From: USA Today
We’re all susceptible to false memories
USA Today:
It seems hard to believe that NBC News anchor Brian Williams would remember riding in a helicopter that was shot down if he was nowhere near it, but there are reasons that it’s plausible.
Ask Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist who pioneered the study of false memory — what happens when people remember things that didn’t happen or remember them differently than how they happened.
She has conducted hundreds of experiments on more than 30,000 people over the past 40 years. She has found that a person’s memory is highly susceptible to suggestions or insinuations from conversations with other people or from watching, reading or listening to news stories.
Most people, she says, think of their memory as a recording device that they can turn on and off, one that records everything precisely. But she says it is more pliable.
Read the whole story: USA Today
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