I'm amazed at the HN readers who are doubting this. Loftus and her colleagues demonstrated a long time ago that memory is a constructive process and it is incredibly easy to implant false memories in others.

Some of the factors that help implant a false memory:

1. If the person was distracted at the time of the memory.

2. If the false memory is plausible.

3. If there is social pressure indicating that the false memory is true.

4. If the person is reinforced in some way for recalling the false memory.

It's stupidly easy to make people remember stuff that never happened. Psychologists have known this for a long time and it's one of the most bulletproof findings in psychology.

There's a difference between doubting the phenomena, and doubting this particular attempt at demonstrating the phenomena.

As problematic as the method in this study may turn out to be, I'm afraid their general claims about the confabulated/reconstructed nature of episodic memory are pretty valid, and have been extensively studied over the years due to their relevancy to the legal system in the area of eyewitness testimony.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Lost_in_the_m...

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Reconstructio...

And more generally:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Eyewitness_me...

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Episodic_memo...

"It’s the difference between a 'Save' and the “Save As” function. Our memories are a 'Save As': They are files that get rewritten every time we remember them, which is why the more we remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes."

Wouldn't that be save? If you save a file it permanently alters the original, whereas 'save as' leaves the original file untouched.

A better analogy would be opening a document that had partial bits missing, filling in the partial bits the best you can, and saving it.

Or better, the good ol' "copy of a copy" analogy.

Or you might compare it to re-compressing a jpeg over and over.

The re-compressing isn't quite accurate as it implies loss of information whereas the process we are discussing can add or remove information.

Sort of related:

Here[1] is an account of a psychologist who got held up at gunpoint for almost 20 minutes discovering how he misremembered many of the details he swore he knew.

1: http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/04/observations_afterwar...

On a related note-Read about Edward Bernays (wiki:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays) , nephew of Sigmund Freud, and his contributions/actions/in advertising..or check out this documentary- "Century of the Self" (http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/century_... ), that BBC produced.

+1 for 'Century of the Self' - it is on Google Video and it is absolutely amazing. It starts slow, but stick with it, it becomes an amazing sequence of revelations and ideas.

This is a terrific documentary, one of the most best I've ever seen. In my opinion Edward Bernays was one of the most (negatively) influential people of the 20th century.

The man helped the NACP when it was somewhat Taboo to do so. When cigarettes were later proved to be harmful, he devoted an enormous portion of his energy and a lot of money to campaigns against it. And after all, persuasion is an incredibly important part of democracy; look back to ancient Greek, even the arguments against rhetoric were heavily rhetorical. He was not evil.

"Although I can’t remember much else about the night, I can vividly remember those sodas: the feel of the drink, the tang of the cola, the constant need to supress burps."

I was just telling my dad the other day that there was only one event I could remember from years of playing baseball at a particular field. It was when I went to go buy a drink from the concession stand - they only had RC cola.

Humans use lossy compression.

Lossy storage might be more accurate. Like a biological Amazon EBS.

Marketing surely takes advantage of it, but I think this has more to do with the addictive, yet passive nature of TV, where we let it push images into our brains.

My favorite example (for which I've already given away the punchline) is the following:

Ask a random group of people to imagine that they are watching a baseball game. Give them a minute to think about it. Then ask them -- Are you in the stadium? Or watching it on TV? The amount of people who visualize TV as their first reaction can be frightening.

I don't know that I agree with "frightening". I would guess people watch baseball games on TV much more often than they go to them, thus a question that asks about "watching a ... game" would trigger the more common of the two.

Your question is leading though. "Watching" heavily implies television. Being at the stadium involves much more than merely watching the game. I don't know of anyone who uses the verb watch in reference to actually going to an event.

Yeah. You 'watch' the match on TV and you 'go to see' the match in the stadium.

That is where you and I disagree. I don't think the verb "watch" has any such inherent implication. Our society has given that meaning to the word in very recent times. Rather than dismiss my point, I think the modification of the meaning has proven it.

It may not be a modification. Did people even say "watch a baseball game" before television? Surely no one said "listen to a baseball game" before radio. What you've demonstrated is that "watch" in some contexts implies watching on a television. That's not the same as demonstrating the "addictive, yet passive" nature of television. It does demonstrate its pervasiveness, though.

I'm suspicious of experimental method. Did the "false memory" students really not eat the popcorn? Really? Students? They didn't get their friend to sneak them some, or go in after the test and taste it? Surely they would not have revealed this 'cheat' to the interviewer a week later in any case.

Or maybe they were confused. There's no such thing as "Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Fresh Microwave Popcorn", but you can go down to the store and buy some "Orville Redenbacher Gourmet Popping Corn", so do the researchers really expect me to remember the difference?

That is the thread of this that I would pull if I had a spare platoon of researchers to send into this territory. How distinctive a memory is "implantable"? As it is, I guess we will just have to wait until someone else does that work.

Speaking of... is there some good way to get notified when a paper is published which builds on some known body of work? Like can I get an email digest updating me if any of a set of papers are referenced in new papers?

Addendum: Yes... "Track Citation" on JSTOR does this (if one makes an account)... I doubt it does a pretty digest that helps me remember why I wanted to know about the new papers (what question about the original paper I was interested in having future research nail down), but it will have to do for now.

Much more distinctive memories have been "implanted" by mistake, such as child abuse.

The way I read it, the false memory wasn't that they ate it last week ... it was that they have ever eaten it. And since the fake product name sounds so much like real product names, it sounds like they were just confused over the name. Which undermines the point of the study significantly.

Am I reading something wrong?

I'm also a bit wary of the results as well. Because it's a very trivial event, the recollection isn't important.

Did I eat popcorn last week? Dunno, don't care.

Most memories in life are trivial though, so any findings are still useful.

I am extremely doubtful of this result. I can't find the full paper available online, but I would like to see it.

The full paper is available here: http://www.pi.edu.pk/660165.pdf

Thank you. The paper makes a point clear that the article doesn't - they didn't ask kids if they ate the popcorn during the study, they asked if they had ever eaten that particular popcorn, which is a huge difference.

That is a critical point. The ad branded the name "Orville Redenbacher" as “Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Fresh Microwave Popcorn.” This is easily confused with "Orville Redenbacher's Gormet Popping Corn" which is a popular brand (see http://www.orville.com/) with a less intuitive name, and which a good number of kids have, in fact, eaten.

Thus this is more evidence of ads causing brand confusion than memory implantation. And underscores the importance of an insight that is already in trademark law - that people will easily mix up a brand that is similar to an existing brand with the existing brand.

>“Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Fresh Microwave Popcorn.” This is easily confused with "Orville Redenbacher's Gormet Popping Corn"

These are not really great examples of brand confusion IMO. In the name "Orville Redenbacher" is considered the origin whilst the remainder of the name is the particular product. Both of these are claiming the same origin (company/person). This isn't brand confusion based on similarity it's a direct rip-off. To make that point clear the consumer isn't confused about the origin they have been conned. Maybe it's a bit of an esoteric point.

Gourmet Fresh Microwave Popcorn and Gormet Popping Corn are two different products in two different geographic regions.

It looks like a pretty clear case of semantic confusion. When the article named it, I just assumed that was the actual name of Orville's standard Gourmet popcorn. Both the real and fictional names are a mess of generic advertising words, neither particularly memorable or distinct unless you're keenly interested. Most people won't even look beyond the "Orville Redenbacher"on the title barring searching for a specific descriptor, like "Gourmet" or "Kettle Corn," because those are the only meaningful terms that will pop up on the box of a popcorn.

So, a better HN post title may be: Wired article implants false memories of what actually happens study.