Tara Thean

 This passage is adapted from Tara Thean, “Remember That?
No You Don’t. Study Shows False Memories Afflict Us All.”
©2013 by Time, Inc.
The phenomenon of false memories is common
to everybody—the party you’re certain you attended
in high school, say, when you were actually home
with the flu, but so many people have told you about
it over the years that it’s made its way into your own
memory cache. False memories can sometimes be a
mere curiosity, but other times they have real
implications. Innocent people have gone to jail when
well-intentioned eyewitnesses testify to events that
actually unfolded an entirely different way.
What’s long been a puzzle to memory scientists is
whether some people may be more susceptible to
false memories than others—and, by extension,
whether some people with exceptionally good
memories may be immune to them. A new study in
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
answers both questions with a decisive no. False
memories afflict everyone—even people with the best
memories of all.
To conduct the study, a team led by psychologist
Lawrence Patihis of the University of California,
Irvine, recruited a sample group of people all of
approximately the same age and divided them into
two subgroups: those with ordinary memory and
those with what is known as highly superior
autobiographical memory (HSAM). You’ve met
people like that before, and they can be downright
eerie. They’re the ones who can tell you the exact
date on which particular events happened—whether
in their own lives or in the news—as well as all
manner of minute additional details surrounding the
event that most people would forget the second they
happened.
The scientists showed participants word lists, then
removed the lists and tested the subjects on words
that had and hadn’t been included. Each list invoked
a so-called critical lure—a word commonly
associated with the words on the list, but that did not
actually appear on the list. The word sleep, for
example, might be falsely remembered as appearing
on a list that included the words pillow, duvet and
nap. All of the participants in both groups fell for the
lures, with at least eight such errors per person—
though some tallied as many as 20. Both groups also
performed unreliably when shown photographs and
fed information intended to make them think they’d
seen details in the pictures they hadn’t. Here too, the
HSAM subjects cooked up as many fake images as
the ordinary folks.
“What I love about the study is how it
communicates something that memory-distortion
researchers have suspected for some time, that
perhaps no one is immune to memory distortion,”
said Patihis.
What the study doesn’t do, Patihis admits, is
explain why HSAM people exist at all. Their
prodigious recall is a matter of scientific fact, and one
of the goals of the new work was to see if an innate
resistance to manufactured memories might be one
of the reasons. But on that score, the researchers
came up empty.
“It rules something out,” Patihis said. “[HSAM
individuals] probably reconstruct memories in the
same way that ordinary people do. So now we have to
think about how else we could explain it.” He and
others will continue to look for that secret sauce that
elevates superior recall over the ordinary kind. But
for now, memory still appears to be fragile, malleable
and prone to errors—for all of us.

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