How Reliable is Your Memory?
Post #883
Friday Video: TED Talk – Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus studies memories. More precisely, she studies false memories, when people either remember things that didn’t happen or remember them differently from the way they really were. It’s more common than you might think, and Loftus shares some startling stories and statistics — and raises some important ethical questions.
Memory-manipulation expert Elizabeth Loftus explains how our memories might not be what they seem — and how implanted memories can have real-life repercussions.
Why you should listen
Elizabeth Loftus altered the course of legal history by revealing that memory is not only unreliable, but also mutable. Since the 1970s, Loftus has created an impressive body of scholarly work and has appeared as an expert witness in hundreds of courtrooms, bolstering the cases of defendants facing criminal charges based on eyewitness testimony, and debunking “recovered memory” theories popular at the time, as in her book The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse (with Katherine Ketcham).
Since then, Loftus has dedicated herself to discovering how false memories can affect our daily lives, leading her to surprising therapeutic applications for memory modification — including controlling obesity by implanting patients with preferences for healthy foods.
What others say
“Loftus… has demonstrated repeatedly how unreliable memory is, going so far as to show that full-grown adults can have entire fake memories implanted in their psyches” — Stanford Magazine
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