so it's a pleasure for me to to be here in Dublin and have a chance to talk with you about the work that I and my collaborators have been doing in the area of memory and memory distortion and what we're sometimes calling the fiction of memory so I've been studying memory for a long time and and I think if it's something so important to all of us if we didn't have memory you'd wake up in the morning and wouldn't know how to make the toast or make the coffee or find your car keys or where the bus station is to walk to catch a bus memory is what we use to store the happy things that happen to us in life and and even the very sad things that happen just a few weeks ago I was reading a much more eloquent description in the New Scientist about the importance of memory and I was so taken with this description it was just so beautiful that I put that into my slides for you here today so in this special section on memory the New Scientist talks about memory and says that perhaps the only thing that links the use sitting here today to the many use from every previous day of your existence that's memory without memory your relationships would mean nothing not to mention your knowledge tastes and your many adventures it might be no exaggeration to say that your memories are the essence of you but there are fresh reasons and even not so fresh reasons for us to not believe in all of our memories so I'd like to start by asking you a question and I know that you already had a little bit of introduction to my work in Cara's introduction but let me ask you this question that I asked audiences or not or even people on the street do you think I could make you remember it did not happen to you could I make you remember that when you were a kid you saw a cat stuck in a tree and you went and rescued that cat could I make you remember that could I make you remember that when you were a kid you were attacked by a vicious animal if it never happened could I give you a memory of that could I make you remember that as a teenager you committed a crime and it was serious enough that the police actually came to investigate could I make you remember that just a week ago you played a card game and you you cheated in the game and you took money out of the out of the bank the game Bank that you weren't entitled to take could I make you remember these things if they didn't happen could I pour them into your memory bank and and I can tell you that lots of laypeople say I don't think so I don't think you could ever make me remember I was attacked by an animal if it didn't happen but we'll see how you feel in another 45 minutes or so so over the course of my career and work in the area of memory and memory distortion I've developed a few paradigms for studying human memory and memory distortion one of them is now called the misinformation paradigm and if you were a subject in one of my studies you would come in and you would be exposed to an event of some sort like a simulated accident or maybe a crime and later on I would feed you some post event information about this incident some misleading information and then finally I would test you to see what it is you personally remember about the accident or crime that I had exposed you to earlier and so we have done many studies where we show people simulated accidents and we then question them about their experiences later and some of the some of them get misleading post event information one of my earliest studies involved showing people a simulator accidents where a car goes through an intersection with a stop sign and by asking a single lead-in question that suggests it was a yield sign not a stop sign we get lots and lots of people to believe and remember and be confident that they saw a yield sign controlling the intersection not a stop sign by the way those two scenes are the actual scenes from our original experiment in the 1970s and I actually got contacted by Microsoft that wanted and they wanted to put these scenes into their Microsoft encyclopedia and so I actually sold my scenes to Microsoft for $100 so you are looking there that's a $50 a scene that you're looking at just just that one so I'm very proud of my business acumen here but the study the study would be criticized you know you'd hear this criticism that these are just simulations if people were really witnesses to serious crimes and accidents that were highly arousing upsetting events maybe these same kinds of distortions wouldn't occur that's a decent criticism and one way that we and other psychologists have responded to that criticism is to go out there and find people out there in the real world who for some usually good reason are undergoing a highly upsetting stressful event and then we can test them for their memories of those events after misinformation and I had a chance to do this in a study with a very unusual group of people in the United States many of our soldiers go to survival school and what they learn in survival school is what it's going to be like for them if they are ever captured as prisoners of war so it's an extremely harrowing stressful bit of Education but these soldiers go through one piece of their experience is a 30 minute highly aggressive hostile abusive interrogation so they get interrogated by somebody for 30 minutes and later on we're going to test them for their memory of that hostile interrogation that stressful interrogation and some of them will have gotten misinformation by the way my access to this group of subjects comes because it's a collaboration with a psychiatrist named Andy Morgan who has been studying these soldiers and their coping skills for quite a few years and so I managed to talk Morgan dr. Morgan into introducing some misinformation into one of these survival school studies so in one of the studies that we published the soldier might have been interrogated that by the person you see on your left but we feed the soldiers misinformation that suggests that it was the person on the right and it's kind of a clever way that we get this misinformation injected into the conscious awareness of these soldiers we do it by holding up a photo and saying I want to ask you some questions about that interrogation when you were in that interrogation room with this guy who interrogated you did he let you talk to anybody else did he let you eat anything did he give you a blanket what other things happen in that room and the trick is this photograph is a completely different person and after being exposed to the misinformation many of these soldiers then go on to identify this person the wrong person as the one who conducted that interrogation falling for the misinformation we also planted objects into the minds of these trained soldiers for details that did not exist during that interrogation so there was no telephone in the interrogation room there was no weapon on the on the chief interrogator he was not wearing glasses and if not exposed to misinformation people rarely not never but rarely claim to have seen these objects but if we fed the soldiers misinformation about the existence of the objects now lots of them claim they remembered a telephone in the room a significant minority remembered a weapon on the interrogator and a glasses being worn by that chief interrogator so now I've summarized for you 40 years of research on the misinformation effect and basically I'm showing you here a graph that depicts what happens if you feed people misinformation we sometimes talk about putting them in a mislead condition it depresses their memory performance I'll tell you a little bit about an experience I had recently when National Geographic a television wanted me to distort people's memories and so they could capture it on film for a program called brain games and so what happened with this National Geographic film company is they staged a crime in a park in New York City and they were they had brought in a whole bunch of witnesses to watch a card game they didn't really understand what was gonna happen and suddenly across not that far away a crime happens and I have a screenshot from what actually did happen and what you could see if you watched a video of this the woman who you see there with the dark hair she's screaming at a tourist and just yelling at him and well he's distracted by her screaming a thief comes over takes a wallet out of his bag hands it off to another kho-kho thief and then the crime is over so these actual witnesses to this crime are interviewed and I got brought in because they wanted to watch me plant misinformation into the minds of these actual witnesses who thought they saw an actual crime the way I was going to plant the misinformation was to bring in a shill I we'd have another individual there a witness who was actually a collaborator with me and I would call on that person first and the person would say well first the woman was screaming she had dark hair and a red jacket or coat and he said a few more things about what he remembered and as this other witness was talking and uttering the misinformation about the red coat which is what I wanted to plant in the minds of these people one of the real witnesses screamed out that coat was not red and I'm sitting there in that moment thinking I can't believe this my experiment is ruined the National brihat Geographic people have paid all this money to get me from California to New York to do this they're not going to believe that misinformation of affects memory because it's not going to work but then that witness who just yelled out that coat was not red said it was white and another witness then said yeah it was white and so right before my very eyes I saw the phenomenon that I had been studying without me even like really trying and I'm of course my demonstration was completely rescued but the misinformation now was a white coat we've used these materials and if somebody doesn't scream out it was white we can ask a leading question like this one think about the woman in the red jacket who was screaming at the man what color hair did she have this question I want you to appreciate how clever it is you think I'm asking you a question about the hair color of the woman and while you're trying to think about and visualize her and what color hair did she have we slip in the information that the coat was or the jacket was red it invades people kind of like a Trojan horse because they don't even they're distracted and they don't even detect that it's coming and with these materials the National Geographic materials we've got lots of people to believe and remember they saw a red coat not the dark-colored coat that you actually did see so the misinformation effect you feed people misinformation it depresses their memory performance because they will often adopt that misinformation and it causes an alteration a transformation a distortion in their prior memory and why is this important it's important because out there in the real world misinformation is everywhere we get misinformation when we talk to other witnesses or over here other witnesses talk who jointly have had an experience we get misinformation when we are interrogated by a biased interrogator who's got an agenda or a hypothesis about what happened and communicates that to the person being interviewed we get misinformation if we see a high publicity event for example and there are as television coverage or newspaper coverage in which they're witnesses are interviewed and perhaps utter misinformation all of these provide an opportunity for new misinformation to enter the consciousness of a witness and to cause this kind of distortion or contamination so in the in my introduction by Kyra she also talked about a somewhat different line of work and I want to tell you a little bit about the the origin of that other work in the 1990s we began to see in the United States and eventually this phenomenon made its way to Europe to Australia to New Zealand to other parts of the world where people were going into therapy with one problem maybe maybe they had an eating disorder maybe they were depressed and they would get with the therapist who managed to convince them that their problems were due to the fact that they were sexually abused as a child that they had horrific repressed memories that they needed to recover and sometimes these patients were recovering these incredible repressed memories ten years of being raped they would claim when they had no previous recollection of it and some of these memories were so bizarre they were remembering that their families forced them into satanic rituals made them sacrifice animals or watched as the killing of animals didn't make them breed babies and watch those babies be killed all of this coming out of this psychotherapy and when I began to work as an expert witness or a consultant on some of these cases where family members were being accused based on a claim of a repressed memory it was pretty natural especially when some of these memories were biologically geographically or psychologically impossible where are they coming and one routine answer is some kind of psychotherapy some kind of psychotherapy that tended to involve things like guided imagination often sexualized dream interpretation occasionally hypnosis was used to try to extract these recalcitrant trauma memories exposing people to false information even if the therapist was unaware that what they are saying is false they were communicating false information to their patients what was being seen in these cases were these huge false memories we're not talking about turning a stop sign into a yield sign we're not talking about making somebody believe they saw a telephone in an interrogation room when it wasn't really there these are really really huge false memories how does that happen and is that something that we could actually study and if so how would we do it and this old misinformation paradigm was just not going to cut it because we are a long way away from just changing a detail in an event that actually did exist so we needed to find a new methodology and we developed something that we now call the rich false memory paradigm so what happens in this work is people there's no event to begin with but we just ply people with suggestions about their past and then we test them to see what they remember about their childhood or about their more recent past now think about this you're a psychologist and you want to studies how you can plant a little seed and out of this a rich false memory will grow but even in the name of science you can't just do whatever you want with people we have to go through human subjects review committees ethics committees present our proposed research get permission to do the stuff so it didn't seem very likely that I was going to be able to convince my ethics committee to let me do a study that would involve making women believe that their fathers raped them in satanic rituals I knew this would make the committee queasy so we needed to find an analog something we could plant in the minds of ordinary people something that would have been at least mildly traumatic had it actually happened and we eventually came up with the idea why don't we try to make people believe and remember that when they were about five or six years old they were lost in a shopping mall they were frightened they were crying they were lost for an extended time and ultimately they were rescued by an elderly person and reunited with their family we used a technique that involved the parents of our subject so we've if I was doing this with cure I'd say Kyra you're my subject we've been talking to your mother and we found out some things that happened to you when you were five years old we want to see how your memories compare to those of your mother she's told us about some of your experiences and if you remember tell us and if you don't tell us you don't remember and then we present some true memories and the completely made-up memory about being lost in the mall frightened crying ultimately rescued and reunited with the family and after as few as three suggestive interviews we got about a quarter of ordinary people to believe and remember that they'd had this experience that was completely made-up with the help of the family members so this study got criticized particularly by the psychotherapists who could see you know where we were headed with our implications and and not a bad criticism they said getting lost is so common if you're going to talk about false memories on the same page in the same paragraph as you're talking about false memories of being abused innocence anok ritual at least show us you can plant a false memory for something that would be more upsetting or bizarre or unusual had it actually happened and other investigators in we too came forward and did those studies so one group in Tennessee planted a false memory that when you were a kid you nearly drowned and had to be rescued by a lifeguard they succeeded with about a third of their sample a group in Canada planted a false memory that something is awful is being attacked by a vicious animal happened to you when you were a kid and they're getting really good at this because they succeeded in getting a complete or partial false memory in half of their subjects I collaborated with an Italian collaborator Julianna Mazzoni and in Italian subjects we planted false memories that when you were a kid you witnessed someone being demonically possessed and a more recent study this one also done in Canada published just a few years ago in Psychological Science one of our top journals this study demonstrated that a planted false memories that when you were a teenager you committed a crime and it was serious enough that the police actually came to investigate they reported in that psych science paper 70% of their sample fell for this suggestion and developed this false memory and a group of investigators from New Zealand and from Britain were so suspicious of this figure was so high 70 percent really you've got them to remember a crime but they they didn't actually commit they demanded the the the raw data and the the verbal protocols from the subjects in that crime study and the chief investigator sent them they were reanalyzed using a more conservative coding scheme and so the reanalyzing authors report that real the figure is closer to 30% fell for this suggestion well I just tell you that so that you have the full story but I think it's still pretty impressive if with a very conservative way of deciding did they develop a false memory or not you're still getting 30% or more of people falling for this pretty strong suggestion just last year a mega analysis was done these are investigators in Canada Britain and the United States and they gathered together all the data from a whole bunch of these rich false memory studies to try to reanalyze them with a common coding scheme and answer the question just how often are people swayed by this kind of suggestion in these studies they had 423 subjects in the nine or so studies that they had in their analysis and of those about 30% developed a false memory a partial or complete false memory and an additional 23% developed a belief that this had happened to them even though they didn't have the sense that they were actually recalling it we think those beliefs are important because believing that something happened even if you don't yet recall it and have that feeling of recollection is often the first step down that royal road to false memories we've used other techniques sometimes inspired but what by what we saw in this problematic psychotherapy to plant false memories so we've used guided imagination and gotten people to remember that they did things that were completely made-up we've used dream interpretation others have done it with hypnosis people are especially susceptible if they're highly hypnotizable and you hypnotize them especially susceptible to accepting these suggestions we can get false memories by exposing people to other people's memories or by applying them with false information and then the kind of high-tech way that I love to talk about because the visuals are so good this is not what's going on in therapy but it may be what's going on in society doctored photographs after I moved to a new university my current University of California Irvine I and my collaborators notably my postdoc Dan Bernstein and a couple of then graduate students kara Laney and Erin Morris we decided we wanted to look at this question if I plant a false memory in you in your mind does it have repercussions does it affect your later thoughts your later intentions or even your later behavior and we thought about a slightly different way of looking at the consequences of a false memory what we decided to do is plant a false memory that you got sick eating a particular food as a child and we reasoned that if we could plant this false memory maybe people wouldn't be as interested in eating that food and so we planted a false memory in some subjects they got sick on pickles in other subjects they got sick on eggs in other subjects they got sick on strawberry ice cream and guess what people weren't as interested in eating those foods we could even put the foods in front of people and measure how much of the offending food people ate and after developing a false belief or false memory about getting sick on a food people didn't eat as much of that food we wondered whether the opposite might happen if we could plan a warm fuzzy memory about a healthy food maybe we could make people want to eat it more and we did that with asparagus we planted a warm fuzzy memory that as a child you absolutely loved to spare is the first time you tried it we found that out about you and people are more interested in eating asparagus this kind of phenomenon it works not only with food but we also plant it in another study that you got sick drinking a vodka drink and after people developed a belief or memory about getting sick on the vodka drink this hasn't worked for me but it it has worked for our subjects there many of them not as interested in having a vodka drink so I get a lot of questions about this work and I've heard questions from audiences and so I know some of the questions that that you're thinking about or you might be thinking about such as you know is there any way we can tell the difference either we ourselves or when we're listening to somebody else tell the difference between a true memory and a false one I was thinking about this a lot recently this year because I was reading my hometown newspaper the Los Angeles Times over my coffee one morning and there was a letter to the editor in the newspaper you can't read that letter but I'm going to show you what the part I want you to see this writer was commenting on a story that had been published in the LA Times a few days earlier and that story was about a sexy abuse accusation against the famous actor Woody Allen it was brought when his daughter was seven years old her name is Dylan it was brought in the midst of a miserable ugly kind of custody dispute it was investigated and found not to be founded by the Yale Medical School and now Dylan has grown up and she's coming back and saying in in light of the me2 movement will you believe me now my father did this she wants she wants people to hear her story and believe it what did this letter writers say she says as a therapist who has worked with many sexual abuse victims I can recognize the stories when the stories are valid and Dylan Farrow story rings very true what does that mean what is ringing in the mind of this therapist what is ringing for her that lets her know that when she reads a comment that Dylan has made or seen an appearance by her on television that she thinks the story is authentic and not something else maybe it's the emotion that's being expressed and so it's natural for us to wonder maybe maybe we're more emotional about true memories than false memories this was the subject of the dissertation work of one of my former graduate students now professor Carol Rainey she planted false memories in the minds of people for something that would have been pretty upsetting like you witnessed your parents having a physical fight she found other subjects who truly had the experience and she compared their emotional reactions to the false experience or the comparable true ones and the overwhelming finding of this work is that false memories people were just as emotional about them as as the true memory people were maybe the brain knows maybe if we could do some neuroimaging the neural signals would be different for a true memory and a false memory well I had a chance to team up with a couple of people who know a lot about functional magnetic resonance imaging you're seeing photographs of my collaborators Oh kado and stark and we put people in a scanner while they were recounting true memories or recounting false memories that we had suggested to them and the overwhelming similair in the of the neural signals is what came out of this piece of research you might wonder whether everyone is susceptible to these kinds of manipulations well we had a chance to test a group of people and we thought to ourselves if anybody is going to be resistant to this kind of suggestion it's gonna be these people these are people with superior memory they they're called H Sam's highly superior autobiographical memory they've been studied by my colleagues in neurobiology they remember just about everything they have done every day of their adult life they have extraordinary personal memories and they've appeared on television and talked about their experiences there they're fascinating it's a fascinating ability what would happen if we brought them into a laboratory experiments and tried to plant false memories in their minds or try to distort their memory for experiences that we had exposed them to so we took a group of these eight Sam's people with a superior memory we had age and gender match controls we ran them through a bunch of these memory paradigms and the overwhelming finding is those H Sam's were just as susceptible to having their memories distorted or created as were their age and gender match controls the the the most recent work we're doing is on something that we're now calling memory blindness so I'm showing you photographs of three of my graduate students who were instrumental in this work Kevin Cochrane Rachel Greenspan and Daniel Bogart all now dr. Cochrane dr. Greenspan and dr. Bogart and in a memory blindness study what happens is people give you a memory and then you come back to them and you don't say well mrs. Jones said something different you say to them you said something different when I asked you this question earlier so for example they may have seen a simulated crime where the thief takes a wallet out of the woman's bag puts it in his the pocket of his green jacket and afterwards if we ask people to describe what they saw and to identify the color of the jacket many can be accurate and telling you it's a green jacket but later on we come back to them and we say something like this earlier you said the thief's jacket was this color and we're point to a brown we now want to ask you what was the brand again we try to get you focusing in on the brand of the jacket and we kind of slip in the information that you earlier told us it was brown and what happens in this work is that people routinely don't detect that you fed them an answer that's different from what they actually told you and then their memory shifts in the direction of that fake answer dr. Cochran just finished his PhD dissertation and received his PhD I kind of loved this study it's a little bit different it's a new memory blindness study you're hearing about it here first before it's even published and what happened in this particular work is subjects are going to have a very painful experience the particular pain 'fl experience that sometimes used if you want to inflict pain and yet the Ethics Committee to let you do it is you haven't put their hand in ice cold water for 90 seconds if they can keep it in there that long it's pretty painful afterwards on a 100-point scale they rate their pain and maybe the subject says well I give it an 80 waitor you tell them you know earlier you told me that when you had your hand in the cold water you rated it at a 60 on a 100 point scale in other words that false information about their earlier response do people even detect that you've given them an answer that's different from the one they gave there are a lot of different ways of thinking about how do we know if they did detect do they say anything at the time or any way indicate no stop that's not what I said only 11% did anything like that well there are other ways you can try to decide did they detect or not you can interview them deeply at the end of the study you could say something like was there anything strange about how the computer gave you the pain rating and see if they'll mention anything and even then only 33 percent showed any signs that they detected this a couple of days later one or two days later we asked them to tell us how painful was that experience that you had when you stuck your hand in the ice cold water and I won't walk you through this graph but I'll just summarize that especially when they didn't detect they showed no signs of detection which is more of them that false information about their prior response made them want to make them remember the experience as less painful and it not only made them likely to remember the experience is less painful but it even made them marginally more likely to be willing to participate in another study and like the one they just did in the future and so we see all kinds of implications of this memory blindness work say for maybe deceiving your your kid into believing that the last time he went to the dentist it really didn't hurt very much at all well you can imagine imagine some of the potential applications of memory blindness or misinformation for people's own earlier reports you don't need all these deception to get false memories even getting people to lie about an experience where they know they're lying they know they're making up us and so my former graduate student Steven frienda presented asked his subjects to make up a story make up a story about how when you were a kid you saw a cat stuck in a tree you rescued that cat I want you to write out this story and I want you to make it so convincing that you can convince other people it really happened to you and after going through this exercise where maybe they write about 250 words or so of made-up story many of them start to believe and remember that they actually had this experience that they completely made up essentially lied about for the purpose of this study so we're getting really good at mine technology we're getting really good at being able to plant false beliefs and false memories into the minds of people and we're only going to get better at it and it does raise a number of ethical issues for our society such as when should we use this kind of mind technology when should we affirmatively use it if ever or should we think about something banning its use and that's something that I think society will have to grapple with where I see this going in the future and this gives me a chance to to talk about those doctored photographs I a few years ago I used to say the doctored photographs was the kind of high-tech way of planting false memories with Photoshop for example we did a study in which we asked people whether they remembered certain public events happening do you remember seeing this in the news when our former President Obama was shaking the hand of the former president of Iran or do you remember when our former President George Bush was vacationing during Hurricane Katrina he was on the bush ranch with a famous baseball player you remember that and many people looked at these photos and a significant minority would then say yeah I do remember that and they not only would say they remembered these doctored photographs that had were created completely with Photoshop but they also would give a number of details about the experiences and one of the things that we found is that your political orientation affected the likelihood that you fell for the false memory so if you were a conservative Republican for example you were more likely to fall for for a scene a false scene that made the Democratic President Obama look bad and if you want to hear the latest on how political orientation can lead to susceptibility to false memories you might want to come to a talk by Joey Murphy tomorrow in the psychology building because it's the latest I think really exciting work done in the context of the referendum that you had here in Ireland in May brand-new study of false memories this one was done by Rob Nash he happens to be my academic great-grandson and he used doctored photographs here's an actual photograph of the procession leaving the wedding in 2011 William and Kate after they got married he doctored the photograph and presented it when he had protesters and protesting signs and so on he presented that to other subjects and it affected how people remembered the this public incident this common cultural incident but what was really surprising about Nash's work is he had another condition where the doctoring was so bad the Photoshop was like the worst this is like fake Photoshop where the horses are not even having their feet on the ground and people were still influenced by those doctored photographs this year I read about deep fakes this this really scares me there is a technology and maybe people in this room some of you understand it better than I do where you can make it look like someone is saying anything you want them to say or even doing whatever you want them to do so it was demonstrated by showing a video of our former President Barack Obama and he was saying something and it sounded just like him and his lips were moving in exactly the right way and he was saying this incredible thing but really the person who was saying it and it was fed through this high-tech system was some totally different person not even Barack Obama and when I read about this in an article in Vox the title of that article and this is something for you all to think about fake media is coming for our memories so I started here with you could I could I make you remember if it did not happen could I could I pour these memories into your mind could I make you remember that you rescued a cat stuck in a tree when you were a kid or that you were attacked by a vicious animal or as a teenager you committed a crime and it was serious enough that the police came or could I make you remember and I didn't talk about this work great work being done in Britain by Kim Wayne and Rob Nash could I make you remember that last week you cheated in a game and you took money out of the bank when you weren't entitled to it all of these things have been planted into the minds of ordinary people by psychological scientists in this line of work so I'm going to leave you with one take-home message and I did a TED talk on some of this material a short TED talk of years ago and this is sort of the one take-home lesson that I wanted to leave that audience and it's this what I've learned is just because somebody tells you something and they say it with a whole lot of confidence just because they describe it in a lot of detail just because they cry when they tell you the story or express emotion it doesn't mean that it really happened you need independent corroboration to know whether you're dealing with an authentic memory or one that's a product of some other process I used to think that photos and videos could be that independent corroboration but now I realize that we even have to watch out for that form of corroboration and so I'll just end with this old quote that I used to love by Salvador Dali and he's he's the one who said the difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels it's the false ones that look the most real the most brilliant if he were still alive and I could have a conversation with him I I would basically say Sal you know you've got to modify this this quote it's not that the false ones look the most real and the most brilliant but if you want to be scientifically accurate you just need to say they're equally real and equally brilliant