One of the first experiments which demonstrated that we can fiddle with our memories of childhood was conducted by memory scientists Ira Hyman and Joel Pentland at Western Washington University in 1995. Their 65 adult participants were told that they were taking part in an experiment investigating how well people could remember early childhood experiences. They were told they would be questioned about a number of events which they had experienced before the age of six, details of which had already been provided by their parents through a questionnaire. Finally, they were told that accuracy of recall was paramount. But of course this was no regular childhood memory study. The researchers did not just want to see how well the participants remembered true events – they wanted to see how well they remembered events that had never actually happened. Among the true accounts obtained from the participant’s parents they had hidden a false account they had made up themselves: ‘When you were five you were at the wedding reception of some friends of the family and you were running around with some other kids, when you bumped into the table holding the punchbowl and spilled the punchbowl on the parents of the bride.’ Appropriately, the study is frequently known simply as the ‘spilling the punchbowl’ experiment. It is easy to picture this event – it’s both emotional and plausible. We all know what weddings look like in our particular cultures and countries. We all know what a punchbowl looks like, or at least what it might look like. We all know that weddings are generally formal events, so we likely picture the parents of the bride as an older couple dressed up for the occasion. It is easy to picture ourselves running around in this situation at the age of five. And, as it turns out, it is even easier to picture all this if we imagine the event happening for a few minutes. Each participant was asked first about two true events which the researchers had learned about from the participants’ parents, and then they were asked about the fake punchbowl incident. After giving participants basic information for each memory, the researchers asked them to try to form a vivid mental image of the event in order to access the memory. They asked them to close their eyes and imagine the event, including trying to picture what the objects, people and locations looked like. The researchers had the participants come back three times, each visit a week apart, and repeat the process. What they found will astonish you. Just by repeatedly imagining the event happening, and saying out loud what they were picturing, 25 per cent of participants ended up being classified as having clear false memories of the event. A further 12.5 per cent could elaborate on the information that the experimenters provided, but claimed that they could not remember actually spilling the punch, and were therefore classified as partial rememberers. This means that a large number of people who pictured the event happening thought that it actually did happen after just three short imagination exercises, and that they could remember exactly how it happened. This demonstrates that we can misattribute the source of our childhood memories, thinking that something we imagined actually happened, internalising information that someone suggested to us and spinning it into a part of our personal past. It is an extreme form of confabulation that can be induced by someone else by engaging your imagination.
The key tenet of this book, that our memories are unreliable and prone to manipulation. Just like how it is possible to implant fake memories through hypnosis, this experiment shows how easy it is to get people to alter or create “new” memories with just their imagination.
If our memories are considered unreliable, it also leads to a whole new set of implications for things such as the legal system. Can we really rely on witness testimonies for the truth? Many times, we choose what we want to believe and some people are able to even alter their memories to build the narrative they want for themselves. After all, repeat a lie enough and it becomes the truth.
What the author wants to promote is to shed some light on the malleability of our memories and by doing so, to hopefully promote ways of doing things that do not suggest or promote the creation of false memories. This book also covers certain ways to improve the reliability of what we remember. Also, just because we misremember things early on in our childhood also does not mean that they do not have a long lasting impact on our physical and mental development. Our early years are the ones that have the most impact on our brain, personality and cognitive development.
