Let me start by asking you a question: What is surprisingly untrustworthy, can cause numerous mental health issues, and is hated by scientists everywhere? Your memory! Very few people have stopped to think about memories, and almost no one knows the horrors that come along with memories. Throughout time, the concept of memories has been overlooked and never really questioned until recently. Scientists have discovered that the cause of many mental health issues is our own memories. Also, the high level of confidence that we have in our memories is very misleading. Our memory is so self-destructive and unreliable that scientists have started creating ways to erase memories. What if I told you that your memories couldn 't be trusted? Welcome to …show more content…
That might have been a little dark, but it 's true; false memories happen to everyone, but they usually go unnoticed. A false memory is simply a memory of an experience that has been distorted. Your brain fills in the missing pieces of a memory with many possible things: details from a dream, something you saw on television, or even information from a different memory. In Erika Hayasaki’s article How Many of Your Memory Are Fake? he says, "Memory distortions are basic and widespread in humans, and it may be unlikely that anyone is immune." It 's frightening that these memory distortions are so common yet so many people go their whole life unaware of them. Jonah Lehrer’s article, The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever backs up Hayasaki 's point by saying, "since the time of the ancient Greeks, people have imagined memories to be a stable form of information that persists reliably." Proving that people have strong confidence in their memories, he then goes on to say, "Even though every memory feels like an honest representation, that sense of authenticity is the biggest lie of all." Lehrer is saying that the confidence in our …show more content…
Memories of a traumatic experience can cause a range of different negative mental health issues. After someone has been through a traumatic experience, the memories attached to the event are not like any other normal memory. Hayasaki describes this when she says, “the stronger the emotion attached to a moment, the more likely those parts of our brains involved in memory will become activated.” She explains that the reason traumatic memories hold such powerful reactions is that because, during the time of the events in the memory, there were strong emotions connections to the moment while it was being experienced. The feelings left from the memories that have strong emotions behind them can cause severe mental issues. Those emotions from the memories can hold fears that can affect almost every aspect of the person 's life, causing them not to be able to jump back into their daily life routine. PTSD is the biggest mental problem that comes from those types of memories. Lehrer helps proves this by saying, “PTSD memories remain horribly intense, bleeding into the present and ruining the future.” This shows that the unpleasant emotions that a traumatic memory holds can lead to health problems in the future, such as anxiety, addiction, and, of course, PTSD. Unfortunately, that 's not the worst part; there is not yet a way to cure these memories.
Memories can be altered based on acquisition, storage, and retrieval. Acquisition is what we notice or perceive based on what we are paying attention to. Storage is what information gets stored into one’s memory. Retrieval correlates with the false memory syndrome, which is recalling a previous traumatic experience that is false but believed to be true. The false memory syndrome is often noticed during police interrogations and leads to coerced confessions, which is when the individual being interrogated is essentially pressured to confess.
PTSD is a battle for everyone who is diagnosed and for the people close to them. The only way to fight and win a battle is to understand what one is fighting. One must understand PTSD if he or she hopes to be cured of it. According to the help guide, “A positive way to cope with PTSD is to learn about trauma and PTSD”(Smith and Segal). When a person knows what is going on in his or her body, it could give them better control over their condition. One the many symptoms of PTSD is the feeling of helplessness, yet, knowing the symptoms might give someone a better sense of understanding. Being in the driver’s seat of the disorder, can help recognize and avoid triggers. Triggers could be a smell, an image, a sound, or anything that could cause an individual to have a flashback of the intimidating event. Furthermore, knowing symptoms of PTSD could, as well, help one in recovering from the syndrome. For instance, a person could be getting wor...
Not a lot is known about what happens to individuals that have PTSD, but what? we do know is that it is caused by a change in the nervous system, where large levels of stress. hormones appear to be present. The parts of the brain that are changed following the traumatic event are the amygdala and the hippocampus. Those parts of the brain link fear and memory together.
Steffens, M., & Mecklenbräuker, S. (2007). False memories: Phenomena, theories, and implications. Zeitschrift Für Psychologie/Journal Of Psychology, 215(1), 12-24. doi:10.1027/0044-3409.215.1.12
PTSD is defined as mental health disorder triggered by a terrifying event (Mayoclinic). This ordeal could be the result of some sort of physical harm or threat to the individual, family members, friends or even strangers. (NIMH) While PTSD is typically associated with someone who has served in the military, it can affect more than just that genre of individuals. It could affect rape victims, victims in a terrorist or natural disaster incident, nurses, doctors, and police and fire personnel and bystanders. PTSD can manifest itself in many forms. The primary signs and symptoms of PTSD include but are not limited to re-experiencing symptoms (flashbacks, bad dreams, frightening thoughts), avoidance of places, situations, or events that may cause those memories to resurface, and hyperarousal symptoms (easily startled, feeling tense or on edge) (NIMH). Other symptoms may include not having positive or loving feelings toward other people, staying away from relationships, may forget about parts of the traumatic event or not be able to talk about them, may think the world is completely dangerous, and no one can be trusted.
Can memories be biased? Researchers Postarino and Doyle-Portillio (2013); Bernstein and Loftus (2009); and Bartholomew (2009) found increasing evidence to suggest that the answer to this question is yes. Explicit and implicit memories are encoded differently, but it appears both can be fallible. Also worth noting, is that this can happen without a person conscious awareness. Kolb and Whishaw (2014) examined studies that gave participants a list of words, then gave them a second list. The second list contained some, but not all items from the first list, but many participants thought the word sugar was on both, when in fact it was only on the second. Similar words like cake, sweet, and candy were on the first so this seemed to confuse participants. This phenomena researchers refer to as false memory. False memory is different from a lie; unlike a lie, the individual in this case may give false account of the past truly believing that he or she is telling the truth. In other words, false memory can simply be defined as mental experience that is wrongfully considered as the truthful representation of the past. False memories can result in both minor and serious consequences Bernstein & Loftus, 2009; Bartholomew, 2009).
PTSD is a debilitating mental illness that occurs when someone is exposed to a traumatic, dangerous, frightening, or a possibly life-threating occurrence. “It is an anxiety disorder that can interfere with your relationships, your work, and your social life.” (Muscari, pp. 3-7) Trauma affects everyone in different ways. Everyone feels wide ranges of emotions after going through or witnessing a traumatic event, fear, sadness and depression, it can cause changes in your everyday life as in your sleep and eating patterns. Some people experience reoccurring thoughts and nightmares about the event.
There have been several experiments done to try to prove that false memories can indeed be formed. One experiment, for example, was tried with a 14-year-old boy. The boy was told four memories, one of which was falsely constructed but similar to that of a true memory. The memories that were suggested took place when the boy was about 10 years younger. As the false memory was retold to him, he was asked to explain in detail what he had remembered from that event. Surprisingly, he claimed to remember the event, even though it was falsely created by the interviewer and his brother, and went on to explain what he remember to have happened, details and all. After collecting everything he had said about the four memories, he was told that one of the suggested memories was made-up and he was asked to guess which one it may have been. When he couldn’t decide which one it was, he was told that it was in fact the memory of getting lost in a store. He was confused and had trouble believing the truth.
In recent years there has been a hot debate between "repressed" vs. "false" memories. Neurobiological studies show that both suppression and recall and the creation of false memories are possible. This paper evaluates the evidence but forth by both sides of the controversy and concludes that both are feasible and separate phenomenon, which occur at significant rates in our society.
I believe that having a false memory is more likely to occur because if our real memories change over time the story, arguing that a repressed memory stays intact after years of being blocked, is illogical. Most of the cases, the repressed memory came back because it was forced by external factors that may have altered the veracity of the memory, which makes repressed memories unreliable as testimonies. I believe that there is truth in both topics, however, the cases presented in the film, and how the victims reacted to the memories gives the viewer a sign that most of the cases were under the influence of false memories.
False Memories are essentially, unintentional human errors, or a state of none-factual creativeness; which results in persons having declared memories of events and situations that did not occur in the actuality of their own lifespan reality history. If they were not unintentional errors they would be deception, which has the nature of a different purpose, morality and legality. False memories have no authenticity, realness or legitimacy, in the subject’s actual life. However they may not be complete false memories: more likely to be a combination of subjugation of previous memory cue’s; or imaginative inventive production, activated and initiated by an origination of external scenario additive as a prompt, indicator or sign, which fuses into memory recall. Therefore ‘False Memories’ are a genuine but inaccurate remembering of experimental data or recall of an genuine occurrences; both of which have rudiments of accuracy and inaccuracy in their transitive attention, giving most ‘False Memories’ partiality.
We can imply this finding of false memory in many ways in our lives. We all should note that our memory cannot be trusted 100% and we should not solely rely on our memory when it comes to making critical decisions. Just like the murder trial example used in earlier, when it comes to eye witnessing, the judge should take possible false memory into account when making the final decisions and try to obtain objective evidence along with the memory of the witness.
The article How to Tell If a Particular Memory Is True or False by Daniel M. Bernstein and Elizabeth F. Loftus, addresses the various techniques used by cognitive scientists and other researchers in hopes of distinguishing true from false memories. For this article Loftus and Bernstein, memory researchers, chose to discuss the different methods currently used, rather than trying to find new ways to tell if a particular memory is true or false. Their findings in these three different approaches are very interesting, and leads us to think critically of the veracity of true and false memories.
It is common to have experienced a trauma at some point in our lives. These traumas can affect our mental health and a series of problems can arise if left untreated. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is most likely to occur after the traumatic event. Some of the common symptoms with PTSD can be nightmares, trouble sleeping, panic attacks, flashbacks, depression, poor concertation, emotional numbness, or alcohol and drug dependencies. Depression can also set in and this brings on different feelings of hopelessness and
Bartlett’s “War of the Ghosts” experiment (1932) is a classic example of false memories. The results of his study found participants would unintentionally alter the information of a story they read in a way that was more reflective of their own lives. Otagaar, et.al. (2013) examined false memories by developing non-believed memories in adults and children about taking a ride in a hot air balloon. The results of this study found that when the participants were asked immediately after reading a passage about this memory, most did not recall going on a hot air balloon. However, when the participants were called back a few months later, a higher percentage of participants recalled having experienc...