Question: Is it possible to implant false memories?

Alex Reid answered on 14 Nov 2018: last edited 14 Nov 2018 9:31 pm

Crunchy, I have to hand it to you, you have asked some truly great questions! It might take us a little time to work through all of them but I must say it is really nice to see you thinking so much about psychology. To answer your question: yes you can. This can happen in a number of ways, and false memories have big ramifications for our legal system and other areas beyond psychology. However, I am going to tell you about the type of false memory I am most familiar with through sleep research. Sleep might promote some kinds of false memories because your episodic memory (that is your memory for facts, such as ‘I saw a dog yesterday’) can get integrated into your semantic memory (your memory of concepts, such as ‘what is a dog’). When this type of integration occurs false memories can arise because semantic memory will influence the original episodic memory. To give you a specific example: in some sleep experiments we could give you a list of words that have a missing word that is closely associated with the rest of them. So the word list you might see before sleep could be: nurse, bed, medical, doctor, medicine and patient. The hidden word linking all these is ‘hospital’. After learning word lists like these, it has been found that people are sometimes more likely to falsely recall the hidden critical word (hospital) following sleep. Our best understanding at the moment, as I said, is because sleep is integrating the word list with your semantic memory through memory consolidation, and as such they will all link up and activate the word ‘hospital’ in your memory when you later try and recall all the words.