In psychology, a false memory refers to someone remembering something that didn’t happen or remembering it differently from how it actually happened.

A research team led by scientists at the University of Amsterdam was able to trick the brains of test participants into instantly creating false memories, indicating that data in our memory instantly overlaps with previous expectations about it.

In psychology, a false memory refers to someone remembering something that didn’t happen or remembering it differently from how it actually happened.

Letter memory

To achieve those results published in the April 5 issue of “Plus oneIn PLOS One, the team conducted experiments with 534 people, in which they were each shown a slide containing the letters of the English alphabet in their true or reversed directions (for example, the letter E in the correct form and times in the reversed Ǝ direction) and then, all participants remembered the target letter within half a second of viewing the slide. were asked to take

According to the study, approximately 20% of the participants formed a false memory about the target letter, and this percentage increased to 30% after 3 seconds, when they stated that they had seen the letter in their description. Their brains are this way and they don’t remember seeing it any other way.

Faulty memory

This is not the first time a case of false memory has been documentedIn 1974 Cognitive psychologists Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer of the University of Washington were able to track this phenomenon through experiments in which they showed volunteers short videos of a two-car collision for between 5 and 30 seconds.

In these experiments, participants were asked what they saw in the crash, but the results indicated that there was a difference in people’s memories with changes in the language used in each question, such as the use of the word “bump” in some questions and the word “accident” in others.

AndThrough over 200 studies on 20,000 test subjects, researcher Loftus and his colleagues discovered that memory is not a camera for recording events like “Wikipedia,” where you enter something to record a topic, but someone edits it a short time later. Our memories of something can change over time for a variety of reasons.

Are we seeing reality?

But in addition to confirming the existence of this phenomenon in the context of very short moments, researchers from the University of Amsterdam came to another conclusion, saying that people are more likely to remember the reversed letter as the real letter compared to the opposite letter.

This implies that our memory interacts with objective reality in a momentary way, changing it in proportion to its previous experiences.

For example, our visual experiences, if the English letter E is written over time, the memory cells record it this way and expect to see it in the future, if we saw it. It’s reversed, and then the brain can sometimes reverse it so you think you’ve seen it in its natural state.