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You may take it for granted that the person whose memory you can trust the most is your own.

In this article, we will look at how false memories are created, the impact of questioning, language and other factors on our recall and the real life consequences of false memories.

False memories and False Memory Syndrome

Many of us experience false memories without even realising:

Imagine that you are walking past a person in the street and see them clearly for only a split second. Once they are out of view, you might note that they were carrying a satchel. But what color was it?

"Green," you might think, "Yes, it was green."

But then self-doubt sets in:

"Or was it the person's coat that was green - wasn't the bag blue? Yes, it was an eggshell blue. I remember now," you may ruminate.

Once you have suggested to yourself this alternative, a false memory may develop and your recollection of events can become skewed.

False memories are a normal occurrence and they will generally have little impact on our lives. In rare cases, however, a false memory can bother a person.

A person may come to believe the traumatic details of a false memory and it can then affect them in their ability to function as normal in everyday life. In such severe cases, the experience has been labelled as false memory syndrome, although there is some doubt as to its existence as a condition.

You can, however, experience and believe false memories without suffering from false memory syndrome. You might recall a previous holiday and idealize it - look at it through 'rose-tinted glasses', and remember spending all of your time on a sunny beach. You overlook the stress of the flight, finding your hotel and the days that it rained. Your memories in this case do not entirely reflect reality, but you do not suffer as a result of them.

Framing questions

Although they are referred to as 'false memories', often our memories are distorted only when we attempt to recall them. Perhaps the best known examples of this are two experiments using leading questions, conducted by U.S. psychologists Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer in 1974.

In the first experiment, Loftus and Palmer (1974) showed different videos of a car collision to different participants. Some saw a video of the car crashing at 20mph, others a video of a collision at 30mph and the rest a video of a crash at 40mph.

The participants were then asked the speed of the collision in a survey question. The question was identical for each participant except for the verb mentioned when describing the crash. Some verbs suggested that the crash was a minor collision, others a full-blown crash.

The experiment results showed that the verb used to describe the crash had more effect on the speed estimated than the actual speed of the car that the participants witnessed in the video.

In a second experiment, participants were shown similar videos of a car and later questioned about what they had witnessed. The question asked the subject whether or not they had seen any broken glass following the collision, and again, the verb describing the collision was altered to suggest varying degrees of severity.

The researchers found that the more serious the accident seemed in the question wording, the more likely participants were to recall having seen broken glass around the car.

Both studies suggest that the framing of questions following an event can affect our recollection of it, even after it has been remembered. Even seemingly slight changes, such as verb alterations in Loftus and Palmer's experiments, can create false memories of events. In fact, Loftus found in a later experiment that even the switching of 'a' and 'the' in a question can influence respondents' recollection of an object.

All of these experiments support Loftus' misinformation effect on our memories - the manipulation of past event recollection by misguidance following it; a case of what the German psychologist Georg Müller (1850-1934) may have identified as retroactive interference of information on our memories ( Lechner, Squire and Byrne, 1999).

Inventing an entire event

We have learnt from these experiments that our memory cannot necessarily be relied on for the recollection of specific details of an event. But we would know if we had been lead to believe that an entire event had been suggested to us - or would we? This question was answered by one of Elizabeth Loftus' psychology students in an experiment to gain extra credits at university:

Each family member was asked to read through the booklets and familiarise themselves with their contents, after which they were asked to recall the stories. Coan's brother recalled the story with additional details invented by himself, and was unable to identify his as being the falsified story.

This lost in the mall technique of implanting false memories was further tested in a formal experiment with Loftus and Jacqueline Pickrell ( Loftus and Pickrell, 1995), and shows how we can even adopt rich false memories that are entirely invented.

Creating false memories

Researchers conducting experiments involving human memory often need to implant invented information and use the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm to create false memories. This involves reading a list of related words to a person (e.g. 'sun, hot, relax, beach, tan, after-sun') and asking them to recall them. It has been found that people will often recall false memories of words which are semantically linked, such as 'holiday' or 'sunbathing', rather than the actual words that had been given to them ( Roediger and McDermott, 1995).

One use for the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm was when researchers at the University of Virginia sought and answer to the question: can your mood affect how receptive you are to false memories?

Eyewitness testimony: memories in court

Members of the first group, who did not witness a weapon, were more likely to be able to correctly identify the man than the group who saw a weapon.

One argument arising from this would be that where a witness gave testimony regarding a defendant who they said had a weapon, the accuracy their recall may be questioned with reference to the effect of weapon focus.

It has also been suggested that in cases such as those involving sexual abuse, in which historic events must be recalled, the techniques used to help a person to recall events may in some circumstances generate false memories.

The debate and research regarding false memories and memory recall continue today, demonstrating the fluidity of our memories, reminding us many factors can affect our ability to recall events even after they have occurred. Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, who lead some of the first research into false memories, has since testified in hundreds of court cases with regards to eyewitness testimonies and an increased focus on the issue has lead to an improved understanding of the techniques used to recover memories.

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How False Memories Can Affect Our Ability To Recall Events

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You may take it for granted that the person whose memory you can trust the most is your own. In this article, we will look at how false memories are created, the impact of questioning, language and other factors on our recall and the real life consequences of false memories.

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Emotion Affects Memory's Reliability | NSF - National Science Foundation

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NSF's mission is to advance the progress of science, a mission accomplished by funding proposals for research and education made by scientists, engineers, and educators from across the country.

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How a teen's apparent flashback of childhood abuse set off a debate over repressed memory

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How a teen's apparent flashback of childhood abuse set off a debate over repressed memory

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https://www.cbc.ca/radio/outintheopen/rewriting-history-1.4386189/how-a-teen-s-apparent-flashback-of-childhood-abuse-set-off-a-debate-over-repressed-memory-1.4391890

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The captain thought he saw gas chambers when he was liberating a concentration camp but said concentration camp didn't have any gas chambers

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Update: Fixed some typos.
You probably think that you remember how you first heard about the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. When I think back to the events of that day, I feel like I'm playing back a video recording of the events as I experienced them. That experience of vividness is misleading, though. Highly emotional and meaningful events produce memories that are more vivid, but those memories are subject to the same distortions that affect more run-of-the-mill memories. In The Invisible Gorilla, we reported a test of my memories for 9/11. I wrote out a detailed description of everything I could recall: who was with me, what I was doing, where I was, what I did after first hearing about it, what I did for the rest of that day. The narrative I produced was extensive and detailed. I then emailed each of the people I remembered having been with me that day and asked them to recall their own memories for that day's events. I told them nothing about what I remembered. As it turns out, 2 of the people I remembered being there had definitive evidence that they weren't. And, I hadn't remembered the person who was actually in the room with me at the time we first heard and was there for the entire morning!

One of the main reasons we suffer from the Illusion of Memory is that we rarely have the opportunity to test the accuracy of our vivid memories. We just trust that those rich details we can remember must reflect what actually happened. I encourage you to try this test for yourself - you might be surprised by the discrepancies between your own memories and those of the people who were with you.

Although most people don't get regular evidence of memory distortions, celebrities and politicians do. Yet, the media often examines the claims politicians make about their past. For example, Hilary Clinton famously claimed during the 2008 presidential primary to have come under sniper fire when landing in Bosnia some years earlier. Yet, contemporary media coverage revealed a greeting ceremony on the tarmac in which a Bosnian child read her a poem - no snipers. We can't say for certain if Hilary was lying or misremembering, but what was striking during the primary was the assumption that she must have been lying. The sort of recollection would be entirely consistent with more typical memory distortion.

Thanks to a tip from a reader of our blog, I encountered an even more dramatic example of proven memory distortion. In a 1995 film, Captain Robert Daniell was interviewed about his experiences with the British army when he helped liberate the Belsen concentration camp. The details of the interview are documented in an edited volume about the Belson camp ( Reilly et al, 1997):

Daniell recounted how he was the first British soldier to go into Belsen and how he 'saw the gas ovens, which had been cleaned out because there was no fuel to run them. This was why there were so many corpses lying around ... It was pathetic. There were worn paths to each of the gas chambers and on the side a pile of spectacles at least 6ft high.'"

Daniell reported that "it is as clear to me now as it was then." The only problem is that Belsen didn't have gas chambers. Daniell's memory conflated his personal experiences with later coverage of other extermination camps as well as inaccurate popular media coverage of Belsen. Think about that for a moment - most of us would assume that our memory for liberating a Nazi camp would be indelibly printed in our mind. It would be something we couldn't forget. How could you forget it. But, memory doesn't work like a video recording, and our memories can (and often do) change over time.

Unfortunately, people use mistaken memories like Daniell's to support revisionist conspiracies about what actually occurred in Nazi Germany. They assume that he was lying about his experiences to cover up some conspiracy. Rather than supporting conspiracies, the example illustrates why we shouldn't rely solely on individual memory to document historical events. Even if it feels as clear now as it did at the time, what we remember is not necessarily what happened.

As we discuss in The Invisible Gorilla, many conspiracy theories capitalize on memory distortions. A similar pattern emerged from George W. Bush's mistaken recollection of having seen the first plane hit the World Trade Center (footage of that plane hitting the towers didn't exist at the time - some footage was discovered months later by a documentary film crew that had accidentally recorded it). Conspiracy theorists assumed that Bush must be remembering correctly, which meant that he must have know about the attack in advance. Far more likely is that his memory was distorted via the same mechanisms that lead to my memory distortion as well as those of politicians and soldiers.

The next time you hear a politician or celebrity make a false claim about what they remember, keep in mind that they might not be lying maliciously. They might not even realize their memory is wrong (and if you tell them, they might not believe you).

Big chest thump to Michael Stopp for directing me to the quotes from Daniell.

Sources cited:
Reilly, J., Cesarani, D., Kushner, T., & Richmond, C. (1997). Belsen in history and memory. Frank Cass: London.

Other Sources:
Just about anything written by Elizabeth Loftus about memory distortion.

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Update: Fixed some typos. You probably think that you remember how you first heard about the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. When I think back to the events of that day, I feel like I'm playing back a video recording of the events as I experienced them.

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Elizabeth Loftus update on repressed memory controversy

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https://www.independent.co.uk/news/false-memory-ends-sex-assault-case-1354848.html

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Eyewitness Memory Is a Lot More Reliable Than You Think

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What law enforcement—and the public—needs to know

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Isa, Rajmund and Albert <3

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On Capitol Hill yesterday, Christine Blasey Ford recounted to the Senate Judiciary Committee how Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had allegedly sexually assaulted her 36 years ago.

It was Ford's first public appearance since her allegations against Kavanaugh came to light. Throughout the testimony, Ford remained composed, compelling and credible, recounting her version of events: how she was pushed into a bedroom by an inebriated Kavanaugh and a friend, Mark Judge, during a party, and how Kavanaugh had covered her mouth to prevent her from screaming, before she managed to escape.

When asked how sure she was that Kavanaugh was the culprit, she replied without hesitation: "100 per cent". In a follow-up question, Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein asked her how she could be so sure of it, Ford replied: "The same way that I'm sure that I'm talking to you right now. It's - just basic memory functions. And also just the level of norepinephrine and epinephrine in the brain that, sort of, as you know, encodes - that neurotransmitter encodes memories into the hippocampus. And so, the trauma-related experience, then, is kind of locked there, whereas other details kind of drift."

Ford knows what she is talking about. After all, she has a PhD in counselling psychology from the University of Southern California and currently works as a research psychologist at Stanford University. She's an expert on the science of memory.

Indeed, some memories can last a lifetime, while others easily disintegrate after a few minutes. Most are eroded by the passage of time, sometimes distorted by social influence, media narratives, even therapy. But old memories are not necessarily false ones. "I would never assume a memory is false just because it is non-contemporaneous," says Julia Shaw, a psychological scientist at University College London who specialises in false memories, and co-founder of Spot, a workplace harassment chatbot. "While time makes it more likely that forgetting and contamination have had the possibly to occur, it is inappropriate to assume that these processes necessarily happened. A lot of time passing - even decades passing - is insufficient to indicate that a memory is wrong."

Furthermore, rarely are strong memories akin to detailed photographic recollections of past events. They might feature vivid moments that were central to the experience, in particular ones that elicited a stronger emotional response at the time, while peripheral details such as location or date are likely to be forgotten. This is particularly true in the case of sexual assault: "A memory of a particularly traumatic part of a sexual assault is also likely to be replayed by the victim as flashbacks, further strengthening the memory at great suffering to the victim," Shaw says. "This can be the moment a victim realises there is no escape (like having a hand put on her mouth), or the immediate aftermath, or any other piece of the event that carries emotional significance. The emotionality is subjective, but this doesn't call into question the accuracy of the memory."

Leading up to the hearing, some questioned Ford's credibility, particularly why she had not come forward at the time of the incident. Predictably, among those critics was president Donald Trump, who tweeted: "I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents. I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place!"

To Shaw, this is one of the most pernicious misconceptions about people who are sexually assaulted: the notion that if a sexual assault had indeed been traumatic, the first thing that victims would do was report it to the police. "If they didn't, then either a) it didn't happen, or b) it wasn't really so bad," Shaw says. "These assumptions are untrue and devastating to the many who have been the victims of sexual assault. And I loathe when these devastating assumptions are veiled in the science of false memory.

"People often come forward many years after something happens. This is not itself a reason to doubt a memory. There are so many barriers to reporting assault and rape, that statistics show that most women never come forward at all - which is a travesty."

Shaw points out that victims are usually reticent to report sexual assault because of fear that they won't be believed and that they will be judged disapprovingly.

At the hearing, the Republican strategy was to attempt to poke holes in Ford's story. "I think the narrative right now around these am accusations is to imply that because memories can be unreliable that this one must be as well," Shaw says. "But when used in this way, talking about false memories becomes a gaslighting technique rather than a real attempt to explain. I think this stems from a persistent unwillingness to accept that most women who are sexually assaulted do not report it contemporaneously, and some of these people choose to come forward years later when they are ready." Regardless, this proved ineffective. During the questioning, Ford remained credible throughout.

"Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter, the uproarious laughter between the two."
Christine Blasey Ford

The same, perhaps, can't be said about Kavanaugh, who testified after Ford and vehemently denied the allegations. "This seems like a normal response, both if he is innocent or if he is guilty," Shaw says. "Men often maintain their own innocence even when evidence clearly suggests otherwise."

From the get-go, in stark contrast with Ford's calm demeanour, Kavanaugh was combative, often exasperated, sometimes bizarre. When asked by Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse about certain mentions in his high school calendar to throwing up after drinking too much, he countered: "I like beer. I don't know if you - do you like beer, Senator? What do you like to drink?"

Kavanaugh's high school drinking habits were central to the line of questioning by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Ford alleges that when Kavanaugh and Judge were drunk when she was assaulted; the two other women - Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick - who have made allegations against Kavanaugh, also cite heavy drinking .

Although Kavanaugh has conceded that he would occasionally drink to excess, at the hearing he persistently filibustered when the questions implied that he had a drinking problem as a young adult. This is not corroborated by Kavanaugh's colleagues at the time. In the book, Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk, Judge makes reference to a certain Bart O'Kavanaugh, a character with a penchant for inebriation. And even yesterday, Lynne Brookes, Kavaunaugh's former classmate, said on CNN: "I watched the whole hearing," Brookes said. "And a number of my Yale colleagues and I were extremely disappointed in Brett Kavanaugh's characterisation of himself and the way he evaded his excessive drinking questions."

The question of whether heavy drinking can in fact lead to forgetting crucial episodes of the past is legitimate. "Mild to moderate drinking does not seem to have much of any effect on memory, but drinking heavily can quickly lead to forgetting," Shaw says. Even Ramirez was initially hesitant because she had been drinking when the alleged attack occurred, only deciding to come forward after spending six days assessing her memories with her lawyer. "We have a tendency to undervalue witnesses and victims who were drunk at the time of a crime," Shaw says. "This process of filling in the gaps over time is more problematic than remembering everything straight away, because it invites social discussion which can contaminate what is remembered."

This wasn't, of course, a criminal trial. Even after a FBI investigation - which is unlikely at this point - it would be difficult to establish beyond reasonable doubt what had happened at the house party in Bethesda, Maryland, in the summer of 1982. Even if Kavanaugh is guilty, it's unlikely that his memory of the incident is, like Ford's, fortified by a strong emotional response. "Perpetrators of sexual assault are almost always more detached emotionally, hence, more forgettable," Shaw says. "They are far more likely to be enjoying themselves at the expense of their victim. This means that there is no reason to assume that the memory at the time should be encoded strongly."

This, sadly, is not the case for the victim. At one point in the hearing, when Ford was asked what was her strongest memory of the incident, she replied: "Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter, the laugh," she said, the voice crackling under the weight of her pain. "The uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense."

"You've never forgotten that laughter," continued Senator Patrick Leahy. "You've never forgotten them laughing at you?" And she nodded.

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The science of memory shows why we must believe Ford's testimony at the Kavanaugh hearing

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On Capitol Hill yesterday, Christine Blasey Ford recounted to the Senate Judiciary Committee how Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had allegedly sexually assaulted her 36 years ago. It was Ford's first public appearance since her allegations against Kavanaugh came to light.

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False memories - Lost in a shopping mall - Elizabeth Loftus

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False memories - Lost in a shopping mall - Elizabeth Loftus

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False memories - Lost in a shopping mall - Elizabeth Loftus

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icole Kluemper's home is filled with mementoes: navy medals, a collage of photographs, a portrait of her old dog. Every wedding anniversary has been carefully celebrated, most recently with a small bronzed statue, for eight years. From her bedroom window, she can see the hill where she and her husband married, and can recite every moment of the day. There is a reason for this careful archive. "My memory," she says, "is a matter of some debate."

In precise tones, Kluemper, 39, explains how she came to be part of one of the most controversial cases in modern psychology. This is the first time she has talked to the media about her story. For years, she was known only as Jane Doe.

"When I was about four, I accused my biological mother of sexually molesting me," Kluemper says, sitting in the living room of her peaceful split-level home to the east of San Diego. "She and my father were in the process of getting a divorce. As part of the custody evaluation, a forensic evaluation was done."

Her parents' marriage had broken down within months of her birth, but the divorce had been brutal and long, with the battle for custody sprawling over years. In 1984, to create evidence for court hearings, a psychiatrist called David Corwin filmed interviews with Kluemper.

In the video, Kluemper, by then six, is playing with her crayons. Her dark, curly hair is held back by a pink ribbon, and her smile is missing a front tooth. Behind her are shelves of heavy legal textbooks. She looks into the video camera occasionally, articulate for a small child. It is only the words that are shocking: a small girl describing how her mother has sexually abused her.

As a result, Kluemper's mother lost custody of her daughter. Kluemper went to live with her father and stepmother. Then, when she was 12, Kluemper's father had a stroke and had to move to a convalescent home.

"At that point, since I didn't have any family members to step in and take custody of me, I lived in several different state-run or private living situations," Kluemper says. In fact, she was left with barely any family at all. Her mother had disappeared from her life, and she was not close to her half-brother. In one year, she moved eight times, ending up in an informal foster home with other kids.

There was one constant in the chaos: Corwin. With the assent of Kluemper and her father, Corwin was using the video of Kluemper as part of his training of fellow psychiatrists. He believed this recording was an unusually clear and effective illustration of a child explaining abuse. As a result, Corwin contacted Kluemper occasionally to ensure that she still consented to his use of the recordings.

But over the decades, Kluemper forgot what was actually on the videos. As time went by, she couldn't remember any more why she didn't see her mother. By the age of 16, Kluemper knew the videos existed and that they were being used as training aids, but no longer remembered what they contained.

Around the time that her father died, four years after his stroke, contact with her mother was re-established at the suggestion of Kluemper's then foster mother.

"At that time, I didn't remember any more why I had been taken from my biological mother's custody," Kluemper says. "And, as you can imagine, having a parent pass away at 16, anyone would be looking for something to grab hold of."

But her mother's erratic behaviour sparked questions, and Kluemper decided she had to see the videos. She contacted Corwin and asked if she could watch them.

The request created an ethical dilemma for Corwin. It seemed wrong to withhold the videos from Kluemper, but he couldn't just send them to the by now 17-year-old and hope for the best. Eventually, they agreed that they should watch the videos together when he was next in California. Meticulous as always, Corwin filmed Kluemper consenting to watch the videos.

On the video, they discuss the situation and suddenly Kluemper appears to remember the abuse. In a few seconds, she goes from truculent teenager to broken child. There are differences between her description at six and her recall at 17. When she was six, she had referred to repeated assaults. In the later video, she recalls only one episode. At 17, she is less confident that it was deliberate abuse. "She was bathing me, and I only remember one instance, and she hurt me. She put her fingers too far where she shouldn't have, and she hurt me," she remembers on the video.

There is this moment of, where did that come from? It's like being slapped in the face

Today, Kluemper still looks bewildered at the surge of memories that overtook her so abruptly. "All of a sudden, I am like: 'No, I do remember,'" Kluemper says now. "And there is this moment of: where did that come from? It's almost like being slapped in the face when you're not expecting it."

Accidentally creating a video of someone apparently recalling sexual abuse was unprecedented. Once again, Kluemper granted Corwin permission to use her story, and he published an academic article carefully shielding his subject behind the pseudonym Jane Doe.

As Corwin wrote in his 1997 paper: "This case is unusual and perhaps unique in documentation; both the child's disclosure at age six and the young woman's sudden recall of the abuse at age 17 - after several years of reported inability to recall the experience - are preserved on video."

Critically, it is almost impossible to "test" for this sort of memory recall. "For obvious ethical reasons, traumatic amnesia cannot be produced in controlled studies with human beings," Corwin noted. "We cannot experiment on humans by raping, torturing, or bombarding them to verify in a laboratory setting that some percentage of human subjects will or will not develop amnesia."

The paper's publication in 1997 caused significant controversy in the world of psychiatry, upsetting long-held views. For most of the decade, a debate had raged between psychologists, therapists and psychiatrists over the existence of "repressed" memories. Known as the "memory wars" of the 1990s, the dispute was sparked in part by the case of an American man called George Franklin, who was accused by his daughter, Eileen Franklin-Lipsker, of the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl. Franklin-Lipsker's childhood friend, Susan Nason, had been killed in 1969, and 20 years later, in 1989, she claimed to recover memories of her father's alleged crime. Despite having no recall of this for two decades, she insisted she was reminded of the killing when she looked at her own young daughter.

Psychiatrist David Corwin, who filmed Kluemper aged six and 17.

Franklin was the first man to be jailed on the basis of a "recovered memory", despite always insisting he was innocent. He was sentenced to life in jail in 1990, with the judge condemning the former firefighter as "wicked and depraved". There followed a number of high-profile cases that seemed to support those psychiatrists who believed it was possible for children to recover memories of abuse years later. Others, however, including Professor Elizabeth Loftus, who testified on Franklin's behalf, argued that there was no scientific evidence to support these "memories". In 1996, amid doubts over his daughter's testimony, Franklin was exonerated. Now, a year later, along came Corwin with what seemed to be video evidence supporting the existence of repressed memories.

For Kluemper, the second interview with Corwin had been an attempt to put the past behind her. She cut off contact with her mother and signed up for the US navy. She rose rapidly to become a helicopter pilot, a job that demanded extensive technical skills.

"The navy provided me with a structure I desperately needed," she says. "And because I had a very, very difficult job to do, and because that job required that I compartmentalise these things that had happened to me, those were the times that I was given respite from the anger."

I just thought this was very fishy. And the records began to convince me this mother was innocent. It was tragic

She operated from the naval base on Coronado Island, just off San Diego, and flew her helicopter for hundreds of hours over the course of her career. She was part of a counter-narcotics force off South America, and the search-and-rescue efforts after Hurricane Katrina, hovering over the flooded houses of New Orleans during the desperate hunt for survivors. "In one house, a little girl wouldn't leave without her cat," she remembers. "We took the cat."

She took pride in her job. "The navy was exciting. It gave me an identity when I was sorely lacking one. It was a good scaffold for rebuilding my life."

But one day, she started hearing rumours of an investigation into her past. Inexplicably, a private investigator had turned up on the doorsteps of old friends. "As he left, he said: 'Oh, tell Nicole that she needs to put air in her left front tyre.' My car was parked up front, so he knew which car was mine. It was a sickening feeling, to know there was someone watching."

A woman approached Kluemper's half-brother, stepmother and biological mother, asking for details about Kluemper's life. The same woman had apparently approached Kluemper's foster mother, claiming to be Corwin's boss. Thinking that she was talking to someone Kluemper knew and trusted, her foster mother spoke for several hours about Kluemper's teenage years, saying that she sneaked out to meet boys and drink alcohol.

Kluemper's biological mother, meanwhile, apparently told the woman that when she had tried to leave her husband, he had threatened her, saying that "he would take 'Jane' away from her and destroy her life". She also said that Kluemper's father "drank scotch in the way most people drink water". Kluemper, who adored her father, insists this was simply not true.

At first, Kluemper couldn't understand why anyone would be taking such an interest in her life. Then she realised it had to be something to do with Jane Doe.

itting in her office in the University of California, Irvine, Loftus speaks with the confidence of a woman at the end of a long and distinguished career. A photograph of her with Bill Clinton sits on the book-lined shelves. The only jarring note is a gun target pinned to the wall, complete with bullet holes. Now 72, Loftus studied for her first degree at UCLA and for her doctorate in psychology at Stanford. She worked her way up to a senior role at the University of Washington, before moving, in 2002, to Irvine.

Along the way, Loftus has carried out groundbreaking research into memory. Her famous "lost in the mall" study, in 1995, showed that if people were told they were lost in a shopping mall as a young child, many would subsequently "remember" the experience, and even embroider the memory. Another study showed that telling subjects they didn't like certain foods could potentially help with obesity. "Or you could give them a negative memory of getting sick on an alcohol as a teenager, and then they're not as interested in that alcohol," she explains.

In Loftus's mind, memory is like a Wikipedia page: anyone can add to it or, with the right factors, rewrite it. One of her key discoveries was proving that people will recall events differently, depending on how they are questioned, whether by a psychologist or a police officer.

As her stature grew, Loftus's skills began being requested in court cases - including that of Franklin. By her own calculations, she has worked on 300 court cases over the past 40 years. It is a career that is both high-profile and lucrative. And it has put Loftus in the spotlight: the gun target on the wall comes from a time during the memory wars when she was getting so many threats, she decided she should learn to shoot. "These people - the repressed memory therapists, some of them, and the patients that they persuaded - they fight dirty," she says.

But through it all, she has remained unconvinced by the science behind repressed memories. "There is no credible evidence for it," she says, firmly. "Some day, we may be able to find it. But that you take this chunk of traumatic feelings and wall it off, and it resides there in some pristine form? It leaks and makes you do bad things and have symptoms, and you need to peel away this layer of repression? No."

Professor Elizabeth Loftus: 'These repressed memory people, they fight dirty.' Photograph: Steve Schofield/The Guardian

In 1993, the British Psychological Society convened a team to consider whether some psychologists might be accidentally implanting false memories of child sexual abuse in their clients. The following year, Loftus published one of her best-known books, The Myth Of Repressed Memory. Once she started looking at Kluemper's case more closely, she became convinced that her mother had been falsely accused. "I just thought this was very fishy," she says. "I was able to find the identity of Jane Doe. And once I could find the name, I could get into the divorce file, and find the records that began to convince me this mother was innocent. It was tragic."

Loftus came across details that Corwin had not included in his paper, and concluded that Kluemper's mother was the innocent victim, financially outgunned by the older and more sophisticated father. "They were separated from the time she was eight months old," Loftus says. "They fought and fought until the sex abuse case got solidified and the mother lost the fight." Loftus hypothesised that someone else had put the thoughts of abuse into Kluemper's mind.

Loftus made contact with Kluemper's mother, who insisted she was innocent. "She was so grateful that someone finally believed her," Loftus says now.

I spoke to Kluemper's mother on the telephone, and she said she was still grateful for Loftus's assistance, and that her life had been destroyed by the allegations of sexual abuse, which she says are false. "It was a nightmare that went on for a long time. It completely destroyed me. My kids are everything to me and they always came first."

But defending Kluemper's mother was not Loftus's only motivation. She was also concerned about Corwin's use of the videos: "He was showing her videotapes publicly, he wrote a big article in which he had extensive excerpts." Loftus believed it was vital to subject Corwin's thesis to scientific scrutiny. "I felt that the Jane Doe case was doing harm. It was being used and introduced in other cases as proof that repressed memories were real - and used against other people that I would bet my house were innocent."

nfortunately, to prove Corwin wrong, Loftus had to shine further light on Kluemper's past. As the psychologist continued to dig, Corwin worked out who was behind the investigation. Horrified by the intrusion, in 1998, Kluemper tried to bring it to a halt.

"I asked her to stop," Kluemper says. "She didn't stop. At that time, Elizabeth Loftus was at the University of Washington. I went to the University of Washington, the ethical use of human subjects committee, and I asked them to review what she had done."

The University of Washington put Loftus under investigation, but she was cleared of any wrongdoing. She left the university, but continued to investigate the case. In 2002, now at Irvine, she published an article.

I lost the ability to trust. It was like someone threw a brick through the front of my life and it shattered around me

Kluemper remembers vividly the day Loftus published her article concluding it was likely that Jane Doe had never been sexually abused. "I can only describe it as you're standing in your home town, where people definitely know you, and this giant hand comes down and grabs you by the back of the neck, rips all your clothes off and then puts you right back down completely naked, for everyone you know and care about to stare at you. Parts of you that you don't want anyone to see."

Although Loftus had not directly named her, Kluemper believed it was possible to identify her through the article. News organisations take particular care when reporting on the victims of sexual abuse to ensure that they cannot be identified by jigsaw identification, which is when pieces of information fit together to identify a victim. Loftus, by contrast, set out all the steps she had taken to ascertain Jane Doe's identity, and included several details about the family.

Though Loftus still maintains it was not possible to identify Jane Doe, Kluemper says: "It felt like the most incredible invasion. I lost the ability to trust people. I am still trying to get that back completely. It was like someone threw a brick through the front of my life, and it shattered around me." In approaching her biological mother, stepmother and foster mother, Kluemper felt that Loftus had targeted the three women in her life who should have been protecting her. Furious, she approached the American Psychological Association, but Loftus had resigned from the organisation, so there was no recourse there.

Kluemper decided to sue. The suit went through two rounds of court. Several of her claims were struck out, but it was decided that the court could examine the argument that Loftus had misrepresented herself when talking to Kluemper's foster mother. Loftus insists that she did not misrepresent herself, but the two sides ended up settling, with Loftus's insurance making a small payout. However, under California's anti-Slapp laws (strategic lawsuit against public participation, to stop groundless lawsuits), and because several of her claims were struck out, Kluemper was hit with $250,000 in legal costs.

Today, Loftus says she regrets the financial crisis that engulfed Kluemper. "I had a phone conversation when I tried to warn her. She may not remember that part of the conversation."

The costs were unpayable for Kluemper, and her navy advisers recommended that she declare bankruptcy. That meant leaving the navy. Once again, Kluemper found her life collapsing.

ven now, two decades later, Corwin is horrified by the sequence of events unleashed by his report into the Jane Doe case. Speaking from the University of Utah, where he now works, Corwin says he was extremely careful only to report the bare facts. "I wasn't an extremist in the memory wars," he says. "I am a forensic child psychiatrist and I have seen all kinds of different cases. We never used the words 'repressed memory'. We tried to describe the phenomenon objectively, without theoretical implications."

Before publishing the paper, and with Kluemper's consent, he invited people "from across the spectrum" to review the videos - including "people who had a lot of scepticism about whether this was even possible. We didn't attempt to slant it. We thought it was useful at the time just to illustrate that this in fact happened".

He always recognised the conflict in treating a six-year-old as evidence, but points out that from Sigmund Freud onwards, psychiatry has depended on case reports. "You couldn't plan it. It just happened," Corwin says. "The main concern here is, what does this mean for science? What does it mean for publication? Case reports have been a cornerstone of the evolution of medical and psychiatric knowledge, and development." He is worried that what happened to Kluemper has affected their use. "From the scientists' professional perspective, there are probably some who are more wary of publishing case reports, because of fear."

He says he remains confused by Loftus's actions. "She phoned me to tell me it was about to be published, and by then it was too late to do anything," he says carefully. "Then I read it, and in my view there were many, many inaccuracies."

He remains close to Kluemper, speaking to her regularly. For her part, she is now able to laugh at the psychiatrist's guilt. "I've said to him: 'In all seriousness, Dave, you've got to let it go.' And I don't know if he can." She believes it was the detail of Corwin's science - and the publicity it received - that motivated Loftus; that if she couldn't question the science, she had to throw doubt over his subject. "In my opinion, she did it because she was starting to get questions about the Jane Doe case when she was testifying as an expert witness, and it was starting to be problematic for her," Kluemper says. "I think it was affecting her livelihood."

Meanwhile, Kluemper was bankrupt and unemployed. The navy, with its sense of belonging and achievement, was gone. "I was angry," she says. "I spent a number of years being angry." Salvation came from an unexpected direction. Despite the trauma, Kluemper had been inspired by her interaction with the psychiatrist.

"What I remembered of David Corwin was that he was somebody who just wanted to hear what I had to say. Because, in a divorce situation, both parents have their own agenda. But I distinctly remember, even at five years old, that Dave Corwin was only interested in what I had to say. I wanted to do what he did."

So Kluemper started again. She trained as a psychologist, and today works at a non-profit healthcare centre in Linda Vista, San Diego. She is routinely the first contact children ever have with mental health services. "It's like someone took a snowglobe and shook it up, and now their world is in freefall. So, to be able to stand with them until everything settles down and then watch them go back to the world not as victims, but as survivors; to be able to watch them go back to the business of being a seven-year-old or a 17-year-old - that is what makes it worthwhile to me."

Today, Kluemper is glad she returned to Corwin. "If I hadn't gone back and watched those videos at 17... It did in the end bring the pieces of my life together in a way that nothing else could have. I didn't appreciate it for years." But she is no longer confident about what happened all those years ago. "There are days when I think I was molested by my biological mother and there are days I am fairly convinced it didn't happen. It is a very difficult way to live. More days, I am convinced it is true... It feels like someone just took an eraser, sort of, and smudged my life."

Though she is now content, living with her husband in southern California, Kluemper retains a sense of outrage over what she feels was Loftus's intrusion into her privacy. She empathises with rape victims who have their memories questioned on the witness stand.

Bill Cosby arriving at a court hearing last year. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

She has been moved by the recent Bill Cosby case, in which the entertainer was accused of aggravated indecent assault. Dozens of women have come forward to speak about memories of his attacks, which Cosby denies, but almost all are time-barred by the statute of limitations. "I'm not sure if there is a more significant sense of outrage than that of having your own memories challenged," Kluemper wrote in an early email exchange. "I was indignant, and I would imagine these women feel similarly."

Loftus was involved in the defence on the Cosby case, which will be retried in November, and it was partly this that inspired Kluemper to speak out about her distress in the aftermath of the Jane Doe case. "What are we if we are not our life experiences?" Kluemper asks. "If we are to believe that those memories are as fallible as some researchers want us to believe they are, what does that leave us with? What are we doing here?"

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'Some days I think I was molested and others I'm sure it didn't happen': a controversial case of repressed memory

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
icole Kluemper's home is filled with mementoes: navy medals, a collage of photographs, a portrait of her old dog. Every wedding anniversary has been carefully celebrated, most recently with a small bronzed statue, for eight years. From her bedroom window, she can see the hill where she and her husband married, and can recite every moment of the day.

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Some people believed that he died in prison, and when he died in 2013 some people got sp00ked
http://theconversation.com/the-mandela-effect-and-how-your-mind-is-playing-tricks-on-you-89544

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In February 2016, Julia Shaw received a call from a lawyer regarding a criminal case. It involved two sisters who, in 2015, had given the police vivid descriptions of being sexually abused by a close female relative. They alleged that the abuse had taken place between 1975 and 1976. The lawyer, who was representing the defendant, wanted Shaw's input as an expert witness.

Shaw, a criminal psychologist at the London South Bank University, was struck by how unusual the scenario was. "Usually, in cases of sexual abuse, the father is the accused," she says. "In this case, it was a girl." At the time of the alleged abuse, the sisters had been around four and seven years old, and the relative was between ten and 12.

As she leafed through the interview transcripts, Shaw noted the older sister's language. "She kept saying, 'My childhood was rough and I buried so much. I think it was my coping mechanism, I must have just blocked it.' These are things that point to an assumption of repression. This is the idea that if something bad happens, you can hide it in a corner of your brain," she says.

The older sister also told police that her recollection was unearthed suddenly by a photograph that her relative had posted on Facebook, triggering memories of a few instances when they were repeatedly made to perform sexual acts in an upstairs room of the family home. The younger sister told police that she couldn't remember most of what had occurred, but agreed with her sibling's version of events. To Shaw, this indicated social contagion: when testimonies are tainted, or even formed, by others' accounts of what happened. "The transcript also gave the impression that the [first] complainant was at times also comfortable with guessing memory details, saying, for example, 'I can't remember, I just had this really weird feeling that she used to make us do stuff to each other,'" Shaw recounts.

Taking into account the claims of repressed memory, the 40 years that elapsed between the alleged crime and the accusation, and the memory sharing between the two sisters, Shaw could reach only one conclusion: although the two sisters were probably convinced of the veracity of their allegations, their accounts weren't reliable. "I don't try to figure out if a person is guilty or innocent," Shaw says. "It's about whether the memory is reliable or not."

The case was eventually dropped due to new evidence that the defendant provided in court. Now, the defendant is trying to put the ordeal behind her. "I like being the person to say, 'actually, this is bad evidence,' if it is," Shaw says. "That's something you can't do if you don't know the science."

As a researcher, Shaw studies how false memories arise in the brain and applies it to the criminal-justice system. Contrary to what many believe, human memories are malleable, open to suggestion and often unintentionally false. "False memories are everywhere," she says. "In everyday situations we don't really notice or care that they're happening. We call them mistakes, or say we misremember things." In the criminal-justice system, however, they can have grave consequences.

"False memories are everywhere. In everyday situations we don't really notice or care that they're happening. We call them mistakes, or say we misremember things."
Julia Shaw, criminal psychologist

When Shaw works on cases she systematically looks for red flags. Cues such as age are important. For instance, before we reach the age of three, our brains cannot form memories that last into adulthood, meaning that claimed recollections from that period are suspect.

She also investigates who the accuser was with when they recalled the memory, what questions they were asked and whether in other circumstances, such as therapy, somebody could feasibly have planted the seed of a memory that took root in their minds.

Finally, Shaw looks for claims that the memory resurfaced suddenly, out of the blue, which can point to repressed memories. It's a discredited Freudian concept that supports the premise that dredging up supposedly forgotten memories can explain a person's psychological and emotional turmoil, but scientifically, it's unsubstantiated.

Understanding the ramifications of memory-gone-wrong drives Shaw. She believes that a limited awareness of memory research in therapy, policing and law is contributing to systemic failures, and is training the German police on improving interrogation methods. She wants to eradicate the misconceptions about memory. "We've done things that people in policing or law don't understand," she says. "An academic journal has ten people reading it. We're doing this to have an impact."

Allegations of sex abuse and satanic rituals hit the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, involving Peggy McMartin Buckey. Accusations by a mother that her child had been sodomised snowballed into an investigation, with allegations from hundreds of pupils. In 1990, these convictions were overturned as it was judged that therapists had unintentionally implanted false memories in the preschoolers' minds.

I n 1989, Eileen Franklin-Lipsker, a woman living in Canoga Park, Los Angeles, was gazing at her young daughter, Jessica, when a series of disturbing memories rushed into her mind. In them, she witnessed her father, George Franklin, raping her eight-year-old friend Susan Nason in the back of his van, then crushing her skull with a rock. Nason had been missing since 1969: her body was discovered three months later in the woods outside Foster City, California, where she'd lived. But the murderer was never found. Disturbed by these memories, Franklin-Lipsker called the police. She told detectives on November 25, 1989, that 20 years earlier, her father ditched Nason's body beneath a mattress in the woods and threatened to kill her if she told anyone. She claimed that she'd repressed the shocking memory for two decades. Her recollection became the basis of an indictment against George Franklin, resulting in his trial.

In late 1990, when the trial was under way, Elizabeth Loftus, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, received a telephone call from Franklin's attorney, Doug Horngrad. He wanted her as an expert witness for the defence. Loftus had been studying memory for more than 20 years and had testified in several previous criminal cases. "What was puzzling to me was that [Franklin-Lipsker] kept changing her testimony," Loftus recalls. "She had maybe five or six different versions of how her memory came back." To Loftus, that signalled distorted or even fabricated memories.

In court on November 20, 1990, Loftus spent two hours explaining to the jury that memories are suggestible, and that Franklin-Lipsker's might not be as reliable as it seemed. Nevertheless, Franklin was convicted of Nason's murder later that month. "I was shocked at the conviction," Loftus says.

Five years later the courts agreed with Loftus. Franklin-Lipsker's sibling, Janice, testified that her sister had recovered the memories during hypnotherapy sessions that she had been attending to alleviate the depression she had suffered from since her teens. During those sessions, Franklin-Lipsker learned that her symptoms could indicate post-traumatic stress disorder, and was encouraged to recall the trigger. That, according to Loftus, originated the false memory. Hypnosis is considered an unreliable source by US and UK courts, so made her accounts inadmissible. Since Franklin's imprisonment rested on his daughter's eyewitness account, the judge overturned his conviction and he was freed.

Loftus's involvement in the case spurred her to pioneer research into false memory. In the 80s and 90s, she'd become intrigued by an upsurge in allegations of sexual abuse. The idea of repressed-memory theory was gaining traction at the time in alternative practices such as hypnotherapy and psychotherapy. Patients were encouraged to embrace visualising techniques, hypnotism and their imaginations to access repressed memories, which were usually pinpointed as violent sexual and physical abuse during childhood. "You began to see hundreds of people coming forward, saying that they had recovered repressed memories of massive brutalisation that they'd been completely unaware of," Loftus says. "I saw that something really big was going on here. It seemed that richly detailed whole memories were being planted into the minds of ordinary people [in therapy]."

"For the time, the notion was hugely controversial", Shaw says. "It was absolutely shocking. Loftus was accused of silencing victims and was verbally attacked. I also get attacked when I speak out against repressed-memory therapies. But people like Elizabeth [Loftus] and I are concerned that this has the potential to really damage lives."

In 1995 - the year Franklin's case ended - Loftus tested out her theory experimentally. Working with graduate student Jacqueline Pickrell, she recruited 24 participants and gave each of them booklets containing details of four experiences they'd had between the ages of four and six. Researchers contacted each participant's parents for details of three true stories.

The fourth story, however, was false: it involved an imaginary incident where the subject got lost in a shopping centre as a child, was rescued by a stranger and returned to their parents. To make it believable, Loftus asked the participants' parents for details that could have been true - such as the name of a local shopping centre that actually existed when the participants were young. They were asked to think about the four memories and write down as many details as they recalled. When interviewed about their recollections, some began to share how they'd felt, and even what their rescuer was wearing - despite the fact that it was all untrue. "It was groundbreaking, because it showed that we can implant false memories of entire experiences. That's something we hadn't done before in the lab," says Shaw.

Ultimately, a quarter of the participants in Loftus's study developed a detailed false memory. "The key is suggestibility. Often, false memories develop because there's exposure to external suggestive information," Loftus says. "Or, people can suggest things to themselves - autosuggestion. People draw inferences about what might have happened. Those solidify and act like false memories."

"A lot of people were studying memory errors at the time, but they weren't making it useful," says Shaw. "Elizabeth structured it in a way that people could take it into a courtroom."

In 1984, police arrested a man named Joseph Pacely in California because he matched the description of a suspect who'd broken into a woman's home and tried to rape her, but fled when others in the house were woken by the noise. The woman, known as Mrs M, identified Pacely from a line-up. But testifying on his behalf, cognitive psychologist and memory expert Elizabeth Loftus explained that cross-race misidentification is common (the accuser was Mexican), and that stress distorts memory. Pacely was acquitted, due to Loftus's evidence.

O ne morning in February 2016, Shaw sat cross- legged in the swivel chair at her desk, in the department of Law and Social Sciences at London South Bank University, where she is a senior lecturer in criminology. A petite 30-year-old, Shaw talks eagerly about her work, in a flurry of words punctuated by the occasional impatient flick of her long blonde hair over a shoulder. Her interest in memory science took hold in her teens, when she began to research her family history. Half-German, half-Canadian, Shaw was born in Cologne, Germany, and spent most of her youth moving between her birthplace, the German city of Bonn, and Vancouver, Canada. "I grew up in a family where some people had difficulty monitoring reality and struggled with mental-health issues. I knew from an early age that reality could be dramatically different for people," she says. Shaw is the first in her family to finish a degree: in 2004, she started studying psychology at the Vancouver campus of Simon Fraser University (SFU). "I didn't know exactly what I was there for. I just knew that some of my family had alternate realities. I wanted to understand that."

Shaw has idolised Elizabeth Loftus since her university days. "There aren't that many women at the top of our field. When I started studying psychology, she was one of the most important," she says. Her interests were influenced by Loftus's memory-implantation studies. In 2009, while moving from SFU to the University of British Columbia to conduct her PhD, Shaw became increasingly fascinated by the impact that false memories could have in criminal scenarios.

How to wipe and restore memories in rats

The idea that memory science can help with police questioning is based on evidence that's been growing since the late 80s. "Studies show that the subtle ways a question is pitched can affect what a witness reports. The feedback you give to a witness can modify how confident they are in their memories, and can shape those recollections," says Kimberly Wade, a psychologist at the University of Warwick who carries out false-memory research. Ultimately, poor interrogation methods can lead to mistaken eyewitness accounts, baseless accusations and even false confessions. "Why do people confess to things they never did? I think the most fascinating examples aren't because of torture or because they felt like they had to, but because they actually think they did it," Shaw says.

In 2015, Shaw set out to discover if she could implant detailed memories of committing a crime in people's minds, as a proxy for understanding how real-world false confessions arise. To do that, she used an updated version of Loftus's shopping-centre experiment. With her former PhD adviser Stephen Porter, a forensic psychologist at the University of British Columbia, Shaw recruited 60 student participants, splitting them into two groups. The first was told they'd experienced an event as teenagers, such as an injury, a dog attack, or losing a large sum of money. The second was told they'd committed a crime, such as assault or theft, as teenagers. To make the memories more convincing, Shaw wove in autobiographical information from the participants' parents - such as where they were living, and the name of a friend that the participant had at the age they'd supposedly committed the crime.

After the initial meeting, none of the participants could recall the false memory. But every night for three weeks, they were encouraged to spend a few minutes visualising the event. Adding some social manipulation, Shaw told them most people can recall memories, but only if they try hard enough.

"The criminal justice system has historically let down victims. Victims had terrible ordeals in those courtrooms. Nobody believed them, and they were ridiculed. Since Savile, it's gone in the opposite direction."
Kevin Felstead, Director of communications at BFMS

Shaw recalls the moment she realised her experiment was working. An important cue that a false memory is taking hold is the richness of the reported detail: "I had a participant who was doing my guided imagery exercise; it seems so trivial but she said, 'Blue sky, I see a blue sky.' It showed that she was buying into the idea of actually experiencing this event and was accessing a memory, as opposed to her imagination. Those were the kinds of details that ended up being the foundation for the event itself."

The combination - a seemingly incontrovertible story backed up by real autobiographical details, visualisation and performance pressure - resulted in 70 per cent of participants generating a rich false memory of the event. Previous implantation studies had rates of 35 per cent. Unexpectedly, participants were as receptive to the false memories of committing crimes as they were to the emotional ones, Shaw says, despite the assumption that people would find it harder to believe they'd acted criminally in the past.

Shaw uses the study as proof of memory's fallibility. "I always go through the study when I talk to police," she says. "They see themselves in that scenario and think 'this could be me, implanting false memories in a witness or a suspect.'"

Shaw, who is fluent in German, works mostly with German police and military forces. With the police, she typically trains senior police officers, who in turn pass on what they've learned to their subordinates at police stations across the country. In November 2016, she lectured an auditorium of 220 police officers in the Police Academy of Lower Saxony in Nienburg, Germany. As always, she started with a grounding of memory science to explain how memories fail. "It's really important to tell them not just what to do, but why. I think having that knowledge makes police much better at their jobs," Shaw says. Then she shared practical tools to help them avoid the development of false memories during criminal cases: get your witness statements early, she told them, so memories don't get muddied by time; keep people's accounts of an event separate so they don't influence each other; avoid leading questions during interrogations.

Shaw also stressed the importance of filming witness and suspect interviews, which isn't widely practiced in Germany. "It improves the outcome because police officers are more cautious about how they ask questions," she explains. It also creates an independent record so that if there are suspicions of a false memory, the police's interrogation methods can be scrutinised, she says.

After the lecture, Shaw received a rare confirmation that her lessons are beginning to take hold. A police officer approached her and said that, back at her station, she would now set up mandatory videotaping for witness statements.

Of her work with the military, she says these ideas can be a tougher sell. "There are always one or two people, usually older men, who will just come at me with anecdotes such as 'I remember being born,' or 'I have memories of my childhood, so this proves you wrong.' I say to them, 'your anecdote doesn't really battle my science,'" Shaw teaches the German military's intelligence officers biannually: her focus is helping officers understand the flaws in their own memory so they can gather more reliable intelligence. "I teach them that you can be highly confident in things that are wrong. So you need to be careful. You're making security decisions based on information that you can't write down while you're gathering intelligence."

She's also campaigning against the military's tendency towards debriefings. In conflict situations, everyone will come back and they'll immediately debrief," Shaw says. "But a big briefing error is to all share your memories, because then they all become one. You lose all the nuances."

Recently, Shaw was informed by her trainees that the military is ditching the joint debriefing habit in favour of officers independently recording their memories right after they've been in the field. "I also found out that my book was a Christmas present for those I work with on the base," she laughs.

During therapy sessions she undertook in 1990, a 19-year-old Californian girl named Holly Ramona began to recall being abused by her father. Her memories were aided by doses of sodium amytal - so-called "truth serum" - known to make people believe they're recalling real events. Her father successfully sued the therapists for negligence in 1994, and was the first case to find therapists guilty of implanting false memories.

W hat makes our memories so susceptible comes down to the way the brain stores information. That's encapsulated by a concept called Fuzzy-trace theory, first described in the 90s by American psychologists Charles Brainerd and Valerie Reyna. The theory suggests that our brains lay down memories in two forms: gist and verbatim-memory traces. Gist traces record broad features of an event; verbatim traces store precise details. "The verbatim is exact, and the gist is general," Shaw says. So, verbatim traces record a person's eye colour and name, while the gist traces register how well you got on and whether you liked them.

Memory distortions arise because the brain stores and recalls these types of information independently, according to the theory. Since gist memories are also longer-lasting and more reliable over time than verbatim, that leads to memory cross-speak. Shaw explains in her book, The Memory Illusion: "When the gist traces are strong, they can encourage what are called phantom recollective experiences, which take the familiarity of the gist as a good cue for verbatim interpretations."

We don't generally remember the verbatim pieces of a lot of things, according to Shaw, "so when we need to recall verbatim, it can lead to confabulation - assuming pieces that weren't originally there. We embellish our gist memories." These embellishments may come from other people's accounts, our own imaginations or what we're currently experiencing - all conniving to alter our sense of objective reality. "As a general rule, memory is a reconstructive thing," says Deryn Strange, associate professor of cognitive psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at The City University of New York. "So we are not able to play back any moment in our past and expect it to be an accurate record of what happened."

How emotions are 'made': why your definition of sadness is unlike anyone else's

In June 2016, Shaw crammed herself, two PhD students and four boxes into her Mini. They were returning to London from the headquarters of the British False Memory Society (BFMS) outside Birmingham. The organisation helps people who have been accused of crimes they claim they didn't commit. The boxes Shaw was transporting contained the photocopies of thousands of carefully redacted files - call transcripts, court reports and psychiatric records - which describe the approximately 2,500 false memory cases the BFMS has amassed since 1993.

Shaw and Kevin Felstead, director of communications at BFMS, are using the dataset to identify how false memories form and evolve over time. Their survey has also revealed several features that allegations have in common: usually the accuser is known to the accused; the claims principally involve alleged sexual abuse; and most accusers are undergoing questionable therapy. "People seeking therapy are vulnerable, and they're looking for answers," Shaw says. "So if the therapist says 'You must have repressed something,' they say, 'Let's go find it.'"

Across the survey, the spectre of bad therapy looms large, usually represented by hypnotherapists and psychotherapists who embrace repressed-memory techniques. "There are still psychoanalytic schools saying repression is something we need to look for. So we've got universities teaching this nonsense to people," Shaw says. The BFMS is slowly building up a therapy blacklist, so that professionals who turn up repeatedly can be identified. "I think, right now, we have a Wild West of therapeutic methods that are applied. Just like not everybody can call themselves a medical doctor, I don't think anyone should be able to say they can help with mental health," Shaw says.

Another facet to the problem is what Felstead calls the "post-Savile effect". In 2012, revelations of sexual abuse experienced by hundreds of people by at the hands of Jimmy Savile raised the profile of sexual-abuse victims. "The criminal justice system has historically let down victims," Felstead says. "Victims had terrible ordeals in those courtrooms. Nobody believed them, and they were ridiculed. Since Savile, it's gone in the opposite direction."

People who allege sexual abuse are frequently referred to as victims from the start. "Inquiries into historic sexual abuse also refer to people as survivors," Shaw says. In 2016, London's Metropolitan police force was criticised for adopting a policy stating that anyone who made a sexual-abuse allegation would be believed. "Referring to people as victims when you're not sure victimisation has taken place has huge potential to influence the legal process," Shaw says.

In Shaw's opinion, there's a third alternative for the criminal justice system. Besides truth and lies, there are also falsehoods masquerading as reality in people's minds. She agrees with Elizabeth Loftus's suggestions in 2008, that courts should adopt a new oath: "Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, or whatever it is you think you remember?"

Emma Bryce is a science and environmental journalist. This is her first feature for WIRED. The Memory Illusion by Dr Julia Shaw is published by Random House Books, out now.

This article was first published in the July 2017 issue of WIRED magazine

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False memories and false confessions: the psychology of imagined crimes

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In February 2016, Julia Shaw received a call from a lawyer regarding a criminal case. It involved two sisters who, in 2015, had given the police vivid descriptions of being sexually abused by a close female relative. They alleged that the abuse had taken place between 1975 and 1976.

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A man who gets accused of rape and later convicted for the crime, which he didn't do.
http://www.digitalspy.com/tv/making-a-murderer/feature/a868576/making-a-murderer-timeline-steven-avery/

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You can go in and change it - but so can other people.

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How reliable is your memory? | Elizabeth Loftus

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Did he lie about his experiences in Iraq, or was he the ‘victim’ of false memory?

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The NBC News anchor Brian Williams apologized Wednesday for mistakenly claiming he had been on a helicopter that was shot down by ground fire in Iraq in 2003.

Last week, NBC Nightly News filmed Mr. Williams taking a soldier to a New York Rangers game. The public address announcer at the game explained to the crowd that "U.S. Army Command Sergeant Major Tim Terpak was responsible for the safety of Brian Williams and his NBC News team after their Chinook helicopter was hit and crippled by enemy fire" during the invasion of Iraq.

Mr. Terpak received a standing ovation, and, on Facebook, where NBC posted a video of the story, Mr. Williams was also praised. But one commenter cast doubt on the story, which Mr. Williams also told in vivid and specific detail to David Letterman in 2013.

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"You are absolutely right and I was wrong," wrote Brian Williams, the NBC news anchor. Credit Monica Schipper/Getty Images for New York Comedy Festival

"Sorry dude, I don't remember you being on my aircraft," wrote Lance Reynolds on Facebook. "I do remember you walking up about an hour after we had landed to ask me what had happened."

The military newspaper Stars and Stripes, which first reported on the Facebook comment, identified Mr. Reynolds as the flight engineer on the helicopter. He and other crew members told Stars and Stripes that Mr. Williams was not in their helicopter that had been shot down, but in one that arrived an hour later.

On Wednesday, Mr. Williams, the news anchor, replied on Facebook and admitted that he had made a mistake, acknowledging that he was not in an aircraft hit by ground fire, but instead was in a following aircraft.

"You are absolutely right and I was wrong," he wrote, adding that he had in fact been on the helicopter behind the one that had been hit. Constant viewing of the video showing him inspecting the impact area, he said, "and the fog of memory over 12 years - made me conflate the two, and I apologize."

On Wednesday's night's Nightly News broadcast, Mr. Williams reiterated his apology.

"This was a bungled attempt by me to thank one special veteran and by extension our brave military men and women veterans everywhere, those who have served while I did not," Mr. Williams said. "I hope they know they have my greatest respect and also now my apology."

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Brian Williams Admits He Wasn't on Copter Shot Down in Iraq

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The NBC News anchor Brian Williams apologized Wednesday for mistakenly claiming he had been on a helicopter that was shot down by ground fire in Iraq in 2003. Last week, NBC Nightly News filmed Mr. Williams taking a soldier to a New York Rangers game.