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Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our “experiencing selves” and our “remembering selves” perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy -- and our own self-awareness.

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Scott Fraser: Why eyewitnesses get it wrong

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Scott Fraser studies how humans remember crimes -- and bear witness to them. In this powerful talk, which focuses on a deadly shooting at sunset, he suggests that even close-up eyewitnesses to a crime can create "memories" they could not have seen. Why? Because the brain abhors a vacuum.

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Elizabeth Loftus: How reliable is your memory?

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Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus studies memories. More precisely, she studies false memories, when people either remember things that didn't happen or remember them differently from the way they really were. It's more common than you might think, and Loftus shares some startling stories and statistics -- and raises some important ethical questions.

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How your brain’s executive function works -- and how to improve it

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You use your brain’s executive function every day -- it’s how you do things like pay attention, plan ahead and control impulses. Can you improve it to change for the better? With highlights from her research on child development, cognitive scientist Sabine Doebel explores the factors that affect executive function -- and how you can use it to break bad habits and achieve your goals.

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Harvey Weinstein trial hears from expert on unreliable memories | Film | The Guardian

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Lawyers for Harvey Weinstein turned on Friday to an expert known for studying false, repressed and unreliable memories who has worked on behalf of clients including the serial killer Ted Bundy.

Weinstein's fate in his rape trial in New York City largely hinges on what his accusers remember about alleged sexual assaults years ago. Testimony from Elizabeth Loftus, a cognitive psychologist, often helps undermine people who say they are victims.

"It doesn't take a PhD to know that memory fades over time," Loftus told jurors in the New York supreme court.

As memories fade, she said, people become more vulnerable to "post-event information" including media reports that can distort what they remember. They also can distort their own memories with inferences and guesses about past events.

False memories "can be experienced with a great deal of detail, a great deal of emotion, even though they're false", she said. "The emotion is not a guarantee you're dealing with an authentic memory."

Loftus, 75, took the witness stand a day after prosecutors rested their case. It featured more than two weeks of testimony, including the accounts of six women who say the once powerful Hollywood producer subjected them to vile sexual behavior.

Weinstein's lawyers are aiming to cement doubts about the women's allegations after using cross-examination to highlight inconsistencies in some accounts. In some cases, the encounters the women recalled allegedly happened a decade or more ago.

Weinstein's lawyers have not said if he will testify. If he does, he could give prosecutors an opening to bring in more witnesses to rebut anything he says.

"That is a question that does not have an answer at this point," attorney Arthur Aidala said. "We want to see how our defense case goes."

Weinstein is charged with raping a woman in a Manhattan hotel room in March 2013 and forcibly performing oral sex on a different woman in 2006. Weinstein, 67, has maintained any sexual encounters were consensual.

Loftus was on the stand for about an hour, her testimony curtailed by a ruling barring her from testifying about memories specific to sexual interactions. She testified that she was not asked to evaluate any of the accusers or their testimony.

Loftus is the co-author of the 1994 book The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegation of Sexual Abuse. In another book, Witness for the Defense, Loftus wrote that in her work for Bundy she seized on "leading and suggestive questions" by investigators and "hesitations and uncertainties on the part of the victim" as signs of muddled memories.

On the stand on Friday, she sounded a similar note, telling jurors interactions with law enforcement "can lead people to want to produce details".

"Some can be accurate, and some can be false and inaccurate," she said.

When prosecutor Joan Illuzzi-Orbon asked if she was originally asked to be a defense consultant rather than a witness, Loftus said: "I don't remember what I was asked exactly."

"Is that due to post-event information?" Illuzzi-Orbon quipped.

Weinstein's lawyers skipped plans to call the Hollywood writer and director Warren Leight, to testify about Annabella Sciorra's drug use during a shoot in the early 1990s.

Sciorra, now 59, testified that she was hooked on Valium when The Night We Never Met started shooting in late 1992, but denied defense suggestions she was still using it when she alleges Weinstein raped her in 1993 or 1994.

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Harvey Weinstein trial hears from expert on unreliable memories

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Elizabeth Loftus says 'post-event information' can color recollections and 'emotion is not a guarantee' memory is authentic

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Fire drill: Inattentional blindness and amnesia for the location of fire extinguishers

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Fire extinguishers can save lives and are placed in locations that make them easily accessible and in plain view in case of an emergency. However, despite having viewed these bright red objects many...

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Memory does not work like a video tape - it is not stored like a file just waiting to be retrieved. Instead, memories are formed in networks across the brain and every time they are recalled they can be subtly changed. So if these memories are changeable, how much should we trust them? With experts Dr Julia Shaw and Prof Elizabeth Loftus, the Guardian's Max Sanderson explores the mysterious world of human memory, how false memories can be implanted - and how this can be harnessed for good and ill

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Why your memories can't be trusted - video

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Memory does not work like a video tape - it is not stored like a file just waiting to be retrieved. Instead, memories are formed in networks across the brain and every time they are recalled they can be subtly changed. So if these memories are changeable, how much should we trust them?

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Brain: Memory In Brain Full Documentary 2016 (720p) HD

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Ronald Cotton was exonerated in 1995, after spending over 10 years in prison for crimes he did not commit. His convictions were based largely on flawed eyewitness identification procedures used by police at the time.

In July 1984, an assailant broke into Jennifer Thompson-Cannino's apartment and sexually assaulted her; later that night, the assailant broke into another apartment and sexually assaulted a second woman.

The evidence at trial included a flashlight found in Cotton's home that resembled one used by the assailant and rubber from Cotton's shoe that was consistent with rubber found at one of the crime scenes, but overwhelmingly the evidence rested on the identification and the flawed eyewitness identification procedures used by police at the time.

In January 1985, Cotton was convicted by a jury of one count of rape and one count of burglary. In a second trial, in November 1987, Cotton was convicted of both rapes and two counts of burglary. He was sentenced to life in prison plus fifty-four years.
Post-Conviction Investigation
Cotton was unsuccessful overturning his conviction in several appeals. But in the spring of 1995, his case was given a major break: the Burlington Police Department turned over all evidence, which included the assailant's semen for DNA testing, to the defense.

The samples from one victim were tested and showed no match to Cotton. At the defense's request, the results were sent to the State Bureau of Investigation's DNA database and the database showed a match with the convict who had earlier confessed to the crime to a fellow inmate in prison.

When the DNA test results were reported in May 1995, the district attorney and the defense motioned to dismiss all charges. On June 30, 1995, Cotton was officially cleared of all charges and released from prison. In July 1995, the governor of North Carolina officially pardoned Cotton. Cotton had served 10.5 years in prison.
Life after Exoneration
Soon after his release, Cotton got a job in the warehouse of LabCorp, the company that tested the DNA evidence that proved his innocence. He also married, had a child, and bought a piece of land to live on. He received $110,000 from the state for his wrongful conviction.

Thompson-Cannino and Cotton met for the first time after his exoneration. They are now good friends and travel around the country working to spread the word about wrongful convictions and reforms - especially for eyewitness identification procedures - that can prevent future injustice.

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Ronald Cotton Celebrates 24th Exoneration Anniversary

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In July 1984, an assailant broke into Jennifer Thompson-Cannino's apartment and sexually assaulted her; later that night, the assailant broke into another apartment and sexually assaulted a second woman.

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Forgetting - proactive and retroactive inteference 

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Forgetting - proactive and retroactive inteference 

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Memory: Proactive & Retroactive Interference

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Patient HM was an important case study for neurological research in the 20th century. Holly Story discovers how his life and his unique condition helped scientists to understand the brain

Henry Gustav Molaison, known to the world as 'Patient HM', has been called the most important patient in the history of brain science. He was studied by a team of neuroscientists for more than 50 years - from the age of 27 to his death aged 82 - yet he could not remember their names or their experiments. Henry Molaison suffered from profound amnesia, and his unique condition helped neuroscientists to understand more about how our memory functions.

As a child, Henry suffered from epilepsy, which may have been caused by a head injury he sustained when he was seven years old. At first his seizures were minor, but from the age of 16 they became increasingly severe. By the time Henry was 27, he was unable to work.

Undergoing surgery

In 1953 Henry was referred to neurosurgeon Dr William Beecher Scoville at Hartford Hospital, Connecticut, USA. Scoville suggested surgery to remove the part of Henry's brain that was causing his seizures. This was major and experimental surgery, but Henry was so incapacitated by his epilepsy that he agreed to undergo the procedure.

Dr Scoville performed something called a bilateral medial temporal lobe resection. This involved removing a portion of Henry's temporal lobe, including parts of the hippocampus and amygdala, from both sides of the brain. Resection is still used today to treat severe epilepsy. It is a highly precise surgical procedure, informed by advanced brain imaging and a detailed knowledge of the brain. Scoville had none of these tools at his disposal and he could not foresee the effects of his surgery.

When Patient HM woke from his surgery, he was suffering from severe amnesia. Henry could remember much of his childhood: he knew his name and family history and could remember the stock market crash of 1929. However, he struggled to remember events from the few years leading up to the surgery and could not remember some things that had happened up to 11 years before.

Henry also had severe anterograde amnesia. This means that he had lost the ability to form new memories. Later, he would describe his condition as being "like waking from a dream... every day is alone in itself".

Scoville contacted researchers at McGill University in Montreal, who had reported on two similar cases of amnesia in patients who had undergone temporal lobe surgery. Dr Brenda Milner, a psychologist from McGill, travelled to Hartford to visit Molaison and began her research into his amnesia, his remaining memory and his brain.

As Scoville never repeated the operation, Henry's case was unique. It was also well-suited to research: his amnesia was unusually severe, his condition was stable, he was a willing subject, and researchers had some knowledge of the anatomical basis for his condition.

In 1957 Dr Milner published the first results of her formal testing. She used the pseudonym 'Patient HM' to protect Henry's anonymity. This paper became one of the most cited papers in neuroscience.

Making memories

At the time of Henry's operation, it was thought that memory functions were spread throughout the brain. The fact that Henry suffered one kind of amnesia so acutely as a result of damage to one part of his brain, and yet retained his intellectual abilities, prompted researchers to reassess this assumption. It was clear that the temporal lobe must be vital for memory function.

At that stage, the scientists could not identify which structure within the lobe was specifically responsible, as several different structures - including the hippocampi, amygdalae and entorhinal cortices - had been affected by the operation. It would take years of study using animal models and great advancements in technology before the medial lobe memory system was fully understood, but Patient HM helped to lay the foundations of this vital research.

In 1962 Milner published the results of a series of trials that she had conducted with Henry, which revealed one of her most notable discoveries. In the trials she had asked Patient HM to draw a line between two outlines of a five-pointed star while watching his hand and the page in a mirror. Milner asked Henry to repeat this task several times on several different occasions. Each time Henry did not remember having completed the task before, yet his performance improved. This demonstrated that, although he was not conscious of it, Henry was able to learn new motor skills by repeated practice.

From these trials Milner was able to conclude that this form of memory, called motor learning, must be distinct from the system of memory that records new facts, faces and experiences. Furthermore, it must be located in a different part of the brain, one unaffected by Henry's operation. Milner's discovery that we have multiple memory systems and that they are located in different parts of the brain was a huge step forward in neuroscience.

Henry's legacy

Henry was always supportive of the research that he enabled and said he was glad that he could be of help to others. In 1992 he gave his consent for his brain to be used in further research after his death, and this led to the establishment of Project HM.

When Henry died in 2008, his brain was removed and scanned repeatedly using MRI. It was then sent to the Brain Observatory at the University of California. In 2009 scientists sliced the brain into 2,401 pieces, each just 70 micrometres (millionths of a metre) thick. Their aim was to create stained histological slides that would enable researchers to map the brain in new ways and connect individual anatomical structures with specific functions.

The dissection took 53 hours to complete and five blades were used in the process. Each slice was photographed and the images were posted online, and the whole procedure was streamed live on the internet.

Henry and his doctors could not have imagined the technology that would eventually be used to preserve his brain, nor could they have predicted the advances in neuroscience that would result from his operation, his condition and his generosity.

To read about how resection operations are done today and to hear a surgeon talk about how technology helps him operate, read our interview with Conor Mallucci.
Lead image:
Dr Jim Myers, Imperial College London/Wellcome Collection CC BY NC

Questions for discussion

Would you donate your brain to science? Why?

What is the Brain Observatory? Search online to find out more.

Further reading

Phineas Gage (1823-1860) was the victim of a terrible accident in 1848

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'Big Picture' is a free and impartial educational resource for biology teachers and students exploring the innovations and implications of cutting-edge science. Our articles, videos, animations, infographics and lesson ideas set out to explain biomedical science and connect it with its ethical and social challenges.

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Human emotion and memory - interactions of the amygdala and hippocampal complex

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Human emotion and memory - interactions of the amygdala and hippocampal complex

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Elizabeth Loftus - Eye Witness Testimony

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Elizabeth Loftus - Eye Witness Testimony

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elizabeth loftus and eye witness testimony

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Elizabeth Loftus and Eye Witness Testimony, Mind Changers - BBC Radio 4

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Claudia Hammond with more experiments that changed our understanding of the human mind.

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By Christian Jarrett

Many parents will attest to their young children's remarkable knack for remembering rhymes, often claiming that their children's abilities exceed their own. Can this really be true? In nearly all other contexts, adult memory is known to be superior to that of children, for obvious reasons, including the immaturity of children's brain development and their lack of sophisticated mnemonic strategies.

A small study in Developmental Science has put pre-literate four-year-olds' memory abilities to the test, finding that they outperformed their parents, and a comparison group of young adults, in their ability to recall a previously unfamiliar short rhyme: "The Radish-nosed King".

"We argue that children are better than adults at recalling verse because they exercise the skill more in order to participate in the transmission of their culture through songs and stories, poems and taunts," the researchers said.

Psychologists have, before now, largely neglected to study children's verbatim memory for rhymes. They've been more interested in whether rhyming verse can act as a memory booster for content - that is, the meaning and story conveyed by the words - rather than the words themselves. These studies have found that rhyme tends to be a hindrance compared with straightforward prose. This might be because kids love rhymes and so focus more on the rhyming words and sounds, at the expense of the overall meaning.

Ildikó Király and her colleauges at Central European University recruited 13 parents and their 14 four-year-old children and asked the parents to read the 167-word Radish-nosed King poem and picture book to the children each night before bed for ten nights. The poem, previously unfamiliar to all participants, has the AABB rhyming scheme and was age-appropriate for the children.

The parents were told that they would be tested on their memory for the poem, the children weren't. A comparison group of 13 university students also listened to a reading of the poem each night before bed, while looking through a version of the picture book with the text removed. They too were told that their memory of the poem would tested after the final tenth night.

On the day after the last reading of the poem, the researchers asked the parents, children and the young adults to recall as much of the poem as they could, verbatim. On average, the children remembered nearly twice as many correct words as the adults, and made far fewer errors. The researchers also tested all the participants on the story events in the poem, and here there was no difference between the groups.

Also, there was a further detail: the researchers had inserted one extra line at the beginning or end of the poem, consisting of a list of nonsense and irrelevant (non-rhyming) words, supposedly shouted by the king when he's angry. This was to test the participants' memory for non-verse content, and here again the children and adults' performance was matched, which argues against the idea that the children's superior memory for the verse itself was due to the adults not paying attention (if so, they should have underperformed on the random word list too).

Instead, Király and her team think that young children have a superior memory for rhyming verse because rhymes aid the oral transmission of stories and songs that form such an important part of their preliterate sub-culture.

Digging a little deeper into their results, the researchers found that the children's memory advantage over adults was especially in evidence for the rhyming words that appeared toward the end of each of the poem's lines. It seems children, more than adults, are particularly attuned to the way that the constraints of a rhyme can act as a memory prompt, perhaps through their extensive practise with recalling rhymes.

Reflecting on this last finding, Király and her colleagues said the promise of verse as an educational tool might yet be restored: "if to-be-learned material is coded verbatim in a verse, with the help of rhyme as a constraining literary device, as in the alphabet song or when, say, introducing new vocabulary for animal names, children should readily retain it, perhaps better than their teachers."

- Preschoolers have better long-term memory for rhyming text than adults

Image via gettyimages under licence.

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Study finds 4-year-olds are considerably better than adults at remembering rhyming verse

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By Christian Jarrett Many parents will attest to their young children's remarkable knack for remembering rhymes, often claiming that their children's abilities exceed their own. Can this really be true? In nearly all other contexts, adult memory is known to be superior to that of children, for obvious reasons, including the immaturity of children's brain development and their lack of sophisticated mnemonic strategies.

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sir frederic bartlett – the war of the ghosts

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Sir Frederic Bartlett - The War of the Ghosts, Mind Changers - BBC Radio 4

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Claudia Hammond looks at memory and the Chinese whispers experiment by Frederic Bartlett.

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Audrey Hamilton: Would you ever confess to a crime you didn't commit? Most people answer that question with a resounding no. Yet, according to the Innocence Project almost 30 percent of wrongful conviction cases overturned by DNA testing involved a false confession. So, why do people seemingly of sound mind, implicate themselves? The answers may surprise you, but they shouldn't. In this episode we speak with a psychologist about how law enforcement, current policies and our own sense of justice can lead to false confessions. I'm Audrey Hamilton and this is Speaking of Psychology.

Saul Kassin is a distinguished professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He has pioneered the scientific study of false confessions and his research has been integral in preventing wrongful convictions and understanding why innocent people are targeted for interrogation, why they confess and the effect of this evidence on judges and juries. Welcome, Dr. Kassin.

Saul Kassin: Thank you. Good to be here.

Audrey Hamilton: Let's start off the bat with the most obvious question I think people have about false confessions. Why would anyone confess to something they didn't do? Do we understand the psychology of why this happens, especially in something like a murder investigation?

Saul Kassin: Right. You know, it's interesting. That is the most interesting first question because when I ask people would that be something that you would ever do the answer is unanimously and strongly is, "no." Nobody imagines they would ever do it short of having a gun to their head.

The very short answer is that everyone has their breaking point. But it's a little more complex than that. It turns out there are three types of false confessions and there are three different storylines as to why an individual would confess to something they didn't do.

One - there is a category of false confessions known as voluntary false confessions. These are cases, and they often happen in high-profile cases that are in the news, where people come out of the woodwork and volunteer confessions to crimes that are in the news that they didn't commit. Kind of the poster child instance of that in history is when Charles Lindbergh's infant son was kidnapped in 1932, 200 people volunteered confessions and all of them were false. You see that again in high-profile cases. Sometimes people volunteer confessions because they're seeking attention. Sometimes they're looking to actually protect somebody else who is the culprit. And sometimes it reflects some degree of delusion and it reflects on their mental health. Honestly, I don't see the voluntary false confessions, while they happen and happen with some degree of regularity and always have, I don't see them as a particular problem for the criminal justice system. I think it's interesting that when somebody volunteers a confession to police - police typically react with some degree of skepticism. And they ask the question, well. And so they say you've committed this murder - prove it. What do you know about the crime? And if the individual who is offering to admit guilt can't also provide details about the crime that are accurate as known to the police, then the police don't follow that case. And so those voluntary false confessions don't tend to enter the criminal justice system as problematic.

The problematic are the next two types. And these are the types of false confessions that arise from police interrogations. These are innocent people who, when asked about the crime, deny any involvement and then they are subject to a process of interrogation and it is a result of that process of interrogation that a confession is produced. So these are categories of police-induced false confessions.

The way in which the two categories differ is the most common form is you bring a person in who denies involvement, who is now subject to a harrowing and relentless interrogation - promises may be made, threats may be made, promises implied, threats implied, stress level is increased, they're isolated, they're away from anybody who's familiar - and essentially, to make a long story short, everybody has a breaking point. And these are cases where individuals are innocent, who know they're innocent, break down and confess in order to extract themselves from a very bad situation. They do what psychologists have known people to do in stressful decision-making situations, which is they maximize their opportunity to get themselves out of that situation. And as for the long-term consequence, well, I'll worry about that when the time comes. They're just not thinking clearly anymore. Classic, recent, historic, I think, example, the Central Park Five. There was a case when five false confessions were produced in a single investigation. And every one of those 14-, 15- and 16-year-old boys who confessed later said, "I knew I didn't do it. I thought I was helping myself out by cooperating." And so that is, I think, the most common type of false confession. An innocent person, broken down and the metric of the fact that these are what we call compliant false confessions - that is they confess as an act of compliance, while privately remaining knowledgeable that they are innocent. The metric of that is as soon as the pressure of the situation is lifted, they recant the confession. But it's too late. It doesn't matter. Nobody pays attention to, nobody trusts the recantation as much as they do the confession.

The third type of false confession is in some ways, when I first discovered this - we wrote about this - Larry Reitzman and I wrote about this in 1985 - was the most vexing because there wasn't the psychology in place yet to explain it. We called it internalized false confessions. These are instances where an innocent person denying any involvement is put through a series of interrogation tactics and ultimately comes out not only willing to sign a confession as an act of compliance but they come to internalize the belief in their own guilt. They come to believe they have committed this crime. Now, that is a different type of process and a different story than what happens in the compliant false confessions.

What happens in internalization is this - what's fascinating about them - I've seen about a dozen of them firsthand where we can actually watch the process. And what's fascinating is the names change, the dates change, the places change, the script is almost always about the same. And the script is this - a subject is brought in who is vulnerable to manipulation. And when I say vulnerable I mean either they are vulnerable dispositionally. They may be mentally, intellectually impaired. They may be young - they may be 12-, 13-, 14-, 16-years-old. They may have been deprived of sleep and therefore rendered vulnerable to manipulation. They may be under so much stress or traumatized because a loved one had just been found murdered and, in fact, they're being accused of that murder. Whatever it is, they are vulnerable. They are in a stressful state of mind. And as a result of the process of interrogation, they are continuing to deny involvement and then the detective doing the interrogating launches into a series of tactics that shocks most Americans to know is lawful. They start to lie to the suspect about the evidence. So, for example, Marty Tankleff, 17-years-old, young 17-years-old, wakes up one morning in 1990 and he finds lights are on all over the house. He finds that his parents have been bludgeoned. His mother is dead in a pool of blood. He runs to his father's study and sees him gurgling, still alive but unconscious, also surrounded by blood. He calls the police. The police come. They identify him for no good reason as the suspect. And while his family is off at the emergency room in a hospital with his father. And he wants to be there. He keeps saying he'd like to be with his family. "Not until we're done here. Not until we're done here." He's in an agitated, traumatized state. The detectives begins to launch into a series of lies about the evidence.

He says "Marty, you said you had nothing to do with this. How does that explain the fact that your hair was found in your mother's grasp?"

And, Marty said, and that wasn't true. Marty said, "Well, I don't know how that could be possible."

And then he asked, "It looks like you used the shower this morning."

And Marty said, "No, I didn't."

Because they couldn't explain there were two bloody murder scenes in this house. And Marty's clean. They arrive at the scene and he's clean. They convince him that they did a humidity test on the shower in his bedroom and that it proved that the shower had been used that morning. That was a lie.

So now Marty is starting to wonder what the truth is and he's getting confused and disoriented. And then the detective gets up and physically leaves the room, leaves Marty in there with his partner. He comes back in and says "Marty, I've got good news and bad news. The good news is I just contacted the hospital. Your father has regained consciousness. The bad news is he said you did this." And that was a lie. And Marty said, "My father never lies. If he said I did this I must have done this."

That is the pattern that you see. Vulnerable suspect, dispositionally or rendered vulnerable, lied to about the evidence, starting to get confused about reality. In some cases the degree of internalization ends with they no longer can attest to their own innocence. They're confused. In some cases, it becomes a full blown belief that they committed this crime and a search for the details as to how they did it. And so what happens is they eventually confess by using words like, "I guess I did it," "I guess I must have done it." Always that kind of tentative, fragmentary language. And then ultimately they produce a fuller confession filled with the kinds of details that were handed to them through the process of interrogation. So if you're an observer in court and all you're hearing is that final statement, there's no way you can get past it.

And so that third category of false confessions - fascinating - you see it over and over again - again not nearly as prevalent as the compliant false confessions. But, it's a third story line where the process of interrogation actually converts the beliefs and memories and sometimes they actually confabulate memories of what they did and how they did it.

Audrey Hamilton: What is the most common thing that you see in these interrogations that leads you to believe someone may not be telling the truth or is feeling intimidated? I think you've touched a little bit on this already but I'm curious in some more examples how are law enforcement officials contributing to these false confessions?

Saul Kassin: They are contributing mightily to false confessions. And there's two things I should say about this. First, imagine yourself sitting in a courtroom watching a videotaped confession. So the suspect has been brought to the point of giving a statement and at that point, the videotape recorder is turned on and a statement is given and that statement later is played in court. I can tell you as an empirical matter we've done these studies and certainly the wrongful convictions, experiences of people who have been wrongfully convicted will attest. Judges, juries, lay people - they can't tell the difference between a true confession and a false confession just by watching the confession. I went into a prison outside of Boston with colleagues. We had prisoners on tape confessing to the crimes for which they were incarcerated and then we asked each one to make up a confession to a crime he did not commit. People cannot tell the difference between those two sets of confessions. And the story of every false confession is not just a story of what happened in the police interrogation room. It's a story of the fact that once that false confession was taken and recanted and the person pled not guilty and went to trial, in every instance, a prosecutor, judge, jury and, typically, an appeals court, believed that false confession.

The second terrible subplot in these cases is not just that the false confession was taken, it's that all of the safety nets we believe were built into the system fail. People believe false confessions. So, first thing it's important to know is there's no way to identify what it is that law enforcement does simply by watching the final statement. That's why what's most important and whenever I clamor for reform and other psychologists in this area clamor for reform, the number one rule for reform is, record the entire process.

Audrey Hamilton: The minute they walk in the door.

Saul Kassin: The minute they walk in. And in fact, I'm sitting here right now in the District of Columbia Metro Police - DC Metro Police went to the system years ago. They've got interview rooms set up and as soon as somebody walks into the room the motion activation system turns on the lights and turns on the camera. Simple as that. Every interaction is recorded. It's the only way that a judge and a jury can make a reasonable determination as to what happened. You can't know from listening to the final product.

Now, I keep saying judge and jury. The judge, almost always when a confessor recants and goes to trial, the judge ends up having to rule in a pre-trial suppression hearing as to whether or not that confession was voluntary because by law if the judge determines that it was not voluntary then it should not be admissible into evidence and the case is usually closed.

So every judge has to rule on whether the confession was voluntary. Most times confessions are ruled voluntary. They go into trial and then it's up to the jury to determine whether it's a credible confession. I don't know how a judge is competent to determine voluntariness without watching the process. I don't know how a jury can know whether it's a good confession without watching the process. And the reason all of this can be so confusing is another empirical fact. When you look at analysis of real, known, proven, false confessions taken right out of the Innocence Project case files...

Audrey Hamilton: Right, this is the one where they use DNA to...

Saul Kassin: Yes. Right, so these are DNA exonerated men and women who had confessed. So we know now that they are actually innocent and that the confessions were false. When you go back and look at those confessions, 95 percent of them contained facts about the case that were spot on accurate with regard to the crime and that were not in the public domain. Facts that only the perpetrator could have known. The problem is, the police knew those facts too. And somehow, advertently or inadvertently, those facts made their way into the final statement.

So, imagine a judge or a jury ruling on a confession determining if it is a good confession. They're not just hearing an admission of guilt, they're hearing an admission of guilt followed by a full narrative story. This is what I did. This is how I did it. This is who I was with. This is why I did it. This is what I saw and heard along the way.

And then, my colleagues and I also content analyzed some known false confessions. They often contain physical reenactments, hand drawn maps, apologies and expressions of remorse. Corey Wise of the Central Park Five - not only did he admit to taking part in the rape of a jogger, which he had nothing to do with. Embedded in his statement, which was videotaped, was an apology. He said, "this is my first rape and it's going to be my last. I'm never going to do this again."

That's a false confession. That's the sight and sound of a false confession. There's no way a judge and a jury can know how to measure that without having heard the process that gave rise to it. Now, thankfully, 25 states require the recording of interrogations. At least in serious felony cases.

Audrey Hamilton: How do you think psychological research can be used to help educate law enforcement on changing the way they conduct interrogations?

Saul Kassin: Fascinating question. There are many ways in which psychologists have exerted influence over practice. One is, it is clear that many of the techniques that have been used -and I should say that there is not one technique for interrogation. There tends to be an American style, confrontational style set of techniques that are shaped around what the law permits and those techniques are confrontational meaning that the goal is to accuse right out of the gate accuse the suspect of having committed the crime. And in fact, the opening salvo of an American style interrogation is an accusation of guilt. And a refusal to accept denials. So, when a subject denies that having any involvement post-accusation typically what the American detective will do is call that person a liar, say no, we know what happened. We want you to tell the truth. And the process then proceeds kind of relentlessly for some degree of time. I should say, the average interrogation lasts for 30 to 60 minutes. But if you look at false confession cases, they're six hours, eight hours, 10 hours, 14 hours - and so this is this relentless process.

Now, it starts with an accusation. Eventually what happens is the American interrogator fashions a set of tactics that are designed both to make it stressful to continue to deny and less stressful to continue to confess.

Audrey Hamilton: Get it over with. I'm done with this process.

Saul Kassin: Get it over with and along the way not only does the interrogator imply that we have all sorts of evidence against you, most countries do not allow their police to lie about the evidence. It makes the suspect feel overwhelmed as if they have no choice, as if there is an air of inevitability. And so now you're looking for an expedient way out.

Well, here comes the second set of tactics, which I have collectively used the term minimization to describe it. Minimization is, and you see this in every one of these cases, minimization is you know, I think you're a good person. I don't think you intended to do this. I don't think this is something you went in there intended to do. It's possible you may have had too much to drink. It's possible somebody put you up to it. You were under pressure. You were provoked. There are externalizations of blame, moral justification. The implication is, you know what, I don't think this is such a big deal. So, the crime and the implications of that crime are minimized. It is not a coincidence that every one of the Central Park Five boys and their families who were present, when their interrogations had concluded and they were put under arrest, they were shocked. They all thought they were going home. The most common comment you hear when a microphone is put into the face of an exoneree who had confessed is, "So why did you confess?" The typical thing they say is because they wanted to go home.

I don't know if you're familiar with the case of Brendan Dassey from "Making a Murderer," the Netflix documentary. Dassey was 16-years-old. He gave a confession. Shortly after giving that confession, there is a jaw-dropping moment when he says, "Am I going to get back to school in time? I have a project due." He had no idea he was going to be under arrest and he'd never go home again. And that tells you what kind of interrogation tactics were used. Minimization tactics are the final way to take a subject who has been broken down, lead to believe there's no way out. But, if you cooperate with us we think this is no big deal.

Again, as am empirical matter we've done these studies. When people hear minimization tactics, the take-home message that they infer when we ask them is leniency. This person will not be treated with a harsh punishment. And so that's the American-style interrogation.

But there are others. In Europe, there is a sweeping set of reforms. You ask can psychology make change? Psychology has already made change. We have contributed to the fact that 25 states now record interrogations. In Europe, there is a sweeping reform that started in the United Kingdom, started in England. And that reform is to move away from the confrontational style investigation to what they call investigative interviewing, where the goal is to gather information, to figure out what happened - to determine whether or not this person has information. Secondarily, to solve the crime by confession. In England, they went to a new model as a result of some false confession cases in the 1980s. And as a result of reforming their form of - moving from the kind of interrogation that we see in the U.S. to investigative interviewing - they have reported no change in their ability to close cases. No change in their ability to get confessions. And they're no longer seeing this rash of false confession cases they used to report. Unlike in the United States, there has been a concerted effort to bring psychologists and practitioners together to create this new model. Here, there is a greater amount of resistance to moving in that direction. And that is why, at least as a backup if you can't reform the process of interrogation, at the very least you can make it transparent so that judges, juries and prosecutors can see what happened. The way everybody saw Brendan Dassey's interrogation, taken at a time when the state of Wisconsin required the recording of interrogation, there was a public outcry when Netflix showed that documentary because people got to see the process not just the final outcome.

Audrey Hamilton: You've also studied quite a bit about why people waive their protections, like Miranda rights, you know, you have the right to remain silent. I'm interested in an experiment you did that was published in the Journal of Law and Human Behavior where you had people pretend they were either guilty or innocent, like a mock theft of $100. Innocent people signed their Miranda waiver twice as often as guilty suspects. Why would they do that? Obviously, this wasn't a real crime, but what does this tell you about why people agree to talk even if they're innocent? How can this harm them in actual criminal investigations?

Saul Kassin: Um, this was an important topic. In part, because, I had spent a good amount of time - I occasionally work as a consultant or an expert witness on cases involving false confessions and I talk to those who had given false confessions - and one signal that came through loud and clear, because you know, what they all have in common, is they all gave false confessions. But they have something else in common - they all waived their Miranda rights. We're handed one means of protecting of ourselves and that is, at any moment, we can clam up and say we want a lawyer. We don't have to talk. We don't have to put ourselves through this hideous process. And so I asked them, "Why?" And, it's fascinating. They all give you exactly the same answer in almost exactly the same words: "Why didn't you get a lawyer?" "Well, I didn't need a lawyer." "Well, why didn't you need a lawyer?" "Well, I didn't do anything wrong." They had this naïve belief in the power of their innocence to prevail.

The idea came to me because there had been data showing that Miranda waiver rates are very high. The police worried in 1966, when the U.S. Supreme Court forced them to read people their rights and get a waiver of those rights before they could interrogate them, they worried that nobody will ever talk to us again. That hasn't happened. Eighty percent, roughly 75 to 80 percent, of suspects waive their Miranda rights. And that's a statistic you find in this country and elsewhere where comparable rules are in place. And so you ask yourselves the question, why? And then you look more carefully at those data and you find that people who have never been in trouble before, people who don't have a history with the criminal justice system and, therefore, people just as a base rate matter more likely to be innocent, are much more likely to waive their rights. So, based on those observations and my conversations with the wrongfully convicted, we brought that into the laboratory. I say this because this is not a mere laboratory phenomenon. The idea for it came from the real world. So, now we bring it into the laboratory and we have people go through the motions of stealing, or not stealing, $100. They know it's not real. But they are then put into the laboratory interrogation room and confronted with a detective who walks in, introduces himself as Detective McCarthy, has either - we actually vary whether his demeanor is hostile and close-minded, or whether he seems open and willing to hear their story. They are all incentivized to make themselves appear innocent. And, the first thing he does is read them their rights and look to see whether they're willing to sign the waiver. And, by a large margin of 81 percent to 36 percent, those who had nothing to hide, those whose accounts of their whereabouts of what they did would be truthful, 81 percent of them waived their rights compared to only 36 percent of them who actually had committed the mock crime. And they told us exactly what the wrongfully convicted say, "Well, I didn't do anything wrong. He'll see that."

Two explanations I have for what was happening here and they're kind of related - one is, people have a belief in a just world. Now, we know that. There is research in psychology on the belief in a just world. People tend to believe that the world is generally a just place. Good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people. The fact of the matter is, if I did nothing wrong, that will come out. Justice will figure that out. And the second interesting phenomenon in psychology that I think is informative, is what is called the illusion of transparency. People believe that their truths-telling and their lies are transparent. People believe that when they utter the truth, others will believe them. And that when they lie, others will figure that out. And that illusion of transparency gives comfort to the person who did nothing wrong. So, when you hear the wrongfully convicted talk about why did you waive your rights - and, in fact, in some cases they explain, "The reason I gave in and confessed was, I figured, you know what, they'll proceed with their investigation and, in the end, they'll see I did nothing wrong."

Now this gets to, I think, a very important point that I did not see coming until I had conversations with some of these false confessors and it is a concept that I've gone on to call the phenomenology of innocence. An innocent person, you would think that the thing that protects an innocent person is his or her knowledge of his innocence, right? I'll be damned if I'm going to confess to something I didn't do! However, innocent people sometimes confess after hours of interrogation, because they're led to believe there is additional evidence coming. And, when they're led to believe that there's additional evidence coming, that belief, in fact, becomes a promise of future exoneration, which paradoxically makes it easier to confess. So, a number of innocent people have confessed just to get out of a bad situation believing when the police do the rest of their investigation, they'll see this wasn't me. So, in a funny way, innocence can be your own enemy in that situation. Um and that is the same phenomenon, the same explanation as to why innocent people waive their rights. They'll look you right in the eye and say, "We'll I didn't need a lawyer. I didn't do anything wrong."

Audrey Hamilton: I think it's interesting that you're studying this and, you were telling me this before we actually started recording, but you think it's important for psychologists to be out there making people aware.

Saul Kassin: It's very important. It's very important. You know, the psychology underlying false confessions is basic. We have a wealth of studies that we've done in laboratories, in field settings, in surveys and what not, from the 1980s forward. All of it has been summarized in a white paper that APA Division 41 has produced. All of it is summarized in, now, seven amicus briefs that the APA has submitted to various states courts. But, in a sense, we almost didn't need that literature to understand the underlying psychology, it is so basic. If you understand the principles of reinforcement, if you understand the way Skinner used to shape rats in a Skinner Box, if you understand the reward contingencies that affect people's decision-making, if you remember back to Milgram's obedience experiments, where people were under pressure, step by step, increasingly to violate their conscience - all of that is directly relevant to what happens in an interrogation room. And, so, psychologists, I think, are uniquely poised to help in these matters. And the reason I think raising public awareness is important - I have spent, and others have spent, a lot of years trying to reform the system from the top down. We speak to state legislators. We speak to state innocence commissions. We talk to groups of judges. We try to get the laws changed from the top down. And that has been somewhat successful. But, what has become apparent to me and it has become apparent in some very high profile cases - like the Central Park Five, like Brendan Dassey's situation - what has become apparent, is that another way to manage this, another way to exert our influence and, I think, help to reform a broken system, is to get involved in raising public awareness.

Again, I think the "Making a Murderer" documentary tells me a lot. Here's a case where 16-year-old Brendan Dassey, 10 years ago, gives a confession. Now, mind you, the jury got to see the tape, or parts of the tape, of that interrogation but they didn't get to hear from an expert explaining that tape. And, so he gets convicted. Appeals within the state are exhausted. Everything looks like he's going to spend the next 25 years to life in prison. Then in December of 2015 the documentary is aired. There is a public outcry. Twenty million people watched the documentary in the first month or so and there is outrage over the treatment of Brendan Dassey and his confession. Within six months, a federal judge overturns his conviction, arguing that the confession was coerced. That judge had his ruling appealed and then a three-judge federal panel affirmed that ruling. Now, Dassey, at the moment we are speaking right now, is still incarcerated in Wisconsin because the prosecutor's office has appealed those federal decisions and wants to go back and re-try him and has argued that he should remain incarcerated to that point. But the fact of the matter is, Dassey wasn't going anywhere until public awareness was raised. That is another way, in which, we can make important change. And, I don't know that there's another profession as uniquely poised as psychology and, you know what, if we don't step in to inform the public about what's happening somebody else will fill that void who is less expert and less informed.

Audrey Hamilton: Well, Dr. Kassin, thank you so much for being here today. It's been really interesting.

Saul Kassin: My pleasure.

Audrey Hamilton: Thanks for listening. If you would like more information on the topics we discussed or if you would like to hear more episodes, please go to our website

. With the American Psychological Association's Speaking of Psychology, I'm Audrey Hamilton.

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Speaking of Psychology: False confessions aren't always what they seem

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Audrey Hamilton: Would you ever confess to a crime you didn't commit? Most people answer that question with a resounding no. Yet, according to the Innocence Project almost 30 percent of wrongful conviction cases overturned by DNA testing involved a false confession. So, why do people seemingly of sound mind, implicate themselves?

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Did you feel your brain searching for the correct answer? Once you'd seen the first letter, did you suddenly remember the name of the capital city?

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scientists rethinking nature of animal memory

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Scientists Rethinking Nature of Animal Memory

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An elephant never forgets—or does it? Scientists have long believed that animals do not have so-called episodic memory—the kind that allows humans to remember past events. But recent experiments with scrub jays, chimpanzees, and gorillas have led to rethinking of the nature of memory in animals.

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The Life Scientific

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John O'Keefe on memory, The Life Scientific - BBC Radio 4

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2014 Nobel Prize-winner John O'Keefe talks to Jim Al-Khalili.

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The Life Scientific - Podcast

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Faraneh Vargha-Khadem on memory, The Life Scientific - BBC Radio 4

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Faraneh Vargha-Khadem talks to Jim Al-Khalili about how memories are made.

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Amnesiac - A história de Henry Molaison (H.M.) [Legendado]

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Clive Wearing - The man with no short-term memory

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The Psychology of Memory, Baddeley, 2004

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Innocence project

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Jennifer Thompson: Innocence and Forgiveness

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Introduction by Dr Michael Naughton. Description from the Bristol Festival of Ideas website: (http://www.ideasfestival.co.uk/?p=2595) "Jennifer Thompson, a native North Carolinian and mother of 21-year old triplets, has become an outspoken opponent of the death penalty and speaks frequently about the need for judicial reform.

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Dr. Endel Tulving has arguably had the greatest impact of any single scientist on the understanding of human memory. A Canadian icon and major international figure in experimental psychology, Tulvings theories have provided the foundation for the whole field of memory research.

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Alan Baddeley - Working Memory | GoCognitive

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Dr. Alan Baddeley has been one of the leading researchers in the field of working memory. His model of working memory, published with Dr. Graham Hitch in 1972, has been one of the seminal models to guide research in memory.

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AP Psych Intro to Memory/ Encoding Part 1a

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HM (Henry Molaison)

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Patient HM was an important case study for neurological research in the 20th century. Holly Story discovers how his life and his unique condition helped scientists to understand the brain

Henry Gustav Molaison, known to the world as 'Patient HM', has been called the most important patient in the history of brain science. He was studied by a team of neuroscientists for more than 50 years - from the age of 27 to his death aged 82 - yet he could not remember their names or their experiments. Henry Molaison suffered from profound amnesia, and his unique condition helped neuroscientists to understand more about how our memory functions.

As a child, Henry suffered from epilepsy, which may have been caused by a head injury he sustained when he was seven years old. At first his seizures were minor, but from the age of 16 they became increasingly severe. By the time Henry was 27, he was unable to work.

Undergoing surgery

In 1953 Henry was referred to neurosurgeon Dr William Beecher Scoville at Hartford Hospital, Connecticut, USA. Scoville suggested surgery to remove the part of Henry's brain that was causing his seizures. This was major and experimental surgery, but Henry was so incapacitated by his epilepsy that he agreed to undergo the procedure.

Dr Scoville performed something called a bilateral medial temporal lobe resection. This involved removing a portion of Henry's temporal lobe, including parts of the hippocampus and amygdala, from both sides of the brain. Resection is still used today to treat severe epilepsy. It is a highly precise surgical procedure, informed by advanced brain imaging and a detailed knowledge of the brain. Scoville had none of these tools at his disposal and he could not foresee the effects of his surgery.

When Patient HM woke from his surgery, he was suffering from severe amnesia. Henry could remember much of his childhood: he knew his name and family history and could remember the stock market crash of 1929. However, he struggled to remember events from the few years leading up to the surgery and could not remember some things that had happened up to 11 years before.

Henry also had severe anterograde amnesia. This means that he had lost the ability to form new memories. Later, he would describe his condition as being "like waking from a dream... every day is alone in itself".

Scoville contacted researchers at McGill University in Montreal, who had reported on two similar cases of amnesia in patients who had undergone temporal lobe surgery. Dr Brenda Milner, a psychologist from McGill, travelled to Hartford to visit Molaison and began her research into his amnesia, his remaining memory and his brain.

As Scoville never repeated the operation, Henry's case was unique. It was also well-suited to research: his amnesia was unusually severe, his condition was stable, he was a willing subject, and researchers had some knowledge of the anatomical basis for his condition.

In 1957 Dr Milner published the first results of her formal testing. She used the pseudonym 'Patient HM' to protect Henry's anonymity. This paper became one of the most cited papers in neuroscience.

Making memories

At the time of Henry's operation, it was thought that memory functions were spread throughout the brain. The fact that Henry suffered one kind of amnesia so acutely as a result of damage to one part of his brain, and yet retained his intellectual abilities, prompted researchers to reassess this assumption. It was clear that the temporal lobe must be vital for memory function.

At that stage, the scientists could not identify which structure within the lobe was specifically responsible, as several different structures - including the hippocampi, amygdalae and entorhinal cortices - had been affected by the operation. It would take years of study using animal models and great advancements in technology before the medial lobe memory system was fully understood, but Patient HM helped to lay the foundations of this vital research.

In 1962 Milner published the results of a series of trials that she had conducted with Henry, which revealed one of her most notable discoveries. In the trials she had asked Patient HM to draw a line between two outlines of a five-pointed star while watching his hand and the page in a mirror. Milner asked Henry to repeat this task several times on several different occasions. Each time Henry did not remember having completed the task before, yet his performance improved. This demonstrated that, although he was not conscious of it, Henry was able to learn new motor skills by repeated practice.

From these trials Milner was able to conclude that this form of memory, called motor learning, must be distinct from the system of memory that records new facts, faces and experiences. Furthermore, it must be located in a different part of the brain, one unaffected by Henry's operation. Milner's discovery that we have multiple memory systems and that they are located in different parts of the brain was a huge step forward in neuroscience.

Henry's legacy

Henry was always supportive of the research that he enabled and said he was glad that he could be of help to others. In 1992 he gave his consent for his brain to be used in further research after his death, and this led to the establishment of Project HM.

When Henry died in 2008, his brain was removed and scanned repeatedly using MRI. It was then sent to the Brain Observatory at the University of California. In 2009 scientists sliced the brain into 2,401 pieces, each just 70 micrometres (millionths of a metre) thick. Their aim was to create stained histological slides that would enable researchers to map the brain in new ways and connect individual anatomical structures with specific functions.

The dissection took 53 hours to complete and five blades were used in the process. Each slice was photographed and the images were posted online, and the whole procedure was streamed live on the internet.

Henry and his doctors could not have imagined the technology that would eventually be used to preserve his brain, nor could they have predicted the advances in neuroscience that would result from his operation, his condition and his generosity.

To read about how resection operations are done today and to hear a surgeon talk about how technology helps him operate, read our interview with Conor Mallucci.
Lead image:
Dr Jim Myers, Imperial College London/Wellcome Collection CC BY NC

Questions for discussion

Would you donate your brain to science? Why?

What is the Brain Observatory? Search online to find out more.

Further reading

Phineas Gage (1823-1860) was the victim of a terrible accident in 1848

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'Big Picture' is a free and impartial educational resource for biology teachers and students exploring the innovations and implications of cutting-edge science. Our articles, videos, animations, infographics and lesson ideas set out to explain biomedical science and connect it with its ethical and social challenges.

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A key finding from neuroscience research over the last few decades is that non-conscious preparatory brain activity appears to precede the subjective feeling of making a decision. Some neuroscientists, like Sam Harris, have argued that this shows our sense of free will is an illusion, and that lay people would realize this too if they were given a vivid demonstration of the implications of the science (see below). Books have even started to appear with titles like My Brain Made Me Do It: The Rise of Neuroscience and the Threat to Moral Responsibility by Eliezer J. Sternberg.

However, in a new paper, Eddy Nahmias, Jason Shepard and Shane Reuter counter such claims. They believe that Harris and others (who they dub "willusionists") make several unfounded assumptions about the basis of most people's sense of free will. Using a series of vivid hypothetical scenarios based on Harris' own writings, Nahmias and his colleagues tested whether people's belief in free will really is challenged by "neuroprediction" - the idea of neuroscientists using brain activity to predict a person's choices - and by the related notion that mental activity is no more than brain activity.

The research involved hundreds of undergrads at Georgia State University in Atlanta. They were told about a piece of wearable brain imaging technology - a cap - available in the future that would allow neuroscientists to predict a person's decisions before they made them. They also read a story about a woman named Jill who wore the cap for a month, and how scientists predicted her every choice, including her votes in elections.

Most of the students (80 per cent) agreed that this future technology was plausible, but they didn't think it undermined Jill's free will. Most of them only felt her free will was threatened if they were told that the neuroscientists manipulated Jill's brain activity to alter her decisions. Similar results were found in a follow-up study in which the scenario descriptions made clear that "all human mental activity just is brain activity", and in another that swapped the power of brain imaging technology for the mind reading skills of a psychic. In each case, students only felt that free will was threatened if Jill's decisions were manipulated, not if they were merely predicted via her brain activity or via her mind and soul (by the psychic).

Nahmias et al said their results showed that most people have a "theory-lite" view of free will - they aren't bothered by claims about mental activity being reduced to neural activity, nor by the idea that such activity precedes conscious decision-making and is readable by scientists. "Most people recognise that just because 'my brain made me do it,' that does not mean that I didn't do it of my own free will," the researchers said.

As neuroscience evidence increasingly enters the courtroom, these new findings have important implications for understanding how such evidence might influence legal verdicts about culpability. An obvious limitation of the research is its dependence on students in Atlanta. It will be interesting to see if the same findings apply in other cultures.

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This post first appeared on the British Psychological Society's Research Digest blog.

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Belief in Free Will Not Threatened by Neuroscience

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A key finding from neuroscience research over the last few decades is that non-conscious preparatory brain activity appears to precede the subjective feeling of making a decision. Some neuroscientists, like Sam Harris, have argued that this shows our sense of free will is an illusion, and that lay people would realize this too if they were given a vivid demonstration of the implications of the science (see below).

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אוניברסיטת תל אביב

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Speaker: Galit Yovel (TAU) "New Frontiers in Neuroscience and Methods of Transdisciplinary Education", The 1st HBP Education Workshop 18th-20th June 2014, Tel Aviv University, 18.6.14

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Rocketboom Tech's Ellie Rountree speaks with Alvaro Fernandez, Founder of SharpBrains, to learn more about the neurology of our brains and cognitive training. This episode was made in collaboration with Intel! Story links: SharpBrains http://www.sharpbrains.com/ brain training http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S26Kk-ueWjQ&feature=player_embedded# drivesharp http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBocuZL85BY&feature=player_embedded Hippocampus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocampus For more information on this episode visit: http://rocketboom.com/neuroscience For up to the minute updates, follow us on Twitter!

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Explanations of forgetting: Interference, context, amnesia, facial recognition & eyewitness testimony

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EXPLANATIONS OF FORGETTING It has also been found that things we already know can cause problems when trying to learn new information. This is called proactive interference Proactive Interference Both groups were asked to recall the first list of word pairs.

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Lieberman (1980) criticizes the working memory model as the visuospatial sketchpad (VSS) implies that all spatial information was first visual (they are linked). However, Lieberman points out that blind people have excellent spatial awareness, although they have never had any visual information.

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This is from the introductory lesson on memory.

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BBC - Standard Grade Bitesize Maths II - Statistics

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A BBC Bitesize secondary school revision resource for Standard Grade Maths II on statistics: semi-interquartile range, standard deviation, probability, mean, mode, median

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Remembering and Forgetting: Crash Course Psychology #14

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How We Make Memories: Crash Course Psychology #13