Instant Genius - How False Memories can trick your mind

Episode Date: August 10, 2023

Do you consider yourself to have a good memory? Perhaps you can recall the minor details of events that occurred years ago. But how about remembering something that didn’t even happen? This is known as a false memory, and we all have them. In this episode we catch up with Dr Julia Shaw, a psychologist at University College London and author of The Memory Illusion. She tells us all about the ways in which false memories can trick our brains and how it is even possible to implant a false memory into a person’s head. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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a bite-tized masterclass in podcast form. Each week you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear. commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus magazine. Do you consider yourself to have a good memory? Perhaps you can recall the minor details of events that occurred years ago.

But how about remembering something that didn't even happen? This is known as a false memory, and we all have them. In this episode, we catch up with Dr. Julia Shaw, a psychologist at University College London, an author of the Memory Illusion. She tells us all about the ways in which false memories can trick our brains and how it's even possible to implant a false memory into a person's head. We're talking about false memories. So before we get on to that topic, can you give us a sort of brief cliff notes version of how memory actually works?

memories are networks of neurons so of brain cells and the kind of memory that I focus on are called autobiographical memories so memories of our lives and when we're talking about those kinds of memories the networks in the brain are actually connecting lots of different parts of the brain so they don't just live in one little piece they live across the brain distributed and so when you feel like you're sort of reliving an experience those smells sites sounds tastes all of those parts of the brain that are responsible for those different sensations are recruited as part of that network. And so it's this really complicated, big network as a memory. And when we recall it, what we're doing is we're activating that network. So one idea that I think is really fascinating

is the sort of so-called malleability of memories. You know, it's like they're almost made anew each time we recall them, right? So how does that work? So think about it like how you name things on your desktop. And sometimes when we name things, we sort of go version one, version two. And you end up with like version 56, XYZ, whatever. And so all you have access to is that most recent version. You don't have access to the backups. You don't have access to the originals, which means that as things change, which they inevitably will, you don't realize that that's happened most of the time. And so when we're talking about memory malleability, it's just that these networks in the brain, they're all responsive to the people we talk to. They're responsive

to other things we experience. And we can create what are called false memories. So memories of things that didn't actually happen, which are either partial or false, either memories or errors, memory errors that are partial. So memory errors that are partial are misremembering details. And that can happen, for example, because you're talking to someone about this experience that you had, and they are reacting to certain parts of that memory and certain details going, wow, really? For example. And to others, they're obviously not really listening.

And so when you tell that story repeatedly, that social influence is coming in and is basically getting you to call the memory to be more interesting. And that's a natural thing. That isn't something that you're doing intentionally most of the time. And the power that that has is that it has the ability to change those memories over time. and you don't realize that that's happened. And so malleability comes in because our memories are changing and we don't realize it's happened.

So I think a lot of people will think, you know, I've got a great memory. This doesn't happen to me. This is impossible. My memories are true. So do we know how common these false memories are? Everybody has false memories all the time, even if they think that they have the world's best memory. In fact, we have tested, we scientists,

not me personally, have tested people who are called H-SAMs, so people with highly superior autobiographical memory, who have the best autobiographical memories in the world, as far as we know. They're the kinds of people who you can ask, what did you do, November 2nd, 1972, and they'll tell you most of what they did that day. And even those people, when you give them false memory experiments, they create false memories at about the same rate as everybody else.

And so just because you're amazing at remembering things doesn't mean you aren't also prone to the same kinds of distortions and confabulations or changes. So this seems to be a really core aspect to how the brain works. And that's because the networks in the brain aren't meant to be static. The way your brain works is as a dynamic and fluid organ, which has to constantly accommodate new information. And that's why our memories also are able to change. So are there any sort of common examples of false memories? Like are some things more likely to become a false memory or made as a false memory, I should perhaps say. I work as an expert witness.

So I look at memories or accounts to see whether or not it's possible that they are the result of a false memory. Now, I do that in two settings. I've done it in lab-based settings, so as part of experiments. But I've also done it in court settings. So when someone accuses someone of a crime and either they're a witness or a suspect or a victim, and they say, here's what I remember. And my job is to say, could that be the result of a false memory? Could there have been some sort of contamination here, either through leading or suggested interviews or through other factors?

And what I look at in terms of red flags that we can all learn from, I think, are things like, did you talk to a trusted person before you recalled the current version? So between the time that it happened and you telling your story now, who have you talked to? And if one of those people or multiple of those people are people you trust and people whose opinions you value,

then the next question is, did they tell me either that something I said was wrong, as in maybe they're changing something that I'm saying because they have a misconception about what happened? or did they perhaps lead to me to say certain things? Maybe they, back to that sort of social content, back to that sort of social remembering piece, maybe they reacted positively to certain parts or negatively to others. How could that have influenced the way I told that story?

And so thinking back to saying things like, I don't remember that or I'm not sure. If you could remember any times where you said that, you potentially have changed your memory because of that interaction. And so as an expert, I'm constantly looking for the. contamination factors that may have contributed to you changing your memory. Right. So like let's have a look at it a bit deeper into it then, like one of your studies that you did. And it almost sounds like sort of science fiction, really.

But you've actually done experiments where you've successfully planted, implanted, false memories into people. How does that worry? I mean, on the surface, that's terrifying. It is potentially terrifying, but again, it's happening all the time, except that we don't realize it's happening. And so every time someone says to you, I don't think that happened,

or presents to you a photo or a video that is completely misaligned with how you remember that happening. I mean, of course, it could be Photoshopped or it could be edited, but more likely is that actually it's your brain that's edited something, not the person who is now presenting evidence to you of what actually happened. So in those moments, the memories that we have are obviously changed. And so all I do in my experiments is I do that intentionally. So I do all of the what not to do's of memory interviewing and I get people to create these narratives that they then come to believe. So the research where I implanted false memories of committing crime was the first time that that had ever been done in a lab-based setting. But it was using a paradigm in false memory research called the familial informant false narrative paradigm. And so what that involves is contacting someone that participants trust. So I had a recruitment poster saying I'm doing

this study on emotional childhood memories, which was true, except that I was also implanting them, but I couldn't tell them that because it doesn't work if you tell people that you're going to do it. So I had this recruitment poster saying, you know, it's going to be emotional. So that was also a warning. so that was going to filter out people who didn't want to talk about negative emotional childhood experiences, which is important. And then the first step was for them to give me contact information so that I could see whether they qualify. And the contact information was actually for their parents or someone who was a trusted person in their life growing up. And so I then emailed the participants' parents. Now, the participants were university students.

Yes, there are critiques of that as well. We can get into that if you want, but they were about 20 years old on average. And so these 20-year-olds, I got their parents' contact information, contacted them with a questionnaire about things that had happened to their children, or now adult children, when they were between the ages of 10 and 14 in particular. But in general, I wanted to know if these experiences had ever happened to this person. And I asked about target events. So I asked about whether they'd ever been, whether they'd ever gotten lost,

whether they'd ever stolen something, whether they'd ever been in contact with the police at all. whether they'd ever been in a violent conflict. And I asked about a number of other things. And then I also asked the participant's parents to tell me one emotional thing that happened to their child between the ages of 10 and 14. And so the requirement was that they had to have something negative and emotional that happened because I needed that, something true. And they had to have never experienced anything like the events that I wanted to implant.

so that I was trying to prevent the situation from happening, right, where I say, do you remember the time and you go, oh yeah, and you just tell me an actual memory? Because I wanted to make sure that I was implanting it and not having you activate a real one. So that was the conditions for it. And I also asked the name of your best friend at the time, or the participant's best friend at the time. I asked where they grew up, so the location. And I used those piece of information to make the false memories more plausible. So how successful was it?

Like, how successful was the implantation? Well, what I did is I had participants come in and then I would first get them to recall the true memory that I had from their trusted persons. And then I would get them to recall the false one. And I would introduce it as your parents told me that when you were 14 years old, you assaulted someone with a weapon and the police were called. And it was scripted. So I'd always have the same setup. And they would initially go, I don't remember that. What are you talking about?

Which was, in fact, a requirement for the second one. But I said, oh, don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Let's talk about the first incident your parents reported happening, which was, and it was something true. And so we'd spend about 20 minutes in a structured what's called cognitive interview, which is actually best practices in police interviewing. But it was a very structured way to go through. So tell me everything you can remember from start to finish.

And then asking probing questions, using words that they used, asking them if they could feel things, taste things, have these multi-sensory details in their memories. And then I use exactly the same format for the second one. But they would start with saying, I don't remember that. So you're telling me I assaulted someone, what do you mean? And they would have this emotional reaction correctly to realizing or thinking they're now realizing that they did something really bad when they were teenagers. And I would say, oh, okay, well, you know, your parents really clearly said that this happened.

So would you like me to help you remember? And so that transparency of choice, I think, is really important. And everybody said yes. and when I would do that, I would actually use an imagination exercise, which is called context reinstatement. So I'd get people to close their eyes, imagine things as they could have been, and I'd walk them through, you know, what does it feel like to be there? What can you see? You're with, and then I'd introduce the name of the friend at the time, and you're in the hometown. It's fall.

It was always autumn in my false memories, because I feel like it's quite an evocative time. You can picture the leaves dropping, the crispness in the air. And in fact, during these imagination exercises, one of the participants, the very first detail I ever got, which was an indicator to me that it was starting to work, was blue sky. I can clearly see a blue sky. And the reason that's exciting is because the person didn't say, perhaps maybe there was a blue sky. They said, I can see a blue sky. And then repeating that three times over each an hour long interview, 70%, so 7.0%. of participants believed that they'd committed crimes that never happened. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this shelf will get a $75

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exceptional sound, an unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. You just touched on that that. This didn't really take very long to do, did it? It was, I think, three sessions? Three sessions each a week apart, and the week apart is sort of to let the memory set.

So the homework effectively was, don't talk to anyone, because it's really important that this comes from your brain, which was quite literal in that, in my head I always had a little chuckle. I was like, because your brain is literally inventing this. But of course, that wasn't what I told them. I said so that your brain can sort of mull it over and remember it.

And so try to imagine every day, like, what would that have been like? But it was mostly just to give some distance between the last recall and the next account. Because then I'd just pick up and say, okay, last time you mentioned this, this time, tell me everything you can remember. And they would build on what they said the week before. And then the next week they would build again. and that those memories would get more and more detailed, they'd get more and more specific.

And I had videos of these true and false, the same participant telling a true memory and a false memory. And when I showed those videos to other participants in a follow-up study in both Canada and the UK in two different follow-up studies, people couldn't tell a difference between the person recalling a true emotional memory and the false one.

And so not only when I asked the participants about whether they felt real, did they say yes, they said, yes, I could feel things, yes, I can smell things. Yes, these feel real. But also, they looked real to other people. That's absolutely fascinating.

There's a few questions I have on the back of that. But the first one is, is the source of the information important? Like, why did you choose the parents or the trusted friends? The source of the information is important because you need to build rapport quite quickly in these experiments. And that's, it's often also the case in. police settings, for example, it's also the case in everyday settings that you're more likely to trust information that comes from someone whom you generally trust and who you know actually know something about you. So if I were to say to them, someone, you know, a student in the hall just told me X,

they'd tell me to, you know, bugger off. Like, I don't care what that person says because they don't know me. Same with me. Like, I don't know them. So I can't just make something up because I don't know what fits with their life story. But using these real details and then letting them create, the narrative of exactly what happened, that is, I think, the powerful way to create these false memories. And it's also what we need to be really careful about when we're doing police interviews. And so when I train police or when I talk to lawyers about how to question witnesses, one of the take-home messages of this kind of research is be really, really careful in how you're presenting information to witnesses, because they can incorporate that very quickly into their

own memories and they can create these false memories and those can lead to wrongful convictions. So the point of the study isn't just to sort of mess with people's memories and to sort of play like a memory hacking god. It's to do all the things you're not supposed to do and then take that into other settings and say, see, it's pretty easy if you do everything wrong. So don't do it wrong. You have to do it right from the beginning. So having said that, what do we know when we revisit memories and how do they build and how do we add to the narrative? Typically, certainly in research settings, but also in everyday settings, false memories grow over time because they have to, right? Because you're creating something that didn't happen. And so your brain is sort of adding details.

And while it's possible that one could create a false memory, sort of a whole story right away out of the blue, that's not really what happens. And it's more likely than to just be a lie or a story. Whereas if we're talking about memories, the things that we actually believe happen to us, it usually requires more of a process and it requires a bit more time. And you sort of get a detail now. And then you start wondering, maybe this happened as well. And so it sort of embellishes over time. And you often start with what ifs, perhaps, maybe you start with all these qualifiers. So, you know, maybe I fell down the stairs when I was six. Perhaps I, well, how could that have happened? What might have happened? But then the next time I'm thinking about it, I already have this image in my head of myself falling down the stairs.

And so I'm going, okay, so I fell down the stairs, what happened? And so, and then I start to add details. Well, maybe this happened, maybe that. And then the next time I'm adding, well, I fell down the stairs and I hit my head. And then, right? So you sort of, every time you have a little bit of distance, so it feels more like you're accessing a memory because you are. You're accessing a memory of the last time you thought about it. And that is also a type of memory.

And so you've got this growth with these false memories where you're adding details over time. And that's often facilitated through other people, but it doesn't have to be. There's something called auto suggestion, which is when you just, for example, you watch something or you read something or you hear someone's account, and you start to wonder if something similar happened to you. And then you start to think about it repeatedly and you build this narrative. but more commonly you're talking to someone else and they suggest to you this happened to you do you remember it or what do you remember and either they're mistaken so it's an honest mistake or they they misremember it or someone like me has come along and they're trying to implant a false memory which i would argue is incredibly rare probably hasn't happened to anyone who's listening

there's not that many of me who are sort of going around just being like ha ha ha ha ha let's see what we can implant. So false memories go over time, whereas true memories typically either stay the same or, especially over long periods of time, disintegrate. So we forget stuff. And so more common is that we forget stuff and details get less rich rather than more rich, which is what happens with false memories. So you've kind of touched on it a little bit, but is there anything that makes a false memory more likely to stick? So that is an excellent question. And There is research on, wow, it's limited. So the research on this is limited because there's lots of factors involved in a false memory paradigm.

So we talk about vulnerabilities to false memories in terms of the system factors. So things that are outside of yourself, things that, for example, in a policing context, would be the police interview. In an everyday context would be who I talk to, things outside of my control, things that I'm watching, things that I'm engaging with. that sort of happened to me. Then there's the individual factors, which are things like my personality, which are things like how susceptible or compliant I am, how much fantasy proneness I have, so how likely I am to sort of think up stories about things, and how good my memory is. So am I confident in my memory or not? And so those two worlds interact. So you've got the external world and you've got the internal world. And so when we're talking about risk factors for these things,

there's so many different things that can happen. But one thing that makes a false memory sticky is having someone else confidently say that something happened to you. So if my mom, for example, again, back to those trusted persons, right? If my mom says to me, when you were 14, do you remember this and sort of says it full of emotions and goes, yeah, this thing happened and maybe even tells me a story of what happened? And I go, Oh man, I don't believe that, but I want to remember it because it's part of our family story. So there's two things going on there. One is there's a trusted person saying, this happened to me.

The other thing is me going, oh, man, I really want to believe that. And they want to remember it because it's important to us or it's important to me. And so that desire is, I think, a really important part to making it sticky because then I'm going to try. I'm going to try and remember. I'm going to think about the what is. I'm really going to engage with the hypothetical, and that is more likely to make that richly detailed false memory over time. And I might even get rewarded for it, right? So if maybe three years later, next time mom says that, I go, yeah, actually, I do remember that.

And I tell a really exciting story. Then the whole family sort of applauds and goes, yeah, great. Although then, of course, someone else might go, that's not what happened. In which case, then there's a battle of, you know, who do we believe and whose memory is right. That's really interesting. I have one particularly cherished childhood memory. I have a twin brother. So when we're about six years old, I don't know,

we were watching Bugs Bunny cartoons or something. And they threw a boomerang. And we were like, wow, how does that work? So we asked my father, like, oh, Dad, you know, how do boomerangs work? And he explained, you know, how it works. And he said, you know what, fellas? let's make one. So we made one in the in the garage

and we went to the park to throw it and you know I'm six years old. My dad's not as slight as I'm. He's very athletic and big. So I imagine him being like Hercules and this boomerang being the size of a like a surfboard and he just absolutely hurled it in the air and it worked.

It came round and it dug into the floor. you know about six inches or something and he says oh sorry fellas we're going to kill somebody's dog i can't throw this again but that that's a really cherished memory of mine and my brothers is like have i embellished that well it sounds like you definitely have embellished it the question is whether you've meaningfully or importantly embellished it so this is where there's another piece of all of this so there's the whole experiences that can be false memories. So a complete event, like in my studies, where I implant an entire situation that didn't happen at all. Or, and these are probably more common, you can have partial false

memories where you are distorting parts, but sometimes important parts of those memories. Now, most of the time, that doesn't matter. Because most of the time, it doesn't matter that your dad is really muscular or not. Or it doesn't really matter whether the boomerang was, you know, 40 centimeters or 14 centimeters, it's irrelevant. What matters is the core of it, or what we call in memory research, the gist. So the gist of the memory is what's important, and that's what you cherish. You remember the feelings, you remember being there, whether or not exactly that was the weather, that's what your dad looked like.

It doesn't really matter. What matters is that this event in general happened, and it was a happy event. Now, the problem is that in other kinds of settings, verbatim, which is the other, the specific memory details are much more important. And it does matter exactly what he looked like. If later on, you're in therapy and you're talking about this and it actually has taken on a very negative tone and you feel like this has been foundational to who you are, or you're talking to someone like me or to a police officer going, you know, something really bad happened, I need to report this. Suddenly, all of those details matter. You know, what day was it? Where was it? Who was it? How did that person look? You've

effectively become a witness. And in those moments, every little detail is potentially dissected. So most of the time, it doesn't matter. But in these kinds of critical moments, it can matter. And that's where you start to notice just how faulty your memory is. Yeah. So one thing, sort of off the back of that, that I find interesting, is people still seem to cling on to these false memories, even though there's evidence to the contrary that they're not real.

You know, what do we know about that? all of us do that so I have a memory at least one memory but one memory that definitely can't be true which is similar to your boomerang story where I get lifted up by my grandfather and I'm sort of spun around and it's this happy sort of childhood moment where oh grandpa and I didn't really know him so this was a whole a whole memory that I clung on to as the one time I met my maternal grandfather and my mom when I was writing my first book called the memory illusion we started talking about about all of these. She's like, well, you know, tell me, but what do you remember from childhood? And I was like, wow, you know, I don't remember that much. But like, here's a couple of memories.

And some of them, she's like, yeah, I remember that. Other times, she was like, that, no, that is not what happened. And she was older, so her memory is more likely to be reliable than mine as a child. And it's just the fact that we haven't spoken about this also makes it more reliable, because it's not like we've told the story so many times that our memories have sort of merged into one master copy. It's that we still have independent memories from one another, and so there's more value in discrepancies. And so she said, your grandpa father couldn't have possibly picked you up, and that setting didn't happen. And basically what we'd come to the conclusion was that I'd just taken some sort of like movie version of being reunited with grandpa, and I'd just come to believe it.

But it's still there. And when we have false memories that we know aren't real, but still feel like memories, they're called non-believed memories. And so it's almost like I have this label that's attached to it now that says, didn't happen, much like if I watch a movie, I know that that didn't happen, but I can remember what happened in the movie. And so that's a curious phenomenon about how you can still have this memory of something that you know is false. But it doesn't happen that often because more often than not,

we're reluctant to accept that those, especially those precious memories, could be false even in their entirety. Yeah, so having said that, like, how do we get our heads around this? You know, I'm one of those people that were wrong that think I have a great memory. Everything I remember is absolutely true and correct. You know, how do we approach that? Like, what could I trust? Trust nothing.

I mean, genuinely, though. So the advice that you'll hear from basically every memory scientist who works with this kind of stuff is don't assume that you are going to remember, assume that you're going to forget, even the most important things. So we've all had the moment where we're sitting somewhere going, I really need, that's really interesting. I need to remember that for later. And then like five minutes later, it's gone. Like it's not even years later, like minutes. It's just and it's gone. And we've literally said to ourselves, remember this. And then we didn't. So we've all had that. that experience. So assume that that's the case for basically everything you experience, because it is, because we remember almost none of our lives. It's just the way it is. And that's partly because we're thinking about things, we're preparing. Our brain isn't meant to be an archive of history of, you know, what happened to us. Most of the things we experience

are not that important to keep. And so the brain is trying to constantly call and filter what's actually important. And it makes lots of mistakes in that. So there's lots of things that we wish we remembered that we don't. And what that means, though, is that even if you think you have an amazing memory, and maybe you do have an above average memory, assume that if something is important, you need to write it down and store it somewhere outside of your brain, because your brain is this wonderful, complex, creative organ that just once it's got that memory, you just don't know what it's going to do with it.

Is it going to drop it? Is it going to change it? Is talking to someone else going to change it? What is it going to look like in a day, never mind 20 years or 40 years? And so store it somewhere outside of your brain as contemporaneous external evidence. So let's go on to your sort of other job, which is being an expert witness in court cases. So funny enough, before I was a science journalist, I did quite a lot of court reporting. So I covered a lot of violent crime like murders, sexual abuse. be his case is paedophilia, like really deep stuff at times. And I think as anyone who's done

court reporting will know, the cases are very drawn out, they're long, they take a long time. So as a reporter, you have to pick your moments when you're in the courtroom to gather the most personal and details. And as I'm a scientist by training, I guess, I do have a master's in physics. I always made sure I was there to hear the expert. witnesses. And it was always really fascinating. So what function do you have as an expert in court cases with this topic? As an expert witness, I get asked to examine whether or not a particular account could be the result of a false memory. So that's the short version of it. And then the long version of that is, as an expert witness, I am asked to

well, so where do I start? Lawyers often come to me and say, we have a monster. Either can you help us ask witnesses better questions so that we can catch this person, which I often go, wait, wait, wait. You have a suspect. Let's see if I can't help you ask better questions so that you don't contaminate evidence in the process and it's actually usable in the courtroom. on the other hand, so that's when I work with teams to structure interviews to make sure that

they're doing things right from the beginning. For example, inquiries. So if there's, they've got 150 witnesses or they've opened up a cold case and the witnesses are talking about something that happened 40 years ago. Those are the kinds of cases where police officers, or sometimes lawyers, but usually police officers, come to me and say, how do we ask questions of these people? And that's the best time to do it because once you've contaminated evidence, there's no going back. And so what you really want to do is be preventative. But more often than that, I'm asked to come in once everything's potentially gone wrong. And that means I get sent a bundle, as it's called, so basically all the case files. And that often also includes videos of a witness and

or suspect saying what they remember. And the only time that I can help really is if there are repeated tellings of the same story. So I can't go in and look at a single account. So someone says, this is what happened. And if they only say it once and I can't look at whether that's changed at all, I can't look at any potential factors that influence that, then I'm not useful. You can't use me. As an expert witness, I look at change in memory accounts and then I try to look at where that change may have come from. And so if I've got three versions of an account, maybe you've got a contemporaneous statement that doesn't happen very often in the kinds of cases I work on, because then again, you usually don't need me.

But let's see you have a contemporaneous statement. Let's say two years ago, Witness X said something. And that happened, they said that maybe a week after the incident. Then a year later, they say something a bit different. And now the question is, okay, why? And then maybe now they're about to go to a court

or they've been deposed, so they've sort of asked what they're going to say. And they give another statement, and it's different again. Now the question is, did that person actually remember more? Because that is possible. So as much as false memories often grow over time and true memories don't, that doesn't mean that you can't remember pieces that you didn't remember before, right?

We've all experienced that where you're now in a different context or you've gone home after talking to someone and you go, oh, this also reminds me of this other piece of the memory. And so the next time you are giving a statement, you might include that thing that you remembered, right? going, oh, so there's this stuff that it told you, but I also remember this other thing, or context factors, things that happened before or after, that I didn't think to include at the time, because the interviewer maybe didn't ask me or I just didn't think about it. And so the question then is, is that change, what is the nature of that change? And could it be the result of a false memory rather than someone just remembering more or remembering differently?

And that's what I look at is change. And if in the middle, let's say someone had problematic therapy, like hypnosis and that hypnosis was allegedly uncovering long-lost memories, then that would be a red flag for me. Or if they spoke to police officers who presented them with evidence or lied to them about things, which in the UK doesn't happen very often, but does occasionally. Then I go, okay, well, you know, this police officer said X. And then that person changed their account. So it looks like they were led to that change through this person. So that's my role as I look at that. And then at the end, I come to a conclusion saying that this is possibly a false memory or this is unlikely to be a false memory. I never go in unless it's impossible.

It's like memories from before the age of one are impossible to have into adulthood. And so that's an easy, this is impossible. or before you were born, those kinds of memories. But for everything else, it's just that this is plausible or probable to be the result of a false memory rather than, yeah, this is a false memory. Because I can't know that for sure. It could also be a lie. It could be an honest mistake.

How do you distinguish then between just straight up blatant lies and false memories? You know, that's, wow. That sounds really difficult. You don't. I don't. I don't even try. So lies are just a completely different category. And the answer, though, to what I'm looking for when I'm looking for distortions is...

So a false memory usually evolves over time. And so you get more and more details. Things get more rich. There's more memories. There's more pieces of it. Whereas with a lie, again, I don't assess lies. But lies, let's say differently. If I'm going in to lie to the police,

I'm probably going to have my story kind of figured out before I go and talk to them. I'm not going to slowly piece it together as I get there. And so, and if I do piece it together and I respond, let's say the police are drip feeding me evidence, which is one way of trying to catch out liars. But if they're drip feeding me evidence, then, and I keep changing my story literally, immediately in response to new evidence that they have against me, then that's unlikely to be the result of a false.

memory said differently. It might more likely be the result of a lie or something else going on. Yeah, got you. So we've covered a hell of a lot of ground here. So just sort of by way of closing, do you have any advice or words that you'd like listeners to take away from this to say, I was going to say, to avoid the traps of false memory, but it seems like we can't. We can. You can write things down. So write things down, take pictures, take videos, If something's important, assume you're going to forget. That's the main thing. You can't just will it into existence.

So you can't just sort of think in your brain, I will remember this forever. You can. So one thing that I also advise is you can be very mindful. So the bigger you make a memory trace in the first instance, the more likely you are to find it later. So memory champions do this all the time when they're trying to remember facts or a small piece of information. So memory champions are people who competitively remember

for things. And they remember like two decks of cards or lots and lots of names in an hour. And often what they try to do is they try to use these memory aids that help them to make bigger memory fragments. And for autobiographical memories, what you can do is you can, I sometimes say sort of describe what you're experiencing right now and what you're seeing, almost like you're a storyteller. So you're just like, almost like tell your story now. as if you're telling somebody else. And again, you can, ideally you're recording that, but let's say you don't have that.

You're underwater, I don't know. You're somewhere where you literally can't record this memory independently. What do you do? You think, okay, I'm going to describe and really pay attention to every detail in the scene that I want to remember. So I'm describing the specific blue of the water. I'm describing what the fish look like. I'm describing the thorns on each fish's back.

I'm thinking about how I feel. I'm thinking about the interactions that are happening front of me, right? I'm really painting this really richly detailed picture because what I'm doing when I do that is I'm creating a much bigger memory fragment that's connecting more parts of my brain and that is more likely to be found later. So that is something that you can do in general. That is makes you more likely to remember also beautiful moments. This isn't just for bad stuff, right? So you want to remember the good stuff as well and that also slips to our fingers very often, unfortunately. What I really want to end with, though, is that false memories sound like defects,

but I think that they are a core part of being human. And the fact that we have false memories is a testament to the brain's creativity and ability to constantly creatively recombine information. So a false memory, usually the components that I see in my research, for example, is that people are using real pieces. So real people, real places. things that they've heard, things they've seen maybe in movies or elsewhere, but they're real bits of information. And a false memory is just combining that into a narrative that didn't actually happen to you. So that is an incredible capacity. That is probably one of the things that really defines us as a species. And I think it's a beautiful thing. So if we were to get rid

of false memories, let's say suddenly you have a perfect memory, I think you might then get rid of lots of other things that we value more than being the perfect archivist of our own personal past. That's a good thing. We like our false memories. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was psychologist Dr. Julia Shaw. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favorite magazines or downloaders on your preferred app store. of course, also find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal.

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