa claus which i've heard you say so i i there there is this

41:12 kind of double standard with respect to lying to children yeah exactly but you know when what i then said more seriously than hello santa claus was you know again if if you had an overweight or obese teenager or a child i mean which would you rather see a little bit of fiction floating around in their memory but they're healthier and they have you know a longer lifespan um or you know or the alternative and and

41:46 people can make different choices i'm not going to make those choices for them but i know what what i prefer for a kid of mine yeah i agree i think that part of the reason i mean when we talk about this and i i teach general psychology and talk about these things and one of the things i see undergraduates and part of the lay person so to speak say is they they really get i don't know pent up about messing with memories because it's so personal and we really identify ourselves with like our memories and it's really part of our self-identity in a sense and so i think people

42:17 um yeah we talk about memory dampening or memory alteration or any of those sorts of things they get very uneasy about it and do you think that is this big is this do you think based on well first of all i wonder if you agree with me about that and secondly i wonder if you think that this is in part based on this erroneous model of how memory works that it's vertical and like little snippets and you know so forth well i'll tell you what i learned in thinking about memory dampening which you which you mentioned in your question um so first of all there there

42:51 were clinical trials of a drug called propranolol where you could supposedly give this drug to let's say somebody who came to a hospital in the emergency room after experiencing a horrible trauma you could give them this propranolol and it would weaken their memory and minimize the chances that they would develop post-traumatic stress disorder which can be a very debilitating condition and i found this work so fascinating

43:24 um but you know i wasn't in a position with my lab to actually study propranolol but what we could do is ask people if you were in that situation if you were in the emergency room after a horrible trauma and somebody offered you this drug would you take it and personally i said to myself yes i would take it because i i i don't want the pain i i want to minimize the pain and i certainly don't

43:57 want post-traumatic stress disorder um but one of my collaborators on this project said no i wouldn't take it then when we went out and asked a general population would you take the drug we give them a scenario you know you're a manager and a a food uh like a you know like a burger king kind of thing you you're carrying the money home at the end of the day because you're going to deposit it the next morning and you're beaten up in the park and you in the emergency room and somebody offers you

44:30 this drug and just to my surprise um most people were like my collaborators they said no i don't want this drug wow changed the scenario a little they still didn't want the drug and this is what you know they they they didn't know what the side effects would be what other memories would it take away they had different reasons but it really taught me that people are scared of having their memories to

45:02 be taken away they they cherish those memories even when the memories might be bad for them and um that that was a real that was a real lesson and i you know i actually got invited to um the toronto uh film festival um right around the time of having done this work where the film audience watched eternal sunshine of the spotless mind or whatever you know that film where they try to wipe away the any remnant of their romantic relationship

45:34 after a breakup yeah so i was able to talk with this audience about the film whether that was feasible and whether people would really want to do that sounds kind of tempting if you had a painful breakup but i bet i bet people would have some qualms based on you know the work that we did on the memory dampening drugs yeah definitely i mean that's something that i talk with them a lot about too so i'd say you know you what if you failed a test or it was you know not even a breakup but just you

46:06 know you were really disappointed in your performance in the class or something would you do this to move on with your life and they'd be like no there's a sense that you know it's unearned i think um i was like well what's the difference between that and going out and drinking all night and then you forget the next day it's and then there they they they they somehow think it's more respectable [Laughter] so that's a great uh pedagogical uh little exercise there richard i like that a lot too about you know why is it different from

46:39 drinking to forget or whatever exactly these things that yeah the answer is that we've done that for a long time already so we sort of know what the what the trade-offs and so far are but yeah i do think and you know even there was this um you know the president's bio bioethics council they wrote a big screed about this back in the uh i guess in the late 90's or early 2000's i forget when exactly but i i just think that yeah we're not ready to come to terms as a society yet with with what we're learning about memory people are very resistant and the lay person has this general view

47:12 that memory is reliable and you know and it presents itself that way you can't deny that like from the inside it really seems like this is what happened and then you find out whoa you weren't wearing that red sweater you were wearing there's a picture of you in the yellow sweater so we we have these kinds of experiences but nonetheless we put a lot of faith in our memory and i i think the more you learn about the memory science the more that that's brought into question but i don't think it's percolated out into that average person yet do you think that would be beneficial if they if they came to understood understand these things

47:46 uh i i feel that understanding the malleable nature of memory is can only help people i mean i even in my own life i i do feel that it's given me an appreciation about the commonness of mistakes and it makes me more tolerant of the mistakes that friends or family members or even i myself might make i i don't immediately assume somebody is deliberately lying

48:17 um i they just have a false memory right and i mean this is you know prominent cases too i mean i know the the brian williams one you talk about and there's also the hillary clinton one um where these people were these people were attacked and you know when i talk to people about this they still judge you know we were to trust him and he may he was lying this whole time to beef up his resume and i know you play you have this recording that you play of the i thought was very interesting of the um of the message that someone left oh my gosh that was such a that was such a weird message

48:50 well i did play that in a couple of talks so did you did you hear a talk i gave where i played this yeah i did answering machine message message from somebody when all i was trying to do was suggest that maybe brian williams could have really had a false memory and how it would have arisen you know i mean i followed that whole thing i of course i only have newspaper knowledge of um of what happened to him but it's a pretty interesting example and i use it and the hillary clinton example to show how even the most educated intelligence

49:23 experienced among us can develop false memories that are sometimes embarrassing for them absolutely but but there is if i'm not mistaken there is a correlation with intelligence and resistance is that correct like the if you have a score higher measures of intelligence then it's harder now that correlates if you are somewhat low in standard tests of uh intelligence you're somewhat more susceptible but you know we're dealing with correlations on the order of about 0.3 or so and so they're not overwhelming it's just a

49:56 tendency yeah and so there's nothing there's nothing one like can do to inoculate oneself against these effects there's like there's or do you know of any technique um i know i know that you know being told that you're gonna have misinformation before you get it is some has some mitigating effect but is that really the only thing that you guys have found well if you if you warn people that you may be exposed to misinformation and you have this warning in the forefront of your consciousness you can you you know you can do certain things that'll make you a little more resistant to the suggestive influence

50:30 but that's but is there anything else i mean there's no like exercises or memory techniques that one can employ not not that i know of no that's too bad i know um and i know also that you've been working recently on the effects of marijuana for example on susceptibility and the findings there are not good oh well that you know that's a group in the netherlands they're the the driving force behind that paper and it they that it it's uh you know it's a and they

51:03 are driving the train but i i was fortunate enough to be able to have a bit of a collaboration in which we showed that marijuana does uh make people a bit more susceptible to post-event contamination um done with kind of a virtual reality uh setup so it was kind of cute that way but people can read that paper i think i have a link to it on my uc irvine website where i've got you know 50 articles that people can just download for free and read for

51:36 themselves yeah i'll put a link to that in in the description over here as well but so i mean that's kind of worrying right because this is a widely used drug which is becoming more and more legalized and if i mean it's already highly used but uh this has a real implication for testimony and witness accounts and so well and we've had that problem with alcohol for a long time too so um yeah i've just gotten a copy of a big review paper out of this netherlands group that i'm just starting to dive into which is going into a whole

52:11 bunch of different drugs not just cannabis but also alcohol and other drugs and the false memory problems so oh interesting digest all this i'll have more to tell you about okay cool so and one other thing i was curious about is that the overall rate i've seen different estimates um and i know that there was a big like mega analysis in 2017 i think but uh so you see numbers every anywhere from like 20 to sometimes 50 sometimes 60. so what do you think out of on average the success rate of these techniques are

52:44 well these are the rich false memory studies right you're not changing a detail turning a stop sign into a yield sign or you know making you believe that the bad guy you know had a brown jacket instead of a green jacket that's super easy to do um these rich false memory studies where you plant an entirely false memory into the minds of people for something that didn't happen those constitute the studies that are analyzed in the mega analysis um headed by scaboria but also including

53:18 co-authors from britain and canada and u.s um and what they found is that using a common coding scheme about 30 percent of subjects developed a false memory and an additional 23 percent developed a false belief that the event happened and this is just with a few suggestive interviews remember in psychotherapy sometimes you are interviewed week after day you know or talking week after week after

53:52 week more than just a few so um i i think that mega analysis is pretty telling right yeah some of these uh the i think you're right that these there's a much different effect from weeks or years of these kind of uh techniques as opposed to just a couple of interviews um so 30 i mean that's pretty high but it but it also suggests that you know 70 percent don't fall for it which i don't know that 20 additional 23 who develop a false belief oh is that additive so that the total is

54:24 50 53 or whatever but that you know that sometimes the false belief is the first step down that royal road to developing a full-blown false memory right often the way it starts you start to get somebody to believe this happened to them even though they don't have any sense of recollection then they work on it they imagine they think about it and that false belief turns into a full-blown false memory so so that's that's pretty depressing that if about half of people

54:56 are susceptible to these things well that's yeah that's in this collection of studies that were analyzed using the common coding technique for the mega analysis right yeah and i'm not sure i'd want to go quite so far as to say you know this means that 53 of people in the world you know right but it's a clue that this is easier to do than some people might think and more widespread than we might think as well do you have any guesses about why so i

55:29 know that like in the i mean i grew up in the 80s and you know the satanic panic was very much prevalent and you you know there was recovered memories all the time of you know abuse but it was like very specific abuse about you know being impregnated by satan or you know being child trafficked and uh with ritual abuse and so forth and so on do you have any ideas about why those specific i mean i mean why so coming up with i was abused is one thing coming with these like very specific and weird scenarios is like another thing so i'm curious if you have anything well

56:03 by my speculation is they they get in the hands of therapists who've got that belief system it's not that different from the many people in our society who believe they were abducted by aliens taken up on spaceships sexually experimented upon and returned to their beds on earth how does that happen they ended up in the in the in the clutches of people who believe that this is real name like dr john mack a psychiatrist from harvard who's

56:35 seemingly very credible he's since passed away um but he hypnotized his people and uh they went all the way to these pretty extreme beliefs so you think it really is just a product of that the the therapist had this antecedent belief that it must be something like that that's i think that's one route and and then of course some of these people go on talk shows and they talk about their experiences and they can influence other people that way watch the talk shows and

57:08 maybe something like that happened to me and sometimes people get into group therapy situations where people are sharing these stories that's another route for potential contamination yeah interesting i mean because it does seem like it died out for a bit um and i don't hear as much about it yeah no there's still a little ritual abuse contingent going on in this oh is there okay i didn't know that yeah that's unfo i mean that's really sad because i mean no one wants to minimize abuse obviously i mean that's not what's going on here

57:40 abuse does happen obviously people are abused it's hard absolutely but this is not making things is i mean i guess sometimes people say well why are you intervening in these cases and so i think what the answer is and hopefully you'll say as well but that you see the kind of techniques that are being used to elicit the memories and that's really an alarm bell really that's really the thing that's that signals that something may be going on that's not legitimate well yeah and when when you see somebody go from you know i had a wonderful happy childhood and

58:14 you know sending all these adoring mother's day and father's day cards to their uh parents for years and years and they end up going into therapy deciding that their parents you know raped them in satanic cults and you know were the the king and queen of the the cult and that they were forced to kill animals and breed babies and kill those babies something happened right yeah and some i mean some of that you make the point too as well that some of the

58:45 things which are remembered are just impossible like uh you know i i guess there's cases of you know riding on flying animals and being flushed down the toilet and so that's all that's also a bit needs to be accounted for that's not every part of the memory that's being recalled can be vertical right well we've seen lots of cases where people remember things that are impossible right you know uh impregnated by a father who had a vasectomy um having an abortion when there's absolutely no physical evidence of

59:20 that there ever was a pregnancy let alone an abortion i mean yeah right and so it's also interesting it seems like repression is making a bit of a comeback as well the whole concept of repression people are seemingly interested in and i know there's i mean i don't have a background in therapeutic stuff you know my background is in cognitive neural science especially related to consciousness but um i i do have some familiarity with these other things as well but so you know in the in our circles repression is not necessarily

59:52 taken that seriously but in therapeutic circles it does seem like people have been using it for a while and it does and i know i'm seeing a little crossover it seems like that even some in the scientific community are starting to think well maybe there's some evidence for something like repression if not like the way freud thought did something about it well that's true i you know i've got another uh paper that you know co-authored with one of my former graduate students on are the memory wars over you know a survey from just a you know a few years ago

1:00:25 basically there there's still a big gap with memory scientists and even clinical university researchers you know believing one thing but many practitioners still believe something else and are still um embracing this uh this idea of of repression so we do see that the memory wars are not over and there is quite a gap in the thinking of different groups of of people about these issues

1:00:59 yeah so i mean it seems like it would be good to have more crosstalk between the two groups but do you see that happening like in your in your uh when you go to conferences or you're involved in these activities are there people that are there from the other side there as well or is it like two separate realms well it depends on what the conference is i mean i you know i've had a couple of experiences with the ericsson foundation which is puts on a huge conference for um mental health professionals and

1:01:31 [Music] so i've had a chance to at least speak to that audience and i'm i'm sure they're also hearing uh from other people who disagree with me right um what do you think of the criticisms that you've heard are there are there any that that make you rethink these things or think that you need to work on more or do you think that most of them are dealt with in the ways that we've been talking about i you know i'm not sure i mean i you know i think in the very beginning

1:02:06 20 years ago i thought you know when i first started thinking about repressed memory when i was working on a murder case where the only evidence against the accused defendant who was accused of committing this murder 20 years earlier was the repressed and recovered memory of his daughter uh and then he's convicted um i was fairly shocked that somebody could be convicted based on nothing other than this claim that i saw this i repressed my memory now it's back um ultimately he was led out of prison his

1:02:40 conviction was overturned but you know even at that time i thought maybe maybe maybe there is some good evidence of repression but over these last 20 years and people have tried to find the evidence and provide the evidence i don't see any credible scientific support for the idea that you can be you know raped for 10 years wall off all these memories be completely unaware that this happened reliably recover this in in some therapy and and then you're cured in the process

1:03:15 this is what richard mcnally the the prominent harvard clinical psychologist and professor has called folklore right so so what why i mean is curious then why it's so resistant in in the therapeutic circles or in this other in this other camp but there's i mean i know it's a handy therapy it's a handy way to make sense of like what's going on but i i just it's curious to me why they're so recalcitrant in this sense or or what it is

1:03:47 i wonder from their point of view what it is that convinces them that these are this is a real phenomenon in spite of like you know like you say 20 years of not finding good evidence for it uh well i think if we invite somebody to come on your program and talk about it i know i think they'll probably say is i see it in my practice um you know or you know what what i've seen the psychiatrists uh who decided that um [Music] you know that holly ramona's memories

1:04:20 were real of her father raping her between 5 and 16 were real because she had an aversion to pickles bananas and mayonnaise you know i mean you know one of my colleagues said oh it's the condimental theory of i mean but that's right what they will tell you but have them on and ask them that question i'd love to listen in yeah that's a good idea i should i should i should i haven't done that but i should um let's see i see we're running i don't

1:04:52 want to keep you forever and i know you uh have other things to do but i am curious just uh if you you know this is ostensibly so we're supposed to be you know show about consciousness so i do wonder do you have any do you think there's any connection between the kind of work that you're doing and and consciousness or is this something that you think is outside of your because i think some people could see the kinds of things you do as evidence for maybe particular views on consciousness so i'm just curious if you have any thoughts about it i don't know you know i i used to co-author an introductory psych textbook and so we would have a chapter on consciousness and i

1:05:25 you know i i think about the work on altered states of consciousness um like hypnosis being something that can alter your state of consciousness i uh you know okay following that path a problem hypnosis does enter into this realm for me um i've got no problems with people who want to use hypnosis to get people to stop smoking or lose weight or whatever some good purpose but in my world hypnosis is sometimes used to dig out

1:06:00 allegedly buried trauma memories and i think it's potentially a dangerous thing to be doing yeah do you think hypnosis is uh like you just said a really an altered state of consciousness as opposed to i know there's some like the social theory of it that they're you know play acting along or you know so do you have a view about that i'm not sure because when uh when i subjected myself as a grad student to uh be a subject in a hypnosis experiment by the famous psychologist hill guard uh i didn't come up very

1:06:34 hypnotizable so it's not something i've experienced myself okay yeah right i i know that yeah there is a controversy about that but uh they're even trying to um change the name i heard in some circles they don't want to call it hypnosis anymore but oh i hadn't heard that how fascinating i wonder what they'll do with the organizations that have hypnosis in their name i guess they'll have to change that too yeah sometimes people call it phenomenological control um oh okay oh okay sort of to get it on i think on board with like uh more familiar

1:07:07 linguists um items like cognitive control control of experience me you know they changed the name of multiple personality disorder dissociative identity disorder and you know my reaction is you know i don't care what you call it just tell me that what is the evidence that really you can have a hundred personalities males females adults kids ducks and other uh animals as your personality and that it is caused by childhood abuse right i mean i guess

1:07:42 like there is some some evidence right that you like there was one case where the one of the altars was blind and the fmr activity and their visual cortex was diminished when that altar was uh act you know active and when when it wasn't you so maybe you know i'm not sure what to think about dissociative identity disorder but but whether it's caused by childhood trauma i think that's a different issue actually yeah okay oh yeah no it's i think the diad is real you've got real people displaying these real symptoms the question is how did they get there right exactly

1:08:13 and and that's something i've seen in the repression discussion as well is that they're trying to rename it like what is it memory disassociation oh dissociative it's dissociation not repression yeah because then they can point to the fact that dissociation is in the dsm so therefore it's real well dissociation is a big umbrella term and and again there too i say whatever you want to call it just show me the proof right exactly um okay so i do wonder at the end here if there's anything that you were hoping

1:08:45 that would come up that hasn't come up no it's been a pleasure talking to you but i think we've covered so much that uh you let me know if you have uh one of these individuals on so i can listen to the answers to your questions yeah absolutely i'm gonna actually look into that and i will let you know um well thank you very much for for joining me it's been a great conversation and i really appreciate it my pleasure uh just hanging out for a second i'll say bye off the air and other than oh so i leave and you do

1:09:18 whatever you're gonna do okay okay yeah you don't have to leave i've