But if you agree to an experiment and wasn't told about it, then yes.
Imagine you sign up to a behavioural experiment, and they put you in front of a tv showing very disturbing images to see how you react, but wasn't told about it beforehand, I don't see how that could be considered ethical.
Now realize that this can happen with therapy. As your therapist helps you deal with trauma, some of it can be false memories.
Like in that case where a woman became convinced her dad molested her as a child. It was later proven that he did not and she was likely never molested at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramona_false_memory_case
edit: I mis-remembered (ha!), it was later judged that the father didn't do this, but you can't prove a negative so that's the best we'll ever get
There could have been something like DNA evidence eventually showing a different perpetrator, or proof that he was in a different country when the alleged incidents occurred. The sort of thing that would make it instantly clear to any reasonable observer that the recovered memories did not reflect reality. I was primed to expect an eventual finding like that, but there wasn't one.
False memories are almost always viewed as negative and certainly not desirable but what if you could use this effect for what you want to achieve?
False memories as way to engineer your past and improve your own life?
Is being delusion somehow good as long as it leads to preferred outcomes? Seems questionable to me and rife with potential bad incentives.
On the other hand, one could imagine expunging useful negative feedback and being worse off (e.g. less socially adapted, lacking in character, etc).
Inherently good doesn't imply inherently better than some alternative.
In the short term, absolutely. But I think my preference would be to work through the actual experience through different methods of therapy so that long term you aren’t forced to choose between reality and a functional existence. I don’t think the MIB eraser device is a good long term coping strategy.
Who is to say that therapy isn't just creating a useful model of your life?
Since it's clear our memory is already false to a considerable degree (or holographic rather than photographic, if you like), and since memories/beliefs have an outsized influence on our feelings/thoughts/behaviors/actions, this seems like a great opportunity for, er, "ethical self exploitation".
Hacking, if you will.
I'm certain there are many methods for doing this very thing.
Do you mean with informed consent?
Sometimes, such experiments can work even with informed consent. As in: "we will show you some pictures of your childhood, some of them may be fake" and you can still be convinced by the fake picture. Just like the placebo effect can work even when the patient knows he is given a placebo.
it’s really interesting to me how unclear my original phrasing was without even knowing it.
It is happening to you, every single day, you just didn't know it before. You should be disturbed, that's the point.
Our memories are much worse than we think they are. Anyone who has ever dealt with eyewitness testimony knows this, and that's immediate memory.
But there are people with true photographic memories who faithfully remember exact details. I think it was the book Subliminal where the author discusses how these people often struggle to put those details into a larger contextual understanding. They get the details but miss the gist.
The traditional notion of photographic memory is being able to recall any and every aspect of a scene upon a single viewing. But in countless experiments where a researcher asks the subject about some obscure detail, nobody has ever been able to demonstrate this--i.e. they may have happened to spot a particular detail, but keep iterating the experiment and they regress to the mean.
To memorize something, a person has to focus their attention on the object such that they can draw associations--inside the scene, outside the scene, etc. Perhaps this can indeed be subconscious. "Conscious" and "subconscious" are such nebulous words, and people's experiences of them so varying, that disputing that it could be done subconsciously requires a degree of certitude I don't think anybody (scientist or otherwise) could rightly possess.
There are indeed people with ridiculously amazing memories, including astounding visual fidelity. But it's misleading to say that it's "photographic". These people aren't glancing at a scene, blinking their eyes, and committing the whole thing to memory like a camera. Rather, their brains seem to be adept at scanning and drawing an incredible number of associations between visual elements and objects within the scene, but never the entirety of a sufficiently complex scene unless given a commensurate amount of time. And in fact, it turns out that with sufficient effort and practice many if not most people can begin to exhibit such astounding feats of memory.
> I think it was the book Subliminal where the author discusses how these people often struggle to put those details into a larger contextual understanding. They get the details but miss the gist.
Perhaps you're referring to the fact that people who exhibit extraordinary episodic memory (i.e. like the stereotypical autistic savant who can remember what they ate on any prior date, though most aren't autistic, AFAIU) usually have normal or sometimes deficient semantic memory. Note that episodic memory isn't the same thing as visual memory. Visual memory can be both episodic and semantic--e.g. if you're a visual-spatial thinker.
This is exactly it. Thanks for clarifying and explaining the distinction. I won't use "photographic memory" in the colloquial sense anymore :)
Interrogations during school (with trained actors) we had to extract 80% of the information and write a report on it containing 90% of the information we extracted, with no notes, up to several hours after the interrogation.
Interestingly, I learned how to “tag” memories as authentic (so I could write about them later) which has had interesting implications later on in my life.
Do tell.
Anyway, occasionally someone will “bring up” a meeting detail later on and be confused by it. This isn’t malicious, but sometimes it can be so far from what was actually discussed that people question their own memories and something slightly different arises from the ashes. I used to point out what was actually discussed, but I learned that doesn’t usually come across that well (you’re now questioning a teammate’s memory and aptitude, and requires a bit more delicate politics than I care to involve myself with). These days, I just sit back and watch it play out. It’s pretty rare-ish.
once upon a time it also meant Califoria Youth Authority, lol
You use direct questioning once you’ve succeeded at your approach, when you lose trust, or when you’re not trained properly on approaches because you can fuck it up pretty bad.
So you’d get a couple of paragraphs explaining what the character was picked up for, etc.
The first steps was learning how to direct question. The actors would pretty much shut down if you did something wrong like try an approach or ask leading questions. And they wouldn’t respond for the rest of the session. The goal was to force it into our head that once someone is willing to answer us, don’t stop asking the right questions. During the test though, the actors would give you wrong information instead of shutting down.
Then we started learning of approaches. The actors goals here was much the same except this time their goal was to not give you information unless they felt like you deserved it. I’ll never forget this one time, I got baited into a religious discussion. It was so obviously a trap and I fell right into it. Didn’t get a single bit of information because I pissed off the guy for not knowing enough about his religion.
Most of the time the first bit is figuring out core motivation. Is the person motivated by power or emotion?, and then giving them that as a carrot or taking it away. So you are genuinely trying to get to know the person, and that person is stuck in a room with you so they don’t have any other choice other than not saying a word (the worst!!).
If it’s done right, you end up caring for these people to some degree. Even though you don’t want to because sometimes these people have done absolutely terrible things. It’s a rough job. It wasn’t until I became a parent and realized that emotion is similar to when your kid misbehaves. You love your kid, but the child has to be punished. So while your child is sitting in the corner, tears streaming down the face in shame and betrayal, you love them but have to teach them that there are consequences. It’s nearly the same emotions as that moment except every single day, all day.
Off-duty cops are clueless, especially the drunk ones. A drug dealer friend once got a cop room mate for a couple years. That was hilarious and he would always pick us up if we were too drunk to drive, which we always made a fake scene about why a squad car was picking us up. Sometimes I miss my 20’s… nah, I don’t.
I've noticed that I can vividly recall experiences in other countries but my memory has altered itself to match the side of the road I'm currently used to driving on, and have confirmed this experience with others.
> Other examples include memories of the title of the Berenstain Bears children's books being spelled Berenstein,[16][17] the logo of clothing brand Fruit of the Loom featuring a cornucopia,[18] and the existence of a 1990s movie titled Shazaam starring comedian Sinbad as a genie.
At least that's how Hollywood would do it.
Would be very interesting to know.
"Jerry, just remember, it's not a lie if you believe it"
Humans have this tendency to use some tool way beyond its realm of applicability.
And could personality and character traits predispose people to fabrication? For example, a person can imagine a scenario that never happened on the basis of a photoshopped photo, but why would one person confuse what is imaged with what is remembered while another person would not?
I have a visual memory and so I always assumed that other people also relied on visual imaginary to recall past events. Now I'm wondering how can someone possibly recall any past event if they can't visualize it happening. Is the past just words and sentences that pop into your mind? How can you verify the authenticity of a memory from mere words? How can you be fully confident in your own memories if you can't scrutinize them from different angles in various levels of detail?
If you can imagine something happening in your mind's eye, then you can also see how your visual memory can be created. You're "seeing" something in your head that is not actually happening. This vision can turn into a memory. Heck, I have a recurring daydream that I have so often I can think of it as a memory.
There's no indication that any of the subjects in these various studies were not using visual memory, and the descriptions they used of their memories matched that.
Over the course of a few interviews where the subjects tried to recall memories related to the photos, half of the participants developed clear, or partially clear, false memories of the hot air balloon, despite it never having happened, and adding invented details that they truly believed. When the photos were revealed to be faked, many of them were flabbergasted, having convinced themselves that it had happened.
1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03196318