False memory syndrome. Paramnesia: false memories. Manifestations of false memory as a mental disorder

In many ways, the human brain has not yet been fully explored.There are extremely interesting phenomena, the nature of which not always clear. This is of great interest to scientists phenomenon , How false memory. Z recorded and confirmed by many th cases of a person having memories of events that actually did not happen.

There is official evidence that, based on witness testimony, people were accusedin crimes. The witnesses were absolutely sure of what they were talking about.But after investigative experiments, such as DNA tests,sentences were overturnedsince the results of checks showed the person’s non-involvement in the crime.

But how do they appear?fake memories? What is the reason for this phenomenon?Swiss scientistsinvestigated this phenomenon. They decided to conduct a series of experiments to establish whether there was a connection between the formationfake memoriesand sleep disorders.

Participants experiment received the task: learn a certain number of words that belong to some concept (for example, “those many”, “night”, “cat” refer to the word "what" ry", but this word-concept in the list k e no t). All participants were divided into two groups. One group was givenget some sleep, and the participants are different ‒ woke up. Researchers observed the reaction participants of the experiment.

While the participants slept, the word lists were edited. New words were added there. After participants woke up, either on their own or being woken, they were shown the updated lists and asked say what wordsova were in the original version.

That group whose participants were woken up, made many more mistakes in answers. Many test takers did not notice the new words or were sure that they were present in the list from the very beginning. At the same time, those participants who woke up on their own showed more accurate results.

Swiss researchers concluded that sleep disturbances may cause false memories.

Later scientists conducted another experiment with a little additional eny. Those participants who during research awakenedoffered to drink coffee or a cup water. The result was interesting: t Those who drank coffee made 10% fewer mistakes . This makes it possible to approve tb that caffeine is positiveaffects the prefrontal cortex of the brain, namely, it is responsible for the selection of concepts. This area of the brain Very susceptible to poor quality sleep.

19 thoughts on “ Scientists have discovered why people develop false memories”

Therefore, you probably need to be honest and frank with everyone, then there will be no need for the brain to turn to false memories :) And I completely agree about coffee, I also have trouble thinking, I don’t even think at all in the morning without a cup of coffee.

Now it’s clear why there’s such a mess in your head when you constantly sleep in fits and starts. I wonder if the deja vu effect has the same mechanism...?

There is information on this topic that documents interviews with people who were shipwrecked on the Titanic immediately after the crash and 10 years later.
Some facts in these two interviews differed radically. Recent memories have already been imposed by external factors (newspapers, radio, television, conversations with other people on this topic).

Another proof of the beneficial effects of healthy sleep on the human body. It’s not for nothing that they advise you to sleep at least 8 hours a day, although sometimes this is not enough for me))
Regarding coffee, I didn’t even doubt it. Until I take a couple of sips of strong coffee in the morning, everything falls out of my hands.

I wonder if the concept of “false memory” refers to the feeling that once upon a time we already knew a certain person whom, in principle, we could not know? I think many people have experienced this feeling.

And I will add that a person’s memory (unlike, for example, a machine’s) is generally all dynamic, that is, changeable. Any act of thought changes, at least a little, but absolutely the entire memory of a person.

From personal observations, I can note that older people suffer more from false memories. For example, my grandmother often tells some things that definitely didn’t happen)) Well, she kind of embellishes or even makes things up)) At the same time, she is still in a fairly sane mind.

Such false memories can be called differently! Dege vu! Although, in my opinion, this has not really been studied at all!!!
And better than caffeine is tea)))

Interesting information... I haven’t read about such studies before, but I always knew that excellent sleep is the key to health. I try to sleep at least 8 hours a day and regulate children’s sleep. I sometimes confuse dreams with reality :)

I think that in people who have not had enough sleep, absent-mindedness plays a big role, because... a person who does not get enough sleep perceives reality worse, thinks and reacts more difficultly, which undoubtedly leaves an imprint on his memory.

Yes, the human brain contains so many unsolved mysteries. And indeed, our memory is not structured at all like a hard drive. If yesterday one piece of information was recorded in the brain, then in the morning you can wake up with something completely different, and not even know about it..

I agree 100500%!
The fact is that I often don’t get enough sleep, and sometimes this feeling comes—déjà vu. So I believe the Swiss scientists.
Sometimes people have the opposite feeling, when they remember something that never happened, and this is called “jame vu.” I wonder what processes within us lead to this?

Interesting research! Our brain is like a computer that always works and then goes into safe mode (but does not turn off). And then they start rebooting it and the saved data is lost and crashes occur.
This is what poor sleep can cause.

Bad sleep is generally a terrible thing. It negatively affects all human life. And now, it turns out, it also evokes false memories. You should watch yourself more carefully))

Human memory is the most complex living mechanism, which has hardly been studied. By the way, there is a very simple way to influence a person’s memory, that is, to slightly change memories. I checked it - it works. but if the event is serious, then you will have to work more.

Yes, but once upon a time there were no DNA tests. It turns out that many people served time for nothing. By the way, I also have false memories from childhood. I don’t know what this is connected with, maybe I didn’t get enough sleep as a child...

There is also a phenomenon of a slightly different kind - false memories of dreams. But, unfortunately, this issue has not been studied at all.
That is, if “de jà vu” was also explained as the perception of events with a delay due to inhibition of the brain (this is exactly the case that we have already been, already seen, already talked, etc..), then with such dreams I can’t yet find any explanation

False memories may well not be false. It’s just that a person previously encountered something similar in life personally or witnessed it, and simply forgot. Banal deja vu.

No wonder they say:
“He’s lying like an eyewitness!” 🙂

Panina Valentina Viktorovna

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I found out about you on the Internet - I urgently need an MRI.

And after the performance I’m with you. I really liked your staff. Thank you for your attention, kindness and accuracy.

May everything be as good in your soul as I am now, despite all the problems...

Be!!! We're happy! Your Panina V.V.

I found out about you on the Internet - I urgently need an MRI.

And after the performance I’m with you. I really liked your staff. Thank you for your attention, kindness and accuracy.

May everything be as good in your soul as I am now, despite all the problems...

Be!!! We're happy! Your Panina V.V.

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Human memory constantly adjusts and adapts to fit the world. Artist A.R. Hopwood created the art project "Archive of False Memories" to show how deceptive memory can be.
Over the course of a year, he collected people's stories about their false memories, which he turned into an installation of photographs, paintings, sculptures and other objects reminiscent of the past.
People told the artist about the most amazing false memories: from eating mice to the ability to fly.
One man was firmly convinced that his girlfriend's sister died at the dentist's appointment. He tried to keep all his visits to the dentist a secret, so as not to worry his girlfriend again.
He wrote: “One day at dinner she said she was going to the dentist next week. The table became unusually quiet. My mother broke the silence by saying that this must be difficult for her after what happened to her sister.”
And these are far from rare cases. Neuroscientists say many of our daily memories are created incorrectly because our view of the world is constantly changing.
A trick of the imagination
Elizabeth Loftus's famous 1994 experiment proves that false memories are created quite easily. So, during the experiment, she managed to convince a quarter of the participants that they had gotten lost in a shopping center when they were children.
Another similar experiment, conducted in 2002, was designed to convince participants that they had flown in a hot air balloon as children. Half of them believed it after seeing the photos, which were, in fact, created in Photoshop.
This work was carried out by Kimberly Wade from the University of Warwick (UK). The artist Hopwood asked her to take a hot air balloon flight, and videos and photographs of this journey became part of his exhibition.
“I've been studying memory for over a decade, and I'm still amazed at how our imagination makes us believe things that never actually happened, and how the brain creates illusory memories. The reason our memories are so malleable is because there is an infinite amount of information being fed into the brain. Our perceptual system is not designed to notice absolutely everything that happens in the environment around us. Our memory fills in the gaps with what we know about the world,” says Wade.
Lost keys
For the most part, false memories concern everyday situations that have no consequences, other than small arguments with a partner or friend about who lost their keys again.
But sometimes false memories can lead to more serious consequences. For example, if evidence in court is based on false memories of a crime. Such cases have more than once led to the adoption of an incorrect verdict.
Christopher French from Goldsmiths University of London points out that we are all little aware of how unreliable human memory can be. And this is especially important in the legal and judicial spheres.
“Although psychologists and those who have studied the issue of false memories in detail are aware of their unreliability, the idea that memory should not always be relied upon is still not taken into account in society. Some people still believe that memory works like a video camera. Others share Freud's theory of repressed memories. It lies in the fact that if something terrible happens, a person does not remember this event, displacing it from consciousness, and it goes into the subconscious,” he says.
Professor French was also involved in an art project about false memories. He hopes the project will make more people aware of how different memories of an event can be from reality.
His hope is shared by A.R. Hopwood. He notes that he was interested in how confident people could be of something that never actually happened.
“Our installation featured mini-portraits of people depicting their false memories. It turns out that when you come to the exhibition, the only thing you learn about a person is something that has never actually happened to him. It’s an amazing paradox that inspires me as an artist,” he says.
Escape from the tiger
The human brain's mistakes can sometimes serve a good purpose, according to another study.
Sergio Della Zala, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, says that sometimes thinking errors save our lives. Imagine that you are in the jungle and suddenly you see the grass moving. Most likely, you will think that there is a tiger somewhere nearby and run away.
A computer, for example, in 99% of cases will come to the conclusion that it is just wind. If we behaved like a computer, we would sooner or later be eaten by a predator.
“Our brain is ready to make 99 mistakes out of 100 to save us from a tiger once. This is true because the brain is not a computer. He makes a huge number of incorrect conclusions. False memories are a sign of brain health. This is a by-product of a properly functioning memory system that is easy to amend,” says Professor Della Zala.
Original article: Melissa Hogenboom, — Why does the human brain create false memories? BBC News, September 2013
Translation: Eliseeva Margarita Igorevna
Editor: Simonov Vyacheslav Mikhailovich
Keywords: false memory, neuroscience, neuropsychology, brain, cognitive ability
Photo source: unsplash.com

This gave rise to a huge number of works on false memory, the authors of which tried to answer questions about how it arises and how it can be avoided.

There is no doubt that people can be made to believe that certain events really happened, especially if they are easily suggestible, and children are just like that. Bruck et al interviewed children at various intervals after medical examination (Bruck, Ceci, Francoeur, & Barr, 1995). The main question was whether the doctor looked at the ears, which he didn't. When the question was, “The doctor looked in your ear, didn't he?”, many positive responses were received, and the number increased over time.

In another study, adults were told that as children they had either gotten lost in a shopping mall or knocked over a punchbowl at a wedding (Loftus, 1993; Loftus & Piclrell, 1995). In a review of similar studies, Wade & Harry (2005) report that while most people are able to resist such suggestions, an average of 37% of subjects not only succumb to them, but also share highly detailed and vivid memories of the experience. similar incidents. Given that patients with psychological problems such as depression or eating disorders dream of recovery, and most psychotherapists sincerely believe that the path to recovery lies through identifying childhood abuse, there is no doubt that the potential for the creation of false memory is present. .

However, no one denies that childhood abuse occurs or that it will not be forgotten to at least some extent. Loftus (1994) notes that 19% of victims of uncontested violence report partial forgetting, while Brown et al. (1999), in a study of 68 cases, report that virtually all victims showed some forgetting.

We will return to the issue of stress and amnesia, but for now it may be enough to say that memory is potentially malleable, especially in a state of extreme suggestibility, and there is reason to believe that suggestibility is very characteristic of the therapist-patient relationship. This is why reports of “newfound memory” should be treated with particular caution. Moreover, even if violence occurred, it is clear that the patient’s awareness of this fact does not guarantee healing.

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Paramnesia

Paramnesia is a memory disorder characterized by false memories.

General information

Paramnesia, dysmnesia (hypomnesia and hypermnesia), and amnesia are the main memory pathologies. Unlike steel disorders, paramnesia is characterized not by weakening or loss of memory, but by its distortion. The term was first used by Emil Kraepelin in 1886. The scientist interpreted it as “memory deceptions.”

With paramnesia, a mixture of past and current events or real and fictitious (read, seen) memories may occur. Often a person attaches too much importance to his role in situations that happened in the past.

In psychology, paramnesia is an inaccurate or erroneous reproduction of autobiographical facts.

Reasons

Short-term isolated episodes of memory impairment (dysmnesia or paramnesia) can be the result of stress, severe fatigue or affect. If the attacks are systemic in nature, they may indicate organic damage to the brain, in particular those structures that are responsible for memory.

ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke;
cerebral palsy;
atherosclerosis of large arteries;
traumatic brain injuries;
tumors in the brain;
schizophrenia;
paranoid psychosis;
vascular dementia;
senile personality changes;
Alzheimer's disease;
paraphrenic syndrome;
Korsakoff's syndrome.

In the absence of damage to the central nervous system, paramnesia may be psychological in nature. Most often, it is observed at a young age and is expressed in the replacement of unpleasant events with positive ones or in the appearance of false memories that justify current actions. Typically, such “memory deceptions” arise against the background of an inferiority complex, lability and a pronounced dependence of the individual on the opinions of others.

Symptoms

Manifestations of paramnesia include many different qualitative distortions of memory. Depending on their specificity, several types of this disorder are distinguished. Paramnesias include:

The main symptom of pseudoreminiscence is that a person passes off past events as present. He describes facts from ordinary life that actually happened, but at a different time, and do not relate to the current situation. Pseudoreminiscence is characteristic of dementia, Korsakoff's syndrome and other conditions accompanied by hypomnesia.

The main manifestation of confabulation is the transformation of real memories by introducing fictitious elements (objects, actions) into them. Types of confabulations:

replacement - filling gaps in memory with real events from other time periods;
ecmnestic – transfer of early childhood events into recent memories;
fantastic - memories of fantastic events in which the patient participated in his opinion;
delusional – distortion of memories by introducing delusional episodes into them;
hallucinatory - supplementing descriptions of events with fragments of visual and auditory hallucinations.

A sign of cryptomnesia is the perception of information read, heard or seen as actually experienced. As a rule, cryptomnesia is combined with different types of amnesia. At the same time, patients are poorly oriented in time and space, get tired quickly, but retain acquired knowledge and skills well. Cryptomnesia occurs with senile psychoses, brain damage and cerebral atherosclerosis.

Phantasms are memories in which hallucinatory events are embedded. They occur in people with multiple personality disorder and schizophrenia. Fantasies are characterized by crudeness and absurdity, and in some cases, by an intriguing plot.

Reduplicative amnesia (dual perception) is expressed in the repetition of memories: it seems to a person that the same events are happening several times. He experiences a feeling of incomplete déjà vu.

False recognition occurs when people, objects, and places are mistakenly identified. In severe cases, a person cannot recognize loved ones or his own reflection in the mirror.

Diagnostics

Diagnosis of dysmnesia and paramnesia is aimed at identifying the underlying disease. It includes the following examinations:

taking anamnesis;
psychological tests to assess the level of memory, as well as the adequacy of perception of reality;
MRI of the brain, which makes it possible to visualize pathological changes in various brain structures and the functional activity of its zones;
blood test.

Treatment

Directions for treating paramnesia depend on the specifics of the leading pathology. In addition to drugs that affect the cause of brain damage, nootropic drugs are used - aminalon, piracetam, glycine, nootropil. They help accelerate the recovery of central nervous system cells and improve blood circulation in cerebral structures. Vitamins and antioxidants are also prescribed.

With paramnesia, patients need psychological help and the creation of a favorable environment that excludes stress factors.

Forecast

The prognosis for the development of paramnesia depends on its causes. In most cases, adequate treatment can correct memory impairment. The appearance or intensification of phantasms along with delusions and hallucinations indicates a deterioration in the patient's condition.

Prevention

Prevention of various types of paramnesia consists of preventing organic damage to the central nervous system.

False memory syndrome

A young woman complained to a psychotherapist about problems in the mental sphere, in particular, about weakening of her memory. The psychotherapist helped her “restore her memory”, and she “remembered” that when she was 13 years old, she was raped by a teacher, she became pregnant and was forced to have an abortion Witnesses, " lacks a scientific basis and therefore cannot serve as evidence of the defendant’s guilt.”

Since the time of Freud, no one has doubted that the memory of unpleasant events can be suppressed and repressed into such depths of the unconscious that not every psychotherapist will be able to extract it from there. A law-abiding citizen, in a fit of rage, kills another and does not even leave the crime scene: he forgot that he himself is the killer, and in full confidence that he accidentally stumbled upon a corpse, he calls the police. A woman who has actually become a victim of violence cannot explain in any way how she got the bruises and contusions. All these are cases of psychogenic amnesia.

But the opposite phenomenon is becoming even more widespread these days - false memory syndrome, the origin of which is associated not so much with mental disorder as with suggestion and self-hypnosis. Most often, its topic is sexual abuse in childhood by parents, close relatives, teachers, and friends. In many cases, these memories are born in conversations with a psychotherapist, whose assumption becomes a memory for the patient and is deeply rooted in his soul. A false memory serves as a source of family tragedies - alienation of children from their parents, divorce, loss of work.

“We know that there are hundreds and thousands of cases of false memories, and that many families have been destroyed by them,” says Harold Leaf, a psychiatrist from Philadelphia. “And we know, unfortunately, that many therapists, by focusing on such memories, lose sight of the true ones.” problems of their patients It is not for nothing that in adulthood many patients renounce the memories implanted in them! Unfortunately, this often happens too late.”

Gail MacDonald, a resident of the Canadian province of Ontario, recently wrote the book “How Diseases are Provoked.” In it, she tells how she was convinced, almost under hypnosis, that the reason for her emotional

problems - long-standing sexual abuse by her father The therapist told her that she had multiple personality disorders - a diagnosis that, according to MacDonald, he has given to more than a hundred patients

A false memory prompted her to separate from her family. Nightmares began to torment her. She began to write stories in all newspapers and magazines about the event that supposedly “left a fatal imprint on her fate.” She stopped eating and began to look like a corpse. All this would not have ended well if one clever psychiatrist had not given her another diagnosis - "post-traumatic stress as a direct result of therapy" - and helped her understand that her so-called memory was false

At a recent conference on false memory syndrome, Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle, talked about how easy it is to suggest to a person something that didn’t actually happen. A series of leading questions, skillfully formulated sentences - and you're done. In one experiment, psychologists easily convinced adult participants that they had been hospitalized for acute pain as children, and that when they were five years old, they had once gotten lost in a shopping mall. Some participants in the experiment supplemented this supposedly “resurrected” memory with many details.

The same thing happened with preschoolers who were asked weekly by Cornell University psychologist Stephen Ceci about an imaginary event. In the tenth week, they themselves told him about this event, embellishing it with new details. The event was simple: the child was told that he put his hand into a mousetrap, it slammed, and he had to be taken to the hospital, where they know what to do in such cases. Neither parents Neither the experimenters were able to dissuade half of the children and convince them that there was no mousetrap.

People prone to depression, hysteria and some other mental and emotional disorders are unusually susceptible to suggestion and are always ready to mix fiction with reality. It is not without reason that professional psychiatric organizations have now sounded the alarm. They warn their fellow psychotherapists against the thoughtless use of various techniques for allegedly restoring memory, in which the patient is simply instilled with a memory of an event that seems plausible to the psychotherapist. Especially recalling childhood sexual trauma, the Crown Bar in Canada considers these techniques generally not available in therapeutic practice.

“Memory deceptions” in paramnesia

The term paramnesia was coined by the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin in 1886 to refer to memory deceptions. He identified three main types of paramnesia. He called the first type “simple deceptions of memory,” referring to them as false memories of imaginary events. The second type is associated memory deceptions, when a person seeing someone for the first time claims that he has already seen him before (reproducing paramnesia). The third type is paramnesia, in which a new situation is perceived as a detailed duplication of a previously occurring situation (déjà vu). Today, the classification of memory deceptions is much broader.

Perversion of memory

In psychiatry, the name paramnesia comes from the Greek. the words “para” - “about” and “mnesia” - “memory”. These are pathological memory disorders that are characterized by false and distorted memories.

Psychology has its own analogue of paramnesia. Psychologists use this term to describe the distorted, inaccurate or erroneous reproduction of facts and events in autobiographical memories. The cause may be affect, stress, chronic or acute fatigue.

According to E. Kraepelin, paramnesia is divided into:

In modern psychology, the classification of paramnesia includes phantasms, confabulations, cryptomnesia, reduplicating paramnesia, pseudoreminiscences and false recognition. Let's take a closer look at them.

False memories

Pseudo-reminiscence (from Greek “false memory”) - substitute confabulations with an everyday plausible plot. This is a kind of “memory” of unreal events, a hallucination of human memory.

Pseudo-reminiscence is often combined with serious memory impairments (such as amnesia, hypomnesia). Symptoms of this disorder occur in organic brain diseases, paranoid and paraphrenic syndromes.

Illusions of memory

Confabulation (from Latin - “pre-composition”) is a distorted memory of real events. Such paramnesias are a product of pathological imagination or creativity, directed to the past, emerging in consciousness in the form of memories. These symptoms are observed in certain psychoses, Korsakoff's syndrome, paraphrenia, and schizophrenic delusions.

There are different forms of confabulation:

Ecmnestic. Illusions of memory fixate on the past;
Mnemonic. Illusions of memory that are associated with present events;
Fantastic. Individual imaginary fragments involuntarily emerge in memory;
Delusional. Confabulation with the transfer of fantastic or ordinary nonsense to an earlier period;
Oneiric. They can be provoked by oneiroid, delirium, exit from a twilight state of consciousness;
Spontaneous. Accompany Korsakov's psychosis;
Suggested (induced). Occurs in Alzheimer's disease.

Borrowed Memories

Cryptomnesia is a memory disorder in which other people's memories (read, seen, etc.) are transferred from the past to the present. A person considers such paramnesia to be an original product of his creativity. Cryptomnesia is somewhat reminiscent of déjà vu, but occurs during memory, not perception. Cryptomnesia occurs in senile psychoses, pathological organics of the brain, and cerebral atherosclerosis.

Such a mental phenomenon as cryptomnesia must be distinguished from plagiarism. Thus, plagiarism is the conscious and purposeful appropriation of another person’s creative work, and in the case of cryptomnesia this happens unconsciously.

Pathological fantasy

Phantasms are pathological uncontrollable fantasies, in some cases combined with other memory disorders. Phantasms are divided into paralytic and hysterical.

Paralytic ones essentially resemble fantastic confabulations, differing only in their rudeness and absurdity. Hysterical films have an unusual and intriguing plot, sometimes with erotic overtones.

Dual perception

The Czech psychiatrist and neuropathologist A. Pick described in 1901 such a phenomenon as reduplicating paramnesia. The same events happen to a person several times. Sometimes such paramnesia is accompanied by anterograde amnesia.

A common form of reduplicating paramnesia is echonesia. With echonesia, there is a kind of doubling of the experiences of ordinary life, when a person is sure that events are repeating themselves. Echonesia appears frequently in Peake's writings. One patient, whom A. Peak observed, said that today he had already seen three Peaks. Echomnesia occurs in paralysis, psychosis, dementia, and Korsakoff's syndrome.

Misrecognition

False recognition is the erroneous recognition of persons or objects, terrain, premises, or even oneself (for example, a person does not recognize himself in the reflection). With severe memory impairment, recognition of family and friends is impaired. Most often found in schizophrenia.

The occurrence of paramnesia is often caused by a person’s increased suggestibility, infantilism of the psyche, certain emotional characteristics and lack of criticality, therefore the prevention of this condition is greatly facilitated by personal growth and work with a psychotherapist.

What is false memory

False memory is a disorder of normal cognitive processes in which it may seem that something that did not actually happen actually happened. An unreal, invented experience that is fixed in the mind as real.

History of false memory research

Before talking about false memory, it is necessary to understand what the phenomenon of homo sapiens, memory, is.

Main causes of false memory

American writer Mark Twain, with his characteristic humor, said that “When I was young, I remembered absolutely everything: both what happened and what did not happen. But I’m getting old, and soon I’ll only remember the latter.” In these words you can catch a hint that with age, memory weakens, and often a person passes off as reality events that actually did not happen to him.

Undeveloped memory in children under 3 years of age. The child's body is just becoming. The frontal lobes of the brain, which are responsible for the formation of short-term and long-term memory, are underdeveloped. The baby simply cannot remember information for a long time, and if he does, it’s only a part (fragment) of the event. Therefore, memories when an adult suddenly “strains” and reveals that, say, he was kidnapped when he was very young, are quite often unreliable. Although the person himself may sincerely believe that this actually happened to him.

Types of false memory

A person remembers the outside world through vision, hearing, smell, taste and touch. These basic five senses underlie human memory. According to the method of memorization, it can be motor, figurative, emotional and verbal-logical. All these 4 types are closely interconnected.

Visual. A man finds himself in an unfamiliar environment, but it seems to him that, for example, he has already seen this table and flowers on the windows before. It calms you down and doesn't make you nervous. A type of false visual memory should be considered emotional-figurative, when the imaginary image appears in bright colors, which can cause a violent reaction.

If attacks of pseudomemory are rare, they do not have much impact on the individual's life. But if they are repeated frequently, this is an indicator of unhealthy processes in the life of the body, in particular the brain. In this case, they speak of a painful memory disorder.

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Manifestations of false memory as a mental disorder

When false memories predominate in a person's memory, we should talk about false memory syndrome (FMS). It determines all aspects of an individual's life. And this is a violation of the memory processes, a painful manifestation that doctors call paramnesia, which translated from Greek means “wrong memory.” Often occurs with neuropsychiatric diseases caused by external (exogenous) factors. And it is provoked by psychoses that arise as a result of various diseases of internal organs or intoxication of the body.

False vague memories (pseudo-reminiscences). Real events of the distant past, usually they relate to personal life experience, are perceived as happening in the present. Let's say a person experienced a burning resentment in childhood. It constantly burned the soul and led to an unexpected painful effect: it began to be perceived as having happened recently. Such memory impairments appear in various diseases of the central nervous system and are typical for people of mature age.

Features of false memory manipulation

Memory has its gray areas. Experts know about this; it is not without reason that in recent years heated discussions have flared up about whether it is possible to interfere with a person’s psyche, forcing him to remember something that, perhaps, did not happen at all in his life. Such manipulations with memory, when something is suddenly “remembered” that did not actually happen, can have far-reaching consequences not only for a specific individual, but also for society as a whole.

What is false memory - watch the video:

False memory is a little-studied phenomenon of the human psyche, an insufficiently known psychological phenomenon when an individual “remembers” events that did not actually happen. Such memories can be attributed to a protective reflex, a person’s reaction to the still unknown, in order to protect himself from a possible stressful situation or to evoke pity and sympathy. On the other hand, conscious manipulation of public consciousness turns people into an obedient herd. Let’s say that historical facts and events (recent or “things of bygone days”) misinterpreted by the media become false collective memory. The consequences of such aggressive intervention in the human psyche can affect the life of the individual and society in the most unforeseen ways.

False memory syndrome

Psychology. A-Z. Dictionary reference / Transl. from English K. S. Tkachenko. - M.: FAIR PRESS. Mike Cordwell. 2000.

See what “False memory syndrome” is in other dictionaries:

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Memory disorders

Memory disorders are a decrease or loss of the ability to remember, as well as retain and reproduce memory reserves. Memory disorders are divided into dysmnesia (memory weakness), amnesia (lack of memory) and paramnesia (memory deceptions).

With dysmnesia, the memorization of current information deteriorates, primarily names, numbers, and definitions, which is especially noticeable in conditions that require a quick response. The memory of the past becomes poorer in the details of events, decreases, their sequence and dating are forgotten.

Amnesia is distinguished: retrograde amnesia - loss from memory in whole or in part of the events of the days, months and even years immediately preceding the present illness; anterograde amnesia - loss of memory for hours, days, weeks of all events immediately following the disease; reproductive amnesia - the inability to remember at the right time the necessary name, number, date, definition; fixation amnesia - the inability to remember current events; progressive amnesia - loss of the ability to remember and gradually increasing depletion of memory reserves, occurring in a certain sequence - first of all, the recently acquired memory reserves (events of recent years) are lost, later the memory reserves of the distant past (middle age, adolescence, childhood) begin to be erased and, finally , the memory reserves of the entire life lived disappear.

Paramnesias are divided into confabulations (false memories) and cryptomnesias (memory distortions). With confabulation, real events are forgotten, and their place is filled with fiction. The latter may relate to everyday issues - everyday events of current life, may have fantastic content, and in some cases (among older people) are limited to the themes of their childhood and youth - ecmnestic confabulations. Intensely expressed and long-lasting confabulations that are fantastic in content are called confabulation. Here, one or another degree of elevated mood is usually noted. Memory disorders are often minor. Cryptomnesia is a distortion of memory in which what is read, seen in a dream or heard seems to patients to have experienced it in reality.

The combination of fixation amnesia, retrograde amnesia and confabulation forms Korsakoff's syndrome. With it, patients are disoriented in place, time and the faces around them. Characterized by lethargy, increased fatigue, and exhaustion. The mood is often tinged with euphoria and carelessness. Despite sudden changes in memory, previously acquired knowledge is retained, often even complex ones.

Memory disorders are characteristic primarily of various organic diseases of the central nervous system. The underlying disease is being treated.

What is paramnesia: false memories, cryptomnesia and other types of disorder

Paramnesia: “circum-memory”, or following a false trace of “parallel” memory.

That’s the way he’s built, a man, that being the way he is is never enough for him. And therefore, in childhood, like God, he strives to extend himself to the entire Universe, to be everywhere, to participate in everything.

He is all thirsty for miracles and magical feats, but in the end his old age is always poisoned by torment: he could have done this and that, but he was never worthy. For at the age of young and mature - when everything is possible - everything is scattered into attempts and efforts to capture living space (with subsequent zealous protection of it) - was it a dream?!

But it is not so easy to part with what has not come true. It is tenacious. It comes in dreams, in fantasies - and now one’s own personality is gradually woven into the lines of a novel being read, a film being watched...

For what has not come true yearns for its embodiment. At least in the form of artificially – and skillfully – evoked virtual sensations.

Not allowed into a measured, stable life, in moments of despair it comes to mind in the form of false memories - distortions of memory, often a very ingenious device.

Well, the personality of what is is missing! There are not enough colors, smells, bodily sensations, sounds!

And then the false memories carefully provide her with all this: take it and love it, squeeze it, feel it!

Paramnesia - the taste of a non-existent life

Paramnesia (“parallel”, false memories) is a common attribute of neurological and mental diseases. But this is not necessarily the case.

In one form or another, it can also be characteristic of creative and artistic individuals (or simply overly sensitive and impressionable).

It is also characteristic of ages “specially created” for it – children’s and old age. Ages when there is still – or no longer – enough strength to create in matter.

The cause of the condition may also be chronic, ongoing intoxication (both as a result of alcoholism, and as a result of a chronic infection, for example, with tuberculosis).

In a word, paramnesia is the essence and destiny of those powerless to create physical life. But only those who already know (or still remember) its taste.

And on the basis of this memory and knowledge they create a new life - a life based on false memory. With myself (not realized in true life) in all the main roles.

But there are a great many main roles. This means that there must be no less options for “plot development” in order to be able to play them all.

And they exist. Here they are.

Classification of “memory substitutions”

At the moment, the following memory disorders are classified as paramnesia:

cryptomnesic (cryptomnesia);
echonesic (echomnesia);
confabulation (or confabulation);
pseudoreminiscence (or pseudoreminiscence);
phantasmatic (or phantasms).

Cryptomnesia: I am not me, and the memory is not mine

With this type of false memory, there are 2 possible options for the symptom complex.

Sometimes our memories turn out to be wrong. The brain plays tricks on us all the time, and the tricks it plays can mislead us into thinking that we are able to accurately reconstruct our personal past. In reality, we are surrounded by false memories.

False memories is the memory of things we have never actually experienced. These can be small errors of memory, such as making us think we saw one road sign instead of another (1), or large misconceptions, such as believing that we have once flown in a hot air balloon when we never did. there was no (2). Another frightening feature of false memories: they can be imposed on us from the outside. In his book A World Full of Demons: Science Is Like a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan argued that implanting false memories in people is not only possible, but in fact very easy - the main thing is to correctly assess the level of gullibility of the person you are dealing with. He gave examples of people who, at the insistence of doctors or hypnotists, actually began to believe that they had been abducted by a UFO, or to remember childhood abuse that never happened. For these people, the distinction between memory and imagination became blurred, and events that never happened were firmly sewn into memory as real. Participants in the experiments could even describe these fictitious events extremely accurately and incredibly vividly, as if they had taken place. Carl Sagan noted:

“It’s easy to mess up a memory. False memories can be implanted even in a mind that does not consider itself vulnerable and uncritical.”

As you can see, this is a very important feature of the psyche, which is at least worth keeping in mind. To find out what new people would like to know about this phenomenon, criminal psychologist, false memory researcher (3) and author of The Memory Illusion Julia Shaw took a poll on Reddit and answered the six most interesting ones. her opinion, questions. Monocler has translated her brief comments for you.

1. Is there a way to check if our memories are real or false?

An analysis of the scientific literature shows that once a person is possessed by false memories, they are almost impossible to distinguish from the true memories stored in our brain.

This means that false memories have the same properties as any other, and are no different from memories of events that actually happened. The only way to test them is to find corroborating evidence for any particular memory that needs to be “tested.”

2. Are there people more prone to creating false memories than others?

There are groups of people who are traditionally considered more vulnerable, such as individuals with low IQs, children, adolescents, and people suffering from mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, which themselves make it difficult for those with this illness to “monitor reality.” Essentially, anyone who is poor at separating fact from fiction is more likely to create false memories.

However, in my study of “normal” adults, I did not find any systematic personality differences between those who tend to form false memories and those who do not. I conducted a study looking at fantasy propensity, malleability, and Big Five personality type differences, in addition to testing for gender, age, and education. And I didn’t find anything.

This does not mean that such personality vulnerabilities do not exist - they probably do, but perhaps they are not as important as we assume. I am convinced that everyone can (and does) have false memories.

3. Where are false memories formed?

Everywhere. The question is not where our memories become lies, but how lies become our memories.

Complex and comprehensive false memories of entire events are probably less common than partial ones (where we inaccurately recall only the details of events that occurred), but we have naturally already filled in so many gaps between memory fragments and made so many assumptions that our personal past is , essentially, just a bundle of fiction.

4. Do you think the implications of your research could impact the current justice system?

The implications of false memory research have profound implications for the criminal justice system. This challenges our current reliance on memories from suspects, victims, witnesses, even police officers and lawyers.

Now memories can confirm or destroy the accusation. However, by showing that memories are inherently unreliable, we call into question the very basis of how evidence is currently used in criminal proceedings. This raises the question of whether we can truly be sure "beyond a reasonable doubt" that someone has committed a crime in cases that rely solely on the recollections of those involved. It also shows us how easily poor interview/interrogation techniques can create false memories. And it forces us to rethink existing policing practices.

5. Can false memories be useful or have positive consequences?

I think false memories are a magnificent consequence of a beautiful and complex cognitive system, the same system that allows us to have intelligence, vivid imaginations, and problem solving. Overall, false memories are part of it all, and they are neither positive nor negative. They simply ARE.

Whether they are considered “good” or not also depends incredibly on the circumstances. For example, a situation in which the victim does not remember part of the crime committed against him may be considered bad for the investigation, but good for the victim.

6. Has the data you received in any way affected the way you use your own memories?

Definitely. I always felt a little awkward because I was always very bad at remembering things that happened in my personal life. On the other hand, I have always been good at remembering facts and information. This was partly what bolstered my confidence that my research on false memories could work, because if my memory was so unreliable, then my research might help others whose memories were also unreliable.

Although I have always been cautious in assessing the accuracy of memory (as far as I remember, ha!), I am now convinced that no memory should be trusted. I am sure that we create our memories every day anew.

It's such a scary but beautiful idea that every day you wake up with a slightly different personal past.

Research Links

1. Loftus, Elizabeth F.; Miller, David G.; Burns, Helen J. Semantic integration of verbal information into a visual memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, Vol 4(1), Jan 1978, 19-31.

2. Maryanne Garry, Matthew P. Gerrie. When Photographs Create False Memories. Current Directions in Psychological Science December 2005 vol. 14 no. 6 321-325.

3. Shaw, J. & Porter, S. (2015). Constructing rich false memories of committing crime. Psychological Science, 26(3), 291-301.

Based on materials from: “How False Memory Changes What Happened Yesterday” / Scientific American.

Cover: Paul Townsend/Flickr.com.