False memories: when the brain plays tricks on us

Remembering one thing and not the other - that's quite normal.

But sometimes our memory plays tricks on us.

Then we think we remember something that never happened - and we are absolutely convinced of the authenticity of this memory.

Manon Priebe

editor.

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Not just a single person, but entire generations collectively remember incorrectly.

Think Star Wars and the encounter between Luke and Darth Vader.

Darth Vader says "Luke, I am your father".

No doubt.

For real?

Not correct.

In reality, he says "No, I am your father".

The occurrence of this memory distortion—memories that are false but shared by a collective—scientists call confabulation, or the “Mandela Effect.”

According to the author Fiona Broome, this term was coined in 2009.

In a casual conversation at a conference, several people were convinced that Nelson Mandela was already dead because he had died in captivity in the 1980s.

Some even thought they remembered television pictures of the funeral.

The truth is that Mandela was released from prison in 1990, served as South Africa's president from 1994 to 1999 - and died decades later on December 5, 2013.

Another example: think of the Monopoly man.

Does he have a monocle in front of his eye or not?

The majority says yes, there is a monocle.

But not true.

But it fits very well with our idea of ​​an old, rich man who has fallen out of the times: anyone who wears a moustache, top hat and tails – a monocle is not far away.

Memory research speaks of “schemes” here.

If a part of these schemes is activated (moustache, top hat, tails), then the whole scheme is often activated, which also includes a monocle.

The more fan paraphernalia "Luke I am your father" is printed on, the more people believe it's a real quote.

And the more believe in it, the fewer question those who saw the scene themselves and might know better.

In addition, there is our longing for conformity: we simply like to agree with the majority opinion (even if it is obviously wrong, by the way).

Who is willing to admit to themselves that they have made a mistake and been deceived by their memory?

Of course, there are also widespread false assumptions that have already been wrongly created or spread.

For example, false reports from the media or deliberate lies by some politicians that lead to "alternative memories".

Or the myth that the Inuit have endless terms for “snow”.

A statement by the ethnologist Franz Boas, who actually said that the word for snow in the language of some Inuit tribes would be possible in many more word combinations, was probably misinterpreted.

What are the causes of collective false memories?

As in so many cases, the Internet does not disappoint when it comes to concocting particularly absurd attempts to explain the Mandela Effect.

According to some, behind the false memory is a perfidious plan of the elite, which manipulates our brains.

Keyword chemtrails.

Or aliens kidnap whole masses of people and implant them with the same false memory.

Does anyone have evidence that it is NOT so?

So it has to be true... That's how conspiracy stories work.

Or it is an "error in the matrix" - and thus an indication that parallel universes exist.

This theory states that there are infinitely many universes that exist parallel to each other.

Only sometimes do these universes cross.

For example, if a person remembers Nelson Mandela's funeral, although he is still alive at the time, the person is from a universe where Mandela has in fact already been buried.

However, the person is currently in a universe where Mandela lives.

Anyone who has seen the Netflix series "Dark" or the film "Interstellar" is familiar with this theory of quantum mechanics, in which humans are travelers in space and time.

And indeed, it's not just a pipe dream of Internet fanatics: Stephen Hawking also thought parallel universes were possible.

But what is the real reason?

Cognitive psychologists have long studied our (false) memory abilities.

Hardly anyone can remember everything and all the details correctly.

A study in the journal Psychological Science found out in 2020 that our memory is basically very good: The adult test subjects who were presented with scenes such as we experience them on a daily basis correctly remembered 95 percent of all details.

However, 76 percent of the participants made at least one mistake.

So the accuracy with which the participants recalled was generally very high—but remembering is not infallible.

However, our brain not only unintentionally falsifies its own memories, as in the case of the Mandela effect, and embellishes details, for example.

Sometimes we also reproduce information that was never stored in the brain: you construct

memories of your own that never took place.

This can happen through trauma and depression, but also through suggestion and manipulation.

Or just by activating a whole schema by parts of this schema.

In both cases, the person is not knowingly lying.

It's a trick of the brain and not a willful misstatement.

How does this happen?

First of all, we have to get rid of the idea that our brain is a huge memory or archive in which we store our memories in order to dig up an event from the past when we need it and reproduce it 1:1 as we experienced it.

Even a healthy brain doesn't work that way.

Rather, our brain is a dynamic network that is constantly reconnecting.

Neuroscientists call this “plasticity”.

It leads to a permanent reorganization of the brain.

We “store” what we have experienced – but selectively.

Unimportant things are discarded, experiences put together incorrectly.

We remember the worst, the remaining gaps are sometimes more, sometimes less freely associated.

Then we imagine that we have experienced something ourselves, although we only read about it in a novel or were told about it by friends.

For neurophysiology, this is simply the spread of excitation in the brain network.

“Historical Truth” versus “Narrative Truth”

If several people remember the same event, it welds them together into a collective.

Such communities of remembrance arise, for example, when people share their experiences during the war.

In the process, a shared, identical memory of all of them often gradually develops from initially different, individual narratives.

The "historical truth" no longer coincides with the "narrative truth".

Our memories are particularly unreliable during trauma and other emotionally distressing events.

This became apparent when the historian Helmut Schnatz gave a lecture to elderly Dresdeners about the bombing raids on their city in February 1945. The eyewitnesses told, in some cases in detail, about British low-flying aircraft that chased them through the streets as they ran through the city on the Find shelter from the flames.

However, the historian was able to prove that physics and technology are opposed to this representation.

Due to the firestorm, a low flight would have been completely impossible.

He was also able to look at British documents and found no evidence that planes had chased fugitives through the burning city.

This caused displeasure in the Dresden audience.

One of the old men must have shouted: “I protest against the fact that foreign historians who are not at home in Dresden are allowed to write about our hometown.

Unwittingly false testimonies

"False memory" becomes a serious problem with witnesses who unknowingly tell an untruth - and do so with the full conviction that they remember the truth.

Neuroscientist Daniel Schacter describes the case of psychologist Donald Thompson in his book The Seven Sins of Memory.

He was accused of brutal rape.

The victim testified that she recognized Thompson as the perpetrator.

However, Thompson had an airtight alibi — he was doing a live TV interview about memory distortion at the time of the crime.

The victim must have just seen the interview when the real perpetrator broke into her house and raped her.

And so she mistakenly linked Donald Thompson's face on TV to the rapist.

So the woman correctly remembered the face, but linked it to the wrong person.

manipulation from outside

False memories can also be manipulated from the outside and “planted” in the mind.

Psychologist Julia Shaw showed this when, in 2016, she persuaded students that they had become criminals as children.

Shaw was successful with the manipulation about two-thirds of the time.

So many subjects really believed they had previously committed a criminal act.

In another study, however, KA Wade was only successful with his false suggestion in less than a third of his subjects.

In the "Lost in the Mall" experiment, psychologist Elizabeth Loftus suggested adults were kidnapped in a mall as a child and taken home by a stranger.

Around 20 percent believed that – although everything about it was fiction.

In another study by Elizabeth Loftus, subjects who visited a Walt Disney theme park suggested they saw Bugs Bunny there.

Everyone thought they remembered it.

In reality, the rabbit Bugs Bunny is a character from the Warner Bros universe, not Disney.

So he can't even have appeared at the competition.

Fiona Broome, who coined the term "Mandela Effect," no longer speaks to journalists about it.

On her website, she writes that too many crude conspiracy stories have formed around the “Mandela Effect” over the years.

She is now concentrating on other things like ghosts and haunted places.