stories and memories and the bullshit component

[Sean McHugh]

I pulled this out of Wired magazine whilst getting distracted from
working. What do you reckon?

How Friends Ruin Memory: The Social Conformity Effect
By Jonah Lehrer Email Author October 18, 2011 | 2:48 pm |
Categories: Frontal Cortex, Science Blogs




Humans are storytelling machines. We don’t passively perceive the
world – we tell stories about it, translating the helter-skelter of
events into tidy narratives. This is often a helpful habit, helping us
make sense of mistakes, consider counterfactuals and extract a sense
of meaning from the randomness of life.

But our love of stories comes with a serious side-effect: like all
good narrators, we tend to forsake the facts when they interfere with
the plot. We’re so addicted to the anecdote that we let the truth slip
away until, eventually, those stories we tell again and again become
exercises in pure fiction. Just the other day I learned that one of my
cherished childhood tales – the time my older brother put hot peppers
in my Chinese food while I was in the bathroom, thus scorching my
young tongue – actually happened to my little sister. I’d stolen her
trauma.

The reason we’re such consummate bullshitters is simple: we bullshit
for each other. We tweak our stories so that they become better
stories. We bend the facts so that the facts appeal to the group.
Because we are social animals, our memory of the past is constantly
being revised to fit social pressures.

The power of this phenomenon was demonstrated in a new Science paper
by Micah Edelson, Tali Sharot, Raymond Dolan and Yadin Dudai. The
neuroscientists were interested in how the opinion of other people can
alter our personal memories, even over a relatively short period of
time. The experiment itself was straightforward. A few dozen people
watched an eyewitness style documentary about a police arrest in
groups of five. Three days later, the subjects returned to the lab and
completed a memory test about the documentary. Four days after that,
they were brought back once again and asked a variety of questions
about the short movie while inside a brain scanner.

This time, though, the subjects were given a “lifeline”: they were
shown the answers given by other people in their film-viewing group.
Unbeknownst to the subjects, the lifeline was actually composed of
false answers to the very questions that the subjects had previously
answered correctly and confidently. Remarkably, this false feedback
altered the responses of the participants, leading nearly 70 percent
to conform to the group and give an incorrect answer. They had revised
their stories in light of the social pressure.

The question, of course, is whether their memory of the film had
actually undergone a change. (Previous studies have demonstrated that
people will knowingly give a false answer just to conform to the
group. We’re such wimps.) To find out, the researchers invited the
subjects back to the lab one last time to take the memory test,
telling them that the answers they had previously been given were not
those of their fellow film watchers, but randomly generated by a
computer. Some of the responses reverted back to the original, but
more than 40 percent remained erroneous, implying that the subjects
were relying on false memories implanted by the earlier session. They
had come to believe their own bullshit.

Here’s where the fMRI data proved useful. By comparing the differences
in brain activity between the persistent false memories and the
temporary errors of “social compliance” the scientists were able to
detect the neural causes of the misremembering. The main trigger
seemed to be a strong co-activation between two brain areas: the
hippocampus and the amygdala. The hippocampus is known to play a role
in long-term memory formation, while the amygdala is an emotional
center in the brain. According to the scientists, the co-activation of
these areas can sometimes result in the replacement of an accurate
memory with a false one, provided the false memory has a social
component. This suggests that feedback of others has the ability to
strongly shape our remembered experience. We are all performers,
twisting our stories for strangers.

The scientists briefly speculate on why this effect might exist, given
that it leads to such warped recollections of the past:

Altering memory in response to group influence may produce untoward
effects. For example, social influence such as false propaganda can
deleteriously affect individuals’ memory in political campaigns and
commercial advertising and impede justice by influencing eyewitness
testimony. However, memory conformity may also serve an adaptive
purpose, because social learning is often more efficient and accurate
than individual learning. For this reason, humans may be predisposed
to trust the judgment of the group, even when it stands in opposition
to their own original beliefs.

This research helps explain why a shared narrative can often lead to
totally unreliable individual memories. We are so eager to conform to
the collective, to fit our little lives into the arc of history, that
we end up misleading ourselves. Consider an investigation of flashbulb
memories from September 11, 2001. A few days after the tragic attacks,
a team of psychologists led by William Hirst and Elizabeth Phelps
began interviewing people about their personal experiences. In the
years since, the researchers have tracked the steady decay of these
personal stories. They’ve shown, for instance, that subjects have
dramatically changed their recollection of how they first learned
about the attacks. After one year, 37 percent of the details in their
original story had changed. By 2004, that number was approaching 50
percent. The scientists have just begun analyzing their ten year
follow-up data, but it will almost certainly show that the majority of
details from that day are now inventions. Our 9/11 tales are almost
certainly better – more entertaining, more dramatic, more reflective
of that awful day – but those improvements have come at the expense of
the truth. Stories make sense. Life usually doesn’t.

Image: wolfgangfoto/Flickr

[John Shipman]

Very interesting & enjoyable. In a similar vein  I'm in Dubai at the mo...where I lived 9 years ago. Much to my amusement, entire buildings seem to have moved several hundred yards in various directions!

[STRM...@gmail.com]

Hi Al

Thanks for that.

The movement of buildings, I suggest, may be down to the brutal Lego-ness of architects,

since all buildings look identical, you can get disoriented.

The cure is to abuse an architect, and ask if they always liked ugly or had to be trained.

Enjoy the sunshine.

Regards

Sean