This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.
In 1980, a bomb exploded at the Central Train Station in Bologna, Italy.
85 people were killed.
Hundreds were injured.
In the wake of the attack, which was later blamed on an Italian terrorist organization,
a large clock on the outside of the train station stopped working.
The clock, frozen at 10.25, became a symbol of the attack.
The picture of the clock was plastered all over postures and banners during commemorations
of the event for years afterwards.
The clock was quickly repaired, but in 1996, 16 years after the bombing, city officials
permanently stopped the clock at 10.25 in remembrance of the tragedy.
In so doing, they unwittingly set up a psychological experiment.
The case later, when asked whether the clock had ever been fixed, the vast majority of city
residents incorrectly reported that it had not.
That included 21 employees of the train station who presumably saw the clock on a regular
basis.
It's not difficult to understand how this error might have come about.
The stop clock had become an integral element of the story of the bombing.
The clock was a bit more than the clock.
The clock was a bit more than the clock.
The clock was a bit more than the clock.
The clock was a bit more than the clock.
The clock was a bit more than the clock.
The clock was a bit more than the clock.
The clock was a bit more than the clock.
The clock was a bit more than the clock.
For millions of people may collectively remember one chronicle of historical wrongs, while
millions of people on the other side of a border remember a completely different set of facts.
Many of us roll our eyes at people who misremember things to soothe their preferred narratives
about the world.
The one thing we all find hard to do, believe that our memories are just as fallible and
shaped by our own thoughts, beliefs and stories.
This week on Hidden Brain, how preferences, loyalties and the power of suggestion can
shape what we remember and what we forget.
Long before Elizabeth Lafters became a psychologist and a researcher who studied memory, long before
she became one of the world's experts on the way we recollect childhood traumas, she
herself suffered three traumatic events as a child.
Each of them became, in their own way, emblematic of her research into the slippery, fallible
nature of memory.
My mother, I would say, developed depression when I was about 13 years old and she went
to Pennsylvania to get some treatment because that's where her brother lived, my uncle
Joe.
I see.
And were you aware as a 13-year-old that your mom was unwell?
Well, yes.
I was definitely aware, even before she left to go to Pennsylvania for some treatment.
My parents had tickets to different concerts or events.
And so my mother couldn't go to one of the events where they had tickets.
And so my father took me, I think it might have been a Gilbert and Sullivan play or it might
have been, well, I can't remember exactly, but I do remember driving back from the play
to our house and stopping at a stoplight and some people were crossing the street and they
were laughing and having a good time.
So it would have been after a play ends in Los Angeles, whatever time that would be.
They were having fun and my father said, see those people having fun, your mother can't
have fun anymore.
So that's just one thing that sticks out in my memory now that you're asking.
So when she went to Pennsylvania, she went to her brother's home.
You said that she went there for treatment.
What happened there?
Her older brother, you know, my uncle Joe.
He wanted her to get this excellent treatment in a hospital in Pittsburgh.
So he brought her, or he managed to get her to Pennsylvania where he got her treatment
in a nearby hospital.
And then she was released and ready to come home.
So I went with my aunt by car to go pick her up and drive her back to California.
And she was staying at her brothers and that's when she was there, she ended up drowning
in a swimming pool on my uncle's property in Pennsylvania.
So that was horrible.
How did that happen Beth?
What happened?
We absolutely don't know.
But there were a lot of questions of was it an accident, was it a suicide?
What was it?
But it was never ever decided.
Nothing definitive.
I see.
So you were actually there when this terrible thing happened, Beth?
I was.
Yes.
I was 14.
And it was terrible.
I mean, it was like the worst thing that ever happened to me.
Many years later, Beth found herself disagreeing with an uncle about what happened on that
terrible day.
I went to a family event.
In fact, it was like a 90th birthday party of one of my uncles.
And while I was there, an uncle said to me, you know, back when your mother died, so
that would have been decades earlier, you were the one who found your mother's body.
And I said to my uncle, no, it wasn't me.
It was her sister, my aunt who found the body.
I'm not the one who found the body.
Oh, yes, you were.
It was relative, was so absolutely positive.
And so I went home and I started thinking, did I find the body?
And I started to try to remember what had happened on that day in 1959 when my mother drowned.
And I did remember that when the 9-11 emergency people came, the firemen ended up giving me
oxygen.
And I thought maybe I was so upset I needed oxygen because I had found the body.
And I started working on this idea.
And pretty soon I could see my mother drowned in the swimming pool with face down with her
arms out.
I was visualizing it.
And then the relative called me and said, I'm calling to tell you I made a mistake.
It wasn't you who found the body.
You're right.
It was your aunt, her sister.
And I was so amazed at the personal experience that I had just had.
I was the subject in one of my own experiments.
This is what it's like for my subjects.
I mean, why did, you know, why was my visualization with her face down with her arms out?
I mean, as opposed to on her back, you know, with no arms out.
I don't know.
Another traumatic event from Beth's childhood took place while she was in high school.
Her house was engulfed in a California wildfire that burned some 500 houses.
I was driving home from high school.
I was driving my brother, my younger brother, David.
And the streets were blocked off because of the fire, but we knew secret ways to get past
the roadblocks and get to the house and came upon the house burning down.
Oh, my God.
What was the reaction when you saw that?
I mean, must have been incredibly traumatic, too, to see the...
No, I ran in the house to get some encyclopedias because I had homework to do.
And I got my encyclopedias, you know, a few other items.
And went to a neighbor's house that was still intact and called my father at his office
and said, the house isn't there anymore.
Beth has told the story of the fire many times.
Her memory of the incident is precise.
Unlike others who have been through similar events, she never exaggerates what happened.
The reason?
Any storytelling she might have been tempted to do has been constrained by a surprising
source of documentary evidence.
I actually know something about this because they were photographers at the house from
Life Magazine.
So there was a very large spread about the fire itself and about our house in particular
in Life Magazine.
If I could show you the Life Magazine photos, you could see that it wasn't like it was
engulfed in flames, but some people had already gone into the house to pull out some of
our possessions and move them onto a concrete area.
So it was possible for me to go in and get those encyclopedias.
It almost seems like what you're telling me is that you trust the pictures more than
you trust your own memories.
Oh, absolutely.
I can tell you because I've seen these pictures many times in Life Magazine and it shows me standing
in this concrete area looking at the burning house.
It shows me trying to carry some possessions away with my brother, David.
It shows me on the phone at the neighbors calling my father.
Oh my gosh.
Wow.
You know, the phone to my ear saying, daddy, that house isn't there anymore.
Yeah, the pictures say it all.
To explain why Beth trusts the photos more than her memory, I need to wind the clock back
and tell you about her strange journey through the labyrinths of human memory.
Also, we'll get to that third traumatic event from her childhood.
Beth had never spoken in public about this incident.
To one day, she blurted it out while serving as an expert witness in court.
I was testifying about the science of memory and the words just kind of came out.
It was the first time.
Certainly the first time I blurted it out publicly.
That's when we come back.
You're listening to Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedanta.
This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedanta.
In the early 1970s, Beth Laftus got a grant from the US Department of Transportation
to study how people remembered events involving auto crashes.
She was a newly minted psychologist and she was interested both in the science of human
memory and the implications of this science for the legal system.
She got her hands on police videos of traffic crashes and showed them to volunteers.
We would show people films of accidents and ask them about the speed of the vehicles.
And different witnesses were questioned in different ways.
So some of our witnesses are asked how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?
Their witnesses are asked how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?
And we might have used different verbs with other witnesses.
But we found that people told us the cars were going faster if you use the word smashed
than if you use the word hit.
So what we had shown at that point is just changing a word or two in your question can have
an effect on the answer that somebody gave you.
Beth study in 1974 revealed something subtle about human memory.
When two cars were set to smash into each other, it painted a picture of the crash in
volunteer's minds.
When Beth asked people about the crash, this image, the story it created in their minds,
influenced what they remembered.
Beth took the study a step further.
What we did then was we brought people back a week later and we said, you know that accident
we showed you last week.
We have a few more questions for you.
And the one we cared about, did you see any broken glass?
There was no broken glass in the accident they had seen.
And yet if we had used the word smashed, more people told us falsely that they had seen
broken glass than if we had used the word hit.
Since broken glass is commensurate with a severe accident, one that occurs at higher speeds,
it's more likely that there was broken glass there and some people then think, yeah, they
probably saw it.
So what this told us is that the way you were to question that you put to a witness can
affect not only the immediate answer that you've yet, but it can have a long range effect.
It can affect the answer to some totally different question that you put to somebody, and
you know, often much, much later.
In the second portion of the experiment, volunteers created visual details that never occurred.
They thought they were remembering the facts, but without their awareness, their minds had
not only inferred the presence of broken glass at the scene of the crash, but fabricated the
sight of broken glass.
After the smash hit study, we did another study where what the subject sees is an accident
unfold where let's say the car goes through an intersection with the yield sign.
After the accident is over, we asked a series of questions.
And one of them was designed to suggest some erroneous information.
Did another car pass the red dots?
Well, it was there at the intersection with the stop sign.
This is a very clever question.
You think I'm asking you about whether another car passed.
You're concentrating on that aspect of the question.
You say, no, I didn't see another car passed, but I have cleverly slipped in the information
that there was a stop sign there.
You don't detect it.
And I think it invades people, almost like a Trojan horse, because you don't even detect
that it's coming.
Later on, we can ask people, what kind of a traffic sign did you see there at the intersection?
Was there a stop sign or yield sign?
And many people will pick the stop sign if they've succumbed to the suggestion in the
leading question.
And there, I think what is going on is, when I ask you that leading question, did another
car pass the red dots?
Well, it was there at the intersection with the stop sign.
You're trying to visualize what you saw, and you just insert a well-known stop sign into
your visualization.
And later on, when I say, what you actually see there, you basically say stop sign, but
you're seeing a stop sign that you yourself constructed.
I mean, in some ways, it's a more insidious form of the earliest study where you tell
people the cars have smashed into each other.
And then you ask, did you see broken glass?
There people are saying, well, if the cars smashed into each other, they was probably broken
glass.
And so, you know, perhaps it's an inference.
Perhaps they are recalling it.
Maybe it's a mishmash between the two things.
But in this case, you're implanting a memory where you're suggesting that there's a stop
sign instead of a yield sign, and people just install their own stop sign and later remember
seeing it.
I do feel like you're showing here the different ways in which memory can become contaminated
one is just, I am drawing an inference on my own and leading myself to a false conclusion.
And in the next case, someone else is very subtly leading me to a wrong conclusion.
And both of those things can be going on at different times or to steal your wonderful
term.
It could be a mishmash.
But we do know that people do draw inferences about what might have happened, what could
have happened, what probably happened.
And later on, those inferences kind of start to feel like memories.
And that's what you now remember.
Ancient philosophers like Plato and Aristotle compared memory to carvings on a wax tablet.
Aristotle proposed that the heart was the learning center of the body.
That's the phrase learning by heart.
In the 19th century, German scholar Hermann Ebinghaus found that memories deteriorate over time
and that constant repetition was key to preserving memory.
Sigmund Freud theorized that some memories were so unbearably painful that they were
repressed into the subconscious mind.
All these were based on a model that human memory worked like a recording device.
Let's study showed that memory was as much about inference, imagination, and suggestibility.
Rather than merely retrieving something that was recorded, volunteers were constructing
events and passing off these inventions as recollections.
The way I've often put it, memory doesn't work like a recording device.
You know, just record the event and play it back later.
The process is much more complex and that's why we talk about the constructive nature
of memory.
That when we're remembering things, where we're frequently taking bits and pieces of experience,
sometimes things that happen at different times and places, bringing it together to construct
what feels to us like a memory.
And that's why we talk about the constructive or reconstructed nature of memory.
Beth Arkeus of the classic phrase, we are the sum of our memories, needs, and addendum.
Our memories are not just the sum of what we've seen and heard, but also what we think,
what we believe, and what we want to believe.
She writes, we seem to reinvent our memories and in doing so, we become the person of our
own imagination.
Beth studies raised questions about the reliability of eyewitness testimony in the mainstay of
the criminal justice system.
Typically, this kind of evidence is treated as a slam dunk.
But in one series of experiments that try to mimic what happens in such situations,
Beth suggested that a collective confidence in eyewitness testimony might be misplaced.
She staged a crime for volunteers.
The crime was clearly committed by one person.
Now you wait a few days and you ask your witnesses to look at six photos and try to pick the
person who committed the bad act.
The bad guy might be in that set of photos or he might not be in the set of photos.
But many people will pick someone and then in a final test, there'll be a strong tendency
to pick that same person again, even if they're innocent, even if they were not the person
who committed the bad act.
But he now looks pretty familiar because his photograph was seen, not because he was
seen in the event itself.
And that is exactly what happens when innocent people get misidentified and get convicted
of crimes they didn't do.
So in this case here, it's another form of subtle memory manipulation, if you will,
because my own recollection of having seen someone makes that face more familiar to me.
So the next time you show me that face, I can't quite distinguish between a face that
I myself picked out and a face that I might have actually seen at a crime scene, for example.
I get mixed up between those two things and I conflate the two.
Exactly.
That kind of error can happen in other ways as well.
There's a famous example in one of the early books on eyewitness testimony written by
a lawyer of a clerk in a train station who was robbed and goes to a lineup to try to
identify the robber.
And makes an identification, but he picks somebody who had purchased tickets from him on a few
prior occasions.
So you can see what's happening here.
The clerk goes to the lineup.
He sees one and only one person familiar in that lineup.
He decides that that's the robber, but that familiarity is really due to another cause,
another reason.
Then that's called an unconscious transference.
A mistaken recollection of somebody who was seen in one situation and you think they were
seen in a different situation.
It was around this time that Beth got an opportunity to get involved with an actual legal case.
She was working at the University of Washington in Seattle.
It was a murder case where a woman was the defendant and her defense was self-defense.
Prosecution said it was murder.
The defendant in the case was accused of killing a boyfriend whom she charged with being abusive.
The woman admitted she shot the man, but in self-defense.
At issue was how much time had gone by between the woman picking up the gun and firing it.
Some eyewitnesses said Mia seconds had passed, which suggested this was indeed self-defense.
Others said minutes had elapsed, which suggested the killing was thought out, premeditated.
Beth testified in court on the fallibility of eyewitness testimony.
I will say that the woman was acquitted.
She was found to have committed this act in self-defense.
So it was certainly a victory for her and her lawyer.
I wrote an article for Psychology Today magazine.
I wrote about the case, I wrote about the woman, and this article came out and I started
getting calls from lawyers.
Could you help me with my case?
One day in 1990, Beth got a call from an attorney about a complicated case.
George Franklin was accused in California of murder.
He was accused of murdering a little girl named Susie 20 years earlier.
And the only evidence against Franklin was the testimony of his daughter, who was Susie's
best friend.
The daughter Eileen claimed that she had witnessed her father kill her best friend, that she repressed
her memory for 20 years and now the memory was back.
Now I get a call from George Franklin's attorney.
His name is Doug Horngrad and Doug says to me, I'm representing a man in a murder case
and I am very confused about this case and I wonder if I can talk to you about it.
So what do you know about this idea of repression?
When I said, well, it's kind of a hand me down Freudian idea that somehow you can take
all these horrific things that happen to you, banish them into the unconscious, wall them
off from the rest of mental life.
But still, you can kind of reliably recover them later in some pristine form if you have
the right procedures applied to you.
But when I started looking for the evidence for this notion of massive repression, I was
pretty shocked because there wasn't any credible scientific support for this.
So Franklin is tried anyhow.
He ends up being convicted and becomes virtually the first American citizen to be convicted
based on nothing other than a claim of massive repression.
Now, I was kind of amazed.
These lawyers were amazed that this is all it took to convict.
And then we started seeing lots of other cases of claims of repression.
Now you at this point could not have been sure that the memory in fact was false, right?
I mean, this was an individual case.
There's no way of telling in this individual case as memory is false or the memory is
true.
I had no way of knowing and I certainly wouldn't have said one way or another as an expert
in court since I had no way of knowing.
But there were there were things that made me suspicious.
But yeah, you're right.
I mean, it's still possible, I suppose, that he could have done this.
But part of the reason that the jury convicted is because she had all this detail in her
recollection, where would this detail have come from if she hadn't actually witnessed
what she claimed?
It turns out all that detail, virtually all that detail was in the public domain, in the
newspaper articles of which, you know, there were many in the television coverage in the
stories.
There is where the detail could have come from.
I was an expert witness for Franklin, but all I could tell the jury about was I could
turn a yield sign into a stop sign or make somebody believe there was broken glass that
wasn't there.
I never really made anybody believe that they had a horrible experience that they witnessed
happen to them.
It set me on a path and wanting to figure out.
I want to do a study where we could plant seeds of suggestion and watch it grow into something
that is big as this memory that Eileen Franklin was claiming she had.
So Beth devised an experiment that was to become famous.
It was called the Lost in the Mall Study.
She recruited volunteers, but before presenting anything to them, she got permission from
them to get in touch with a family member.
We asked them for the name of their mother or their father and older sibling that we
could interview about their life and their memories.
So they, let's say they gave us their mother.
We would contact the mother and from the mother, we would get three examples of experiences,
things that really did happen to the subject when the subject was about five or six years
old.
And from the mother, we would also construct a made up scenario about being lost in a shopping
mall at age five or six with particular family members present and ultimately the subject
was supposedly rescued by an elderly person and reunited with the family.
That was just a completely made up person.
Beth would describe these three true scenarios and the false one about getting lost in a mall
to volunteers.
A week later, she asked the volunteers to describe the scenarios in detail.
What did they remember about the events?
The following week after that, she asked them to recount the scenarios again.
So they've given us their recollections three times and by the third time we had found
about a quarter of these ordinary men and women fell for the suggestion and claimed a
memory of a partial or a complete memory for having been lost in this particular way.
And some of them even recalled details that you had not provided about how they got lost
in the mall and what it felt like?
Oh, absolutely.
Yes.
They remember what the person looked like who rescued them.
Sometimes they'll remember things I think I heard my name over the loudspeaker.
Details that weren't at all part of the initial little scenario that we had constructed
with the mother in order to plant the memory in the first place.
What impressed me about this is that you can with suggestion, plant, and entire event in
the minds of people.
When we come back, Beth tests the limits of what she can get people to believe.
Also, as she begins testifying in court about her findings, she discovers that people simply
hate it.
When you tell them that while they might feel certain, they remember something exactly
as it happened.
Chances are, they don't.
You're listening to Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedanta.
This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedanta.
By the 1990s, the psychologist Beth Loftus was regularly invited to testify in court.
Many cases involved people who claimed to have recovered traumatic memories from the
distant past.
Beth's contention was that while these memories might feel real, there was a good chance
they were false.
To show how this could happen, she proved she could deliberately implant false memories
in volunteers.
In her original set of experiments, she convinced people that when they were small children, they
had gotten lost in a mall.
But when Beth presented the data publicly, other experts criticized the study.
The critic said that getting lost in a mall wasn't an example of the kind of extreme trauma
that people were reporting in courtrooms.
The earliest criticisms that I heard were, getting lost is so common.
At least show us that you can plan a false memory for something that would be more upsetting,
more bizarre, more unusual than getting lost in a shopping mall.
Good point.
But we and others, many others, jumped to that challenge and used this design to plant
false memories of things that would have been even more bizarre, unusual or upsetting if
the event had actually happened.
One group planted a false memory that you had an accident at a family wedding.
Another group planted a false memory that you nearly drowned and had to be rescued by
a lifeguard.
Another group planted a false memory that something is awful is being attacked by a vicious
animal, happened to you as a child.
Later, another group planted a false memory that as a teenager, you committed a crime and
it was serious enough that the police came to investigate.
We now have a whole collection of studies that show that you can plant pretty unusual,
pretty upsetting if they'd actually happened but completely made up experiences into the
minds of ordinary healthy people.
You once ran a study where you had people misremember an unusual event that supposedly
took place at Disneyland.
Tell me about that study, Beth.
Well, another criticism of some of these, we call them rich false memories as opposed
to changing a detail in a memory.
Here it's planting what we call a rich false memory.
Sometimes people will come along and they'll say, you know, you talk to the mother and the
mother said it didn't happen but maybe something like this happened and the mother isn't aware
of it.
And so what the subject is doing is recalling something that really did happen.
So there are many ways you can respond but one of them is, well, let's try to plant something
that would be impossible, that couldn't have happened.
And that was the genesis of the idea.
Why don't we try to plant a memory that when you are on a child with trip to Disney, you
met the bug's bunny character.
We picked that because bugs is a Warner Bros. character, would not be at a Disney resort.
So this is kind of an impossible memory.
And yet when we made a suggestion to people in a study that they had met as the bug's
buddy, a number of people later on said they remembered meaning bugs.
And again, they'll remember shaking his hand or touching his tail or hearing him say,
that's up-dark, one person even remembered he was eating a carrot when they met.
So it is an example that just shows you can, when you can't come back and say maybe it
really happened.
In a series of bizarre and escalating studies, Beth and others implanted implausible memories
into study subjects.
They remembered seeing a wounded animal after a bombing or nearly choking to death when
in fact they had not.
One in five believed they had as a child walked in on their parents having sex or witnessed
someone else possessed by a demon.
In a follow-up to the Disney Land Study, 30% of volunteers falsely recalled a drug-dough
Pluto mascot licking their ears.
His research proved timely. Five years after George Franklin was sentenced to life in prison,
a judge overturned his conviction.
By the case sparked a wave of similar ones.
Hundreds of adults suddenly remembered long ago childhood sexual abuse.
The idea was the events were so traumatic, the mental wounds so deep that their minds simply
blocked out the memories to protect them from pain.
But there were a lot of people who claimed they repressed their memory for massive sexual
abuse and childhood trauma, all allegedly repressed and now recovered and they sued their
parents or their other relatives or their former neighbors.
So throughout the 90s there were many, many, many cases where there were these kinds of
accusations and I was involved in some of those court cases.
And just to be clear, when you were testifying in some of these cases and you were writing,
you were not necessarily saying that the people who recalled being sexually assaulted by
their uncles or their fathers, for example, were necessarily suffering from false memories,
you were arguing that it was possible that these memories in fact might not be reliable,
but that the memories in fact were false.
Absolutely.
And I mean, for ages I have been because the opposing side would often present an expert witness
who would bless the memory and in so many words say that they believe the memory was
real.
And I felt people had no business doing that without independent corroboration.
I was certainly not going to make the opposite mistake, but that didn't matter.
And people just assumed, even though I was doing was presenting an alternative possibility
for what could have happened if these memories weren't real, where could they have come from?
And I do emphasize if they weren't real.
But that didn't matter because that little nuance seemed to get lost in people's anger
over the mere thought that you would be called by the defense in one of these types of cases.
Did you feel like you were doing something wrong here, Beth?
Because the people who were bringing these charges obviously felt like they had been abused
in the most terrible way and had been hurt and scarred in the most terrible way.
And here's a university professor basically standing up and testifying on behalf of the
defense.
Did you ever feel like you were on the morally wrong side of the equation?
No, I can't say that I ever felt I was morally wrong.
Because remember, at these times, there are other human beings in this story.
There's the accused in the story and the family members of that accused and the suffering
and the sadness and the ruined families.
And so I never felt it was morally wrong.
But sometimes what I did feel is that I would have a reaction to stories I would hear that
was different from what a lot of other people had.
So for example, when I read about a new accusation in my morning paper while I'm having my coffee
and some new person is accusing some other person, I mean, one of my first thoughts is
I wonder if this is a false accusation.
But many other people around me, the guillotine, isn't good enough for the accused right
at that moment.
But I don't think that I'm the morally wrong one.
Beth Soher South is obligated to follow the signs, even if it wasn't the popular thing
to do.
As an expert who says human memory is fallible and malleable, Beth has been asked to testify
in many cases where defendants have been accused of wrongdoing.
These include controversial cases such as O.J. Simpson, Ted Bundy, the officers who beat
Rodney King, and more recently in the MeToo era, Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein.
I found it especially remarkable that Beth was willing to serve as an expert witness for
many accused of sexual harassment and assault.
Because as I was researching her life, I came by an account of something that happened
to her during her childhood.
It was the third traumatic event I mentioned earlier.
I was involved in a case where a young camp counselor got accused of abusing kids in the
camp.
And I was testifying about the science of memory.
And I was being cross-examined by the prosecutor and a standard cross-examination that I get
is you're not a clinician, you don't treat people who have been sexually abused.
So what do you know about that?
I don't know why I did this, but I was getting badgered and I finally said, well, as a
matter of fact, I do know something about that because I was sexually abused when I was
six.
And the words just kind of came out of my mouth.
It's not like it was the first time I had...
When I was an adult, I told my then husband, Jeff, about the experience.
He was the first person I ever told.
And I was in my 20s when I told him and this was quite a bit later.
So it's not like it was the first time, but certainly the first time I blurted it out
publicly.
And my first reaction was, oh my God, I don't want them to think it was my father.
So I added that it was a babysitter.
What actually happened, Beth?
Oh, he was a babysitter.
So he would have been babysitting for me.
And I don't know.
He used to caress my arm one time.
We went into the bedroom and he laid me on top of him.
And I squirmed my way off.
And that's what I remember.
Hmm.
I mean, what I've read in terms of your recollections of the event was that he didn't
just lay you on top of him, he actually removed your clothes.
Is that correct?
I don't remember that.
I think one of the times I wrote about this would have been more than 25 years ago.
And I would trust that memory a little more than my memory now.
Yeah.
But I don't remember him taking the clothes off.
Hmm.
I mean, isn't it striking that a detail like that would be something that would feel ambiguous
because I think in the past when you've written about it, you have recall that.
And now you don't recall that.
It isn't remarkable that something as significant as that would be malleable and open to change.
Well, I don't know, but as you're pointing this out, and I'm assuming you're just accurately
recounting to me what I wrote 25 years ago, you know, I'm starting to visualize it,
Chunker.
I'm starting to visualize it.
And I'm starting to think, yeah, maybe he did pull the pants down.
Because he was on his back.
I think he laid me on top of him and I would have been faced down.
I don't think I was there very long.
I remember kind of slithering off and away.
I have to say there's an element of this research that seems frightening, Beth, because
I think when we think about our own memories, our memories seem so real to us and feel like
they anchor us to our past, to the people we love, the events in our lives.
And in some ways, what you're doing is taking something of a sledgehammer to our confidence
in our own memories.
Well, I understand that that upsets people.
And I particularly understand that when I say something that other people hear as a
doubt about the authenticity of their memory, that that can be upsetting.
But I also think that this is a truth about memory.
And we need to recognize that truth.
We need to then figure out ways to live with it or combat it or fix it or minimize the
harms of it.
Because a lot of harm has come from the stake in memory.
I don't like it when people contradict my memories.
But sometimes it says happen and it makes me very uncomfortable and I see why other people
are uncomfortable too.
Especially a cherished memory.
Hmm.
I mean, I'm wondering what your takeaway is for people.
Because in some ways, I think what you have done is you've clearly demonstrated that memory
is a shaky edifice, if you will, and constructed by the mind as we move through our lives.
But what should ordinary people do with this, Beth?
Well, sometimes get asked, why would we have been built this way?
Why would your theory is?
Why would God or Darwin or whoever have created humans with memories that are malleable?
And there are certain benefits.
So for example, when errors creep into our memories, which they do spontaneously, or from
some other process, and we find out we can update our memories, correct the information,
replace the errors with truth.
That's a good thing.
Other people have suggested that some memories maybe make us feel better about ourselves.
People remember that they gave more to charity or they voted in elections.
They didn't vote in or their kids walked and talked at earlier ages than they really did.
I mean, and these are, these are prestige enhancing memories that maybe make us feel a
little bit better about ourselves.
And maybe that could be a good thing.
But it isn't your work also in some ways a call for intellectual and moral humility, because
it tells us that perhaps we shouldn't be as confident in believing we know what we know,
we remember what we remember, we think what we think.
I love that.
I believe that this is telling us that potentially there is a lot of fiction sprinkled in there
in our minds, along with the facts.
And this is maybe a truth that we should figure out how to respond to if it's going to be
a problem or accept and deal with and live with just like we might have blurry, bad vision,
and we fix it with glasses or contact lenses.
For me, as somebody who's been working in this field and seeing how easy it is for people
to come to believe and remember things that didn't happen, when you see someone make a
mistake in their memory, when somebody disagrees with you and you're pretty convinced your memory
is right, at least you don't have to decide that your fellow human is a big fat liar.
You can appreciate the fact that they just might have a false memory in their human.
And I think that is a much kinder way to feel about our family members, our friends, our
acquaintances, our others who say something that we don't agree with.
Elizabeth Lafdes is a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine.
She's the author of the Myth of Repressed Memory and Witness for the Defense, the accused,
the eyewitness, and the expert who puts memory on trial.
But thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.
Oh, my pleasure.
Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media.
Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy Paul, Kristen Wong,
Laura Correll, Ryan Katz, Autumn Bounds, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury.
Tara Boyle is our executive producer.
I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.
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