Category: Memory

Absent-mindedness in psychology is inattentive or forgetful behaviour that can result from distractions, vagueness, blankness or zoning out.

We’ve all done it: forgotten someone’s name, where we parked the car, or left the house without the front-door key.

These are all examples of Schacter’s (1999) second sin of memory: absent-mindedness.

While the first post in the series looked at the transience of short-term memory, how memory degrades over time, absent-mindedness occurs when we’re not really concentrating in the first place.

There are two central factors in how and why we are absent-minded.

One is how deeply we encode a memory, the other is how much attention we’re paying at the crucial moment.

Let’s look at attention first.

Attentional absent-mindedness

One of the most striking experimental demonstrations of how central attention is to absent-mindedness is seen in psychology experiments on change-blindness.

In one well-known example, participants watch a video of people passing a basketball between each other, and they are asked to count the number of passes.

I’ve been a participant in this experiment, and it worked like a treat on me.

I sat watching the video, counting the passes.

Then, after the video was finished, I was asked if I noticed anything unusual.

I was completely bemused: “What do you mean anything ‘unusual’,” I said. “I’ve just seen people passing a basketball to each other. What are you talking about?”

The experimenter smiled and set the video clip running again, but this time with no instructions to count the passes.

I watched in amazement as after about 30 seconds of people passing the basketball, a person dressed in a gorilla suit walks right through the centre of the scene, stops, turns, looks at the camera, then turns again and walks out of shot.

The gorilla is visible for fully 5 seconds.

I didn’t notice a thing.

And I’m not alone.

In the version carried out by Simons and Chabris (1999), on average around half the people who took part didn’t notice the gorilla.

The original version of this experiment was carried out more than 30 years ago, but it still has the power to amaze (Neisser & Becklen, 1975).

The door study

Another well-known demonstration of how absent-minded we can be is the ‘door study’.

Here unwitting students are asked by an experimenter for directions.

While they are talking, two men carrying a door walk between the experimenter and the student.

Also hiding behind the door is another person who swaps places with the original experimenter and carries on the conversation with the student.

The student is now continuing the conversation with someone completely different.

Do they notice?

Like the gorilla experiment, only about half the students notice that they were actually talking to a different person.

Another failure of attention.

Memory encoding: depth of processing

The second element vital to absent-mindedness is the depth at which we process information.

This is demonstrated by a classic experiment carried out by Craik and Tulving (1975).

They set about testing the strength of memory traces created using three different levels of processing:

1. Shallow processing: participants were shown a word and asked to think about the font it was written in.
2. Intermediate processing: participants were shown a word and asked to think about what it rhymes with.
3. Deep processing: participants were shown a word and asked to think about how it would fit into a sentence, or which category of ‘thing’ it was.

Participants who had encoded the information most deeply, remembered the most words when given a surprise test later.

But it also took them longer to encode the information in the first place.

Crucially, though, participants also had to do the right type of encoding.

For example pondering a word’s meaning for a long time did help its recall, but putting equivalent effort into thinking about its structure didn’t help recall.

Prospective memory lapses

We’re not always trying to remember something we’ve already been exposed to, sometimes we’re trying to remember to do something in the future.

This is what psychologists call prospective memory.

Here are some examples:

• Call your mother after supper.
• Fill up the car with petrol on the way home from work.
• Buy those concert tickets at the weekend.
• Drain the pasta in 8 minutes.
• Take the medication at 12pm.

All these tasks involve us setting ourselves a mental alarm clock that is either triggered by some event occurring, like finishing supper, or by a particular time.

Psychologists have found the ways in which we are absent-minded in prospective memory can depend on whether we are trying to remember a future event or a future time.

Normally we depend on external cues to jog our memories.

For example we drive past the petrol station, or write a note to ourselves to buy the tickets.

We tend to forget event-based prospective memories when we fail to spot the cue.

For example we don’t notice the petrol station on the way home as we are distracted by an accident on the other side of the road.

Time-based prospective memories, though, depend more on how good we are at generating cues for ourselves.

For example you might remember to take your medication at the same time by always doing it after lunch.

Absent-mindedness: curse or blessing?

Given our propensity for absent-mindedness, it’s sometimes amazing that anything run by humans works at all.

Slips of memory in so many different types of vital activities – e.g. surgeon, train driver, pilot – can have disastrous consequences.

The fact that things often run smoothly shows we are remarkably adept at focussing when we need to and attending to important cues in our environment.

Absent-mindedness might even be seen as a blessing.

The case of the Russian journalist Solomon Shereshevskii illustrates the point dramatically.

Shereshevskii’s memory was so perfect he could remember everything that was said to him and maybe even everything that had ever happened to him.

Tested by the famous neuropsychologist, Alexander Luria, no limit could be found to his memory.

But this amazing gift had its down-side.

He found it difficult to ignore insignificant events.

As a result, a simple cough would be imprinted on his memory forever.

Also, all his memories were so highly detailed that he found it difficult to think in the abstract.

It can be difficult to think about the idea of, say, a bridge if your mind is immediately assaulted by hundreds of specific examples of bridges.

It is reported that Shereshevskii became so tortured with the accumulation of memories that he developed a special technique to help him forget.

He would imagine the memories he wanted to ditch written on a blackboard and then mentally erase them.

This seemed to work for him.

Perhaps we should be thankful for our absent-mindedness.

It saves us from remembering all of life’s crushingly dull moments as well as setting us free to think in abstract terms.

→ This post is part of a series on the seven sins of memory:

1. Short-Term Memory vs. Long-Term Memory: Definition And Examples
2. Absent-Mindedness: 2 Factors That Cause Forgetfulness
3. Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon Or Lethologica
4. Misattribution: How Memories are Distorted and Invented
5. Suggestibility: How Memory Is Biased By Suggestions
   • False Memory: Dramatic Examples Of Fake Memories
6. Commitment and Consistency Bias: How It Warps Memory
7. Long-Term Memory: When Persistence Is A Curse

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Short-term memory is what is in your mind right now while long-term memory is what gets stored away for days, months or years.

Short-term memory is the the ability to hold a small amount of information in the mind for a few moments.

For psychologists, it refers to things that are currently being used by your brain right now.

For example, as you’re reading this article the words you’ve read go into short-term memory for a very short period, you extract some meaning (hopefully) and then the meaning is either stored or discarded.

Typically, short-term memory is gone from the mind in a few seconds.

Unless, that is, it is transferred to long-term memory, which can last for many years.

Long-term memory, however, can be just as illusive, as most of us know to our cost.

Example of long-term memory failure

My memory continues to surprise me, and not usually in a good way.

I recently reread a book which I first read, and greatly enjoyed, about 13 years ago.

It is fiction by one of my favourite authors – the writing is vivid, the story exciting and the set-piece action breath-taking.

Despite all this I had almost no memory of reading the book the first time.

Almost everything about the book seems to have seeped away in the intervening years.

I couldn’t remember the plot, most of the characters or any of the scenes.

The only thing I vaguely remembered was the main character’s name, but I couldn’t be sure I hadn’t invented that memory, after all I couldn’t recall anything else about the book.

Short-term memory vs. long-term memory

This is an example of what Harvard psychologist Daniel L. Schacter calls the first deadly sin of memory: transience (Schacter, 1999).

Transience can be seen in both short- and long-term memory.

Short-term memory, for psychologists, means the things that are in your mind right now, and only those things.

On the other hand, long-term memory is anything you store to be retrieved at a later time.

Studies have shown that both types of memory can be extremely fragile over their respective timescales.

Short-term memory loss

A classic experiment on short-term memory loss was carried out by Peterson & Peterson (1959).

It demonstrates how quickly short-term memory loss occurs.

They asked participants to memorise a three-letter sequence, then count backwards in sets of threes.

Participants were then asked to try and recall the three-letter sequence after different lengths of time counting backwards.

Participants did surprisingly poorly on this test of short-term memory.

After only six seconds of counting backwards in threes, on average half of the original three letters had disappeared from memory.

By the time participants had been counting backwards for 12 seconds, less than 15% of the original memory remained.

Finally after 18 seconds it was all but gone — short-term memory loss was complete.

This experiment clearly shows how quickly information leaks out of short-term memory.

The experience of short-term memory loss is usually perfectly normal.

Size of short-term memory

The psychologist George A. Miller is famous for coming up with a magical number related to short-term memory.

What this magical number represents – 7 plus or minus 2 – is the number of items we can hold in our short-term memory.

So while most people can generally hold around seven numbers in short-term memory, almost everyone finds it difficult to hold ten digits in mind.

At the other end of the scale, 5 numbers is the bare minimum for what people can hold in short-term memory.

Long-term memory: slow forgetting

To return to my example of the novel, though, it seems to me that some aspects of the book must have become lodged in my long-term memory.

No doubt much was lost in short-term memory, but surely some of it must have stuck in long-term memory.

Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to follow the story and would have ended up reading the first page again and again.

So, what types of processes affect how much we retain from long-term memory?

In fact, relatively little is known about how our long-term memory fades over substantial periods of time.

Thirteen years is a long time for an experimenter to wait just to find out if I can remember the details of that book.

Nevertheless, studies do suggest that forgetting probably follows a power function.

That means we lose a lot of information soon after it goes in, then, over time, the rate of forgetting slows down.

How short-term memory becomes long-term

Of course not all long-term memories are created equal, and so the reasons why we fail to recall information are many and varied.

Indeed, some psychologists have argued that we never really forget anything.

Perhaps, they say, the memory is still in our minds but we can no longer access it.

Cues are clearly important to retrieving long-term memories.

The smell of varnish might remind us of the day we spent canoeing in the rain, lost in solitary thought.

Conversely, some experiences can hinder the retrieval of certain long-term memories.

The long-term memory of a parent’s anger at our childish misdemeanour might completely block out the memory of what we actually did.

Long-term memory is certainly more likely to fade if we don’t use it.

The retrieval and rehearsal of long-term memories has been shown to enhance their storage.

Interestingly, there’s no actual evidence in humans that long-term memory which remains unrehearsed or unretrieved actually does dissipate over time.

Perhaps all our long-term memories really are still in there.

Gone, and forgotten

But even if my long-term memory of reading that book the first time is still in there, it’s doing a very good job of hiding.

Especially since rereading the book should be a massive cue to its recall.

Maybe we do completely forget or maybe I have just forgotten that I didn’t actually read the book in the first place.

Either way, perhaps I’ll be able to enjoy the same book all over again in another 13 years!

→ This post is part of a series on the seven sins of memory:

1. Short-Term Memory vs. Long-Term Memory: Definition And Examples
2. Absent-Mindedness: 2 Factors That Cause Forgetfulness
3. Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon Or Lethologica
4. Misattribution: How Memories are Distorted and Invented
5. Suggestibility: How Memory Is Biased By Suggestions
   • False Memory: Dramatic Examples Of Fake Memories
6. Commitment and Consistency Bias: How It Warps Memory
7. Long-Term Memory: When Persistence Is A Curse

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Some of the most widespread beliefs about memory are myths and misconceptions.

One of the classic criticisms levelled at psychology is that it’s just common sense.

And there’s nothing that winds up psychologists more than having this old saw repeated back to them.

If it’s true we should be able to ask the general public six easy questions about the psychology of, let’s say, memory, and they should do pretty well.

After all, everyone has a mind of their own and can introspect and see what’s going on inside it, so they should be able to answer these questions easily, shouldn’t they?

Myths about memory

Simons and Chabris (2011) had 1,838 Americans polled with six basic statements, testing some common myths about memory.

Great care was taken to try and get a representative sample of the general population.

Their responses were compared with those of almost 100 psychologists.

Amongst these were 16 professors with at least 10 years experience in researching memory.

The statements are all below in their original form:

1. “People suffering from amnesia typically cannot recall their own name or identity.”

Fully 83 percent of people agreed either ‘mostly’ or ‘strongly’ with this statement.

In contrast, all the experts disagreed ‘mostly’ or ‘strongly’ with this statement.

In fact, people suffering from amnesia normally can remember their own name and identity, so it is a myth about memory.

The reason people get this so wrong is probably because they are often exposed to incredibly inaccurate depictions of amnesia.

Films like ‘The Bourne Identity’ (and every sitcom ever made that uses an amnesia plot) are partly to blame; while films like ‘Memento’, with its much more accurate depiction of amnesia, are in the minority.

2. “In my opinion, the testimony of one confident eyewitness should be enough evidence to convict a defendant of a crime.”

37 percent of the public agreed, while all 16 experts disagreed.

Actually eyewitness testimony can be frighteningly inaccurate, so it is another of the myths about memory.

One of the problems with memory is that people are surprisingly suggestible.

Even relatively small differences in the way eyewitnesses are handled can have a huge impact on what they claim to have seen.

For a good example have a look at this article on suggestibility.

3. “Human memory works like a video camera, accurately recording the events we see and hear so that we can review and inspect them later.”

63 percent of the public agreed, while all 16 experts disagreed.

This is a surprisingly high percentage given how most people frequently have problems recalling basic facts.

In fact, it is one of the myths about memory, since it works nothing like a video camera.

In reality, what we recall is affected by our current emotional state, our motivations and so on.

And, of course, a lot of the time we can’t remember it at all.

See this article on the short-term memory vs. long-term memory.

4. “Hypnosis is useful in helping witnesses accurately recall details of crimes.”

55 percent of the public agreed, while 14 experts disagreed and 2 didn’t know or thought it was unclear.

Hypnosis is a bit more controversial, but still the public had a lot more faith in it than the psychologists.

Part of the problem with hypnosis is that it can make people incredibly suggestible to completely false information.

Through hypnosis, eyewitnesses can come to believe things that never happened.

One great example is the ‘lost in the mall‘ study.

5. “People generally notice when something unexpected enters their field of view, even when they’re paying attention to something else.”

78 percent of the public agreed and 13 experts disagreed, while 3 agreed.

This one was the most controversial for the experts, but probably because there’s little evidence about how often we fail to notice when something unexpected comes into view.

The general point here is that people are much more absent-minded than they think.

That’s because of the paradox that we don’t notice what we don’t notice.

For all the classic examples check out this article on absent-mindedness.

6. “Once you have experienced an event and formed a memory of it, that memory does not change.”

48 percent of the public agreed while 15 experts disagreed and one thought it was unclear.

This is yet another myth about memory.

Actually even so-called ‘flashbulb memories’—like where you were when Kennedy was shot—can be quite inaccurate or easily change over time.

For a great example of how malleable memories are, check out this previous article on misattribution, how memories are distorted and invented.

Not common sense

By and large, then, according to memory experts, all these statements are false — they are all myths about memory.

So, should anyone say to you: “psychology is just common sense”, try asking them if they agree with a couple of the above six statements.

If they do, your work is done.

You’ll have spotted that the context for these questions is often related to eyewitness testimony.

That’s because in court, lay beliefs about memory are so important. Simons and Chabris conclude by saying:

“The prevalence of mistaken beliefs in the general public implies that similar misunderstandings likely are common among jurors and could well lead to flawed analyses of testimony that involves memory. At least for these basic properties of memory, commonsense intuitions are more likely to be wrong than right.”

Try not to think about what kind of effect these mistaken models of how memory works have on our legal system and public life in general or you’re likely to become mighty depressed.

→ Continue reading: Facts About Memory: 10 Interesting Things You Should Know

Learning to play music can have a powerful effect on long-term memory and overall brain function.

Professional musicians show superior long-term memory compared with non-musicians, research shows.

Their brains are also capable of much faster neural responses in key areas of the brain related to decision-making, memory and attention.

The results were presented at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, DC (Schaeffer et al., 2014).

Dr Heekyeong Park, who led the study, said:

“Musically trained people are known to process linguistic materials a split second faster than those without training, and previous research also has shown musicians have advantages in working memory.

What we wanted to know is whether there are differences between pictorial and verbal tasks and whether any advantages extend to long-term memory.

If proven, those advantages could represent an intervention option to explore for people with cognitive challenges.”

Music and memory study

The 14 professional musicians in the study — all of whom had been playing for 15 years — were given a series of pictures and words to remember.

Their results on a long-term memory test were compared with a group of 15 non-musicians.

While they did the test, their neural responses were measured using electroencephalography (EEG) technology.

The musicians had the advantage in long-term memory for the pictures, although not the verbal items.

Measures of the musicians’ brain function also showed that their neural response was faster than non-musicians.

Areas in the mid-frontal region — those associated with decision-making — were between one-third and half-a-second faster.

In the parietal lobes — which are associated with the senses, memory and attention — their neural response were sometimes almost one second faster than non-musicians.

It’s not yet known why these advantages in processing and memory occur, but Dr. Park speculates that learning to navigate musical scores may be partly responsible.

This study adds to a growing body of evidence showing that musical training has a wonderful positive effect on cognitive abilities.

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The Zeigarnik effect is the psychological finding that people remember unfinished tasks better than completed ones.

The definition of the Zeigarnik effect is that people remember unfinished tasks or activities better than those that are finished.

When a task is finished or completed it tends to leave memory.

The Zeigarnik effect also provides a key to one of the simplest methods for beating procrastination.

The Zeigarnik effect was named after a Russian psychologist, Bluma Zeigarnik, who noticed an odd thing while sitting in a restaurant in Vienna.

Example of the Zeigarnik effect

What she noticed was that the waiters seemed only to remember orders which were in the process of being served.

When completed, the orders evaporated from their memory.

Zeigarnik went back to the lab to test out a theory about what was going on.

She asked participants to do twenty or so simple little tasks in the lab, like solving puzzles and stringing beads (Zeigarnik, 1927).

Except some of the time they were interrupted half way through the task.

Afterwards she asked them which activities they remembered doing.

People were about twice as likely to remember the tasks during which they’d been interrupted than those they completed.

What does this have to do with procrastination? I’ll give you another clue…

Almost sixty years later Kenneth McGraw and colleagues carried out another test of the Zeigarnik effect (McGraw et al., 1982).

In it participants had to do a really tricky puzzle; except they were interrupted before any of them could solve it and told the study was over.

Despite this nearly 90 percent carried on working on the puzzle anyway.

Another Zeigarnik effect example

One of the oldest tricks in the TV business for keeping viewers tuned in to a serial week after week is the cliffhanger.

The hero seems to have fallen off a mountain but the shot cuts away before you can be sure.

And then those fateful words: “TO BE CONTINUED…”

Literally a cliffhanger.

You tune in next week for the resolution because the mystery is ticking away in the back of your mind.

The great English novelist Charles Dickens used exactly the same technique.

Many of his works, like Oliver Twist, although later published as complete novels, were originally serialised.

His cliff-hangers created such anticipation in people’s minds that his American readership would wait at New York docks for the latest instalment to arrive by ship from Britain.

They were that desperate to find out what happened next.

I’ve started so I’ll finish

What all these examples have in common is that when people manage to start something they’re more inclined to finish it.

Procrastination bites worst when we’re faced with a large task that we’re trying to avoid starting.

It might be because we don’t know how to start or even where to start.

What the Zeigarnik effect teaches is that one weapon for beating procrastination is starting somewhere…anywhere.

Don’t start with the hardest bit, try something easy first.

If you can just get under way with any part of a project, then the rest will tend to follow.

Once you’ve made a start, however trivial, there’s something drawing you on to the end.

It will niggle away in the back of your mind like a Lost cliff-hanger.

Although the technique is simple, we often forget it because we get so wrapped up in thinking about the most difficult parts of our projects.

The sense of foreboding can be a big contributor to procrastination.

When the Zeigarnik effect does not work

The Zeigarnik effect has an important exception.

It doesn’t work so well when we’re not particularly motivated to achieve our goal or don’t expect to do well.

This is true of goals in general: when they’re unattractive or impossible we don’t bother with them.

But if we value the goal and think it’s possible, just taking a first step could be the difference between failure and success.

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Dramatic examples of false memory, implanting false memories and seminal research by Professor Elizabeth Loftus.

A false memory in psychology is a fabricated or distorted recollection.

False memories could be imaginary, distorted or even implanted by someone else.

False memories are common because memory is not a perfect recording device.

Instead, memory is highly prone to influence, as we shall see in these dramatic false memory examples.

False memory example: The George Franklin case

In 1990 George Franklin became the first ever US citizen convicted of murder by a witness who recovered false memories more than 20 years after the event.

The fact that the witness was Franklin’s daughter, Eileen, ensured the case was splashed across the news media.

Franklin was released in 1996 after 6 years in prison when irregularities were discovered in Eileen’s evidence: it emerged she had been hypnotised before testifying, when the false memory was probably created.

There is a good reason why hypnotised witnesses are barred from testifying in some jurisdictions: under hypnosis people are highly suggestible to false memory.

Implanting false memories

Even without hypnosis, studies show that people’s memories are open to influence.

But, can it be demonstrated in the lab that a false memory can be implanted?

False memories are hard to research for one simple reason: it’s difficult to verify whether a false memory is really false or not (Loftus, 1993).

Often a considerable amount of time has passed since the original event and it’s not possible to corroborate what people say a false memory.

But, while it’s difficult, it’s not impossible – it just takes some concerted effort.

Elizabeth Loftus, Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine, has been at the forefront of psychological research into false memory and repressed memories and testified in George Franklin’s case.

She has also carried out some fascinating research into the possibility of implanting a false memory.

False memory of being lost in the mall

In a seminal false memory study Loftus and Pickrell (1995) recruited 24 participants who were to be presented with four stories from when they were between 4 and 6 years old, three of which were true, and one false.

To get the true stories, the researchers spoke to participants’ relatives to get three events for each person which had really happened.

The events were chosen so that they were not traumatic or emotionally difficult to recall.

Each family was also asked to provide the circumstances of another event that could possibly have happened, but didn’t.

This was the target false memory to be implanted.

In each case the false memory was for getting lost in a shopping mall.

Relatives provided details for the false memory of a specific shopping mall it could have been along with other details to make the fake story plausible.

They also confirmed that an event like this had not actually occurred — it definitely was a false memory.

Do you remember this false memory?

Participants themselves were told they were involved in a study about their ability to recall details of childhood memories.

They weren’t told it was about false memory.

Each participant was first sent a written description of the four events their relatives had outlined – three being real and one being the false memory.

They were then asked to write down which events they remembered and more details of the events those events.

Then, soon after, participants were interviewed.

At this point they were reminded about the four memories and asked to recall as much as they could about them.

At a second interview a week later, a similar procedure was followed.

At the end of both interviews participants rated the clarity of their memories, including the false memory.

It was then revealed to them that one was a false memory and they were asked to guess which one it was.

Of the 24 participants, 5 falsely recalled the false memory as a real memory, although participants understandably found the false memory much less clear.

This may seem like quite an unimpressive proportion, but considering the very low level of suggestion or coercion involved in the interviews, it does at least show the possibility of implanting false memories.

Up to half believe a false memory

A later study with more participants which examined a wider range of memories was carried out by Hyman and Pentland (1996).

This found that, depending on experimental variables, at least some kind of false memory could be implanted in between 20 percent and 40 percent of participants.

But psychologists have done better.

In a fantastically titled paper, ‘A picture is worth a thousand lies’, Kimbereley Wade and colleagues used a doctored photograph of a fictitious balloon flight to implant false memories (Wade et al., 2002).

Using similar interview procedures to Loftus and Pickrell (1995), they found that 50 percent of participants created either complete or partial false memories of the flight.

The false memory case of Paul Ingram

Critics argue that the problem with these sorts of studies is that they only implant inconsequential memories.

Traumatic memories, such as those claimed by George Franklin’s daughter, might be a completely different matter.

This is a fair point and difficult to refute because it would be highly unethical to implant traumatic memories into participants.

Well, actually this has been done, in one of the most bizarre and dramatic false memory experiments ever documented.

In 1988 Paul Ingram, a police officer, was arrested for sexually abusing his two daughters, an allegation he strongly denied.

Over an extended period of five months, however, he was subjected to pressure by fellow police officers, psychologists and other advisors, suggesting he had committed child abuse, including having raped his own daughters.

Eventually Ingram began to confess to all manner of rapes, child sexual abuses and even to participation in a Satan-worshipping cult which had allegedly murdered 25 babies.

At one point the prosecution brought in the renowned memory researcher, Dr Richard Ofshe, now Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.

He was asked to interview Ingram.

Ofshe soon became suspicious of Ingram’s credibility.

In order to test Ingram, he made up a story that his son and daughter claimed he had forced them to have sex with each other while he watched.

This was something Ofshe confirmed with both son and daughter had not actually happened.

Over a period of hours, and despite initially denying the memory, Ingram slowly began to generate these false memories.

Ultimately Ingram wrote a three-page confession to a crime that was completely fabricated.

What else might he have fabricated under this kind of intense pressure?

Unfortunately for Paul Ingram, Ofshe’s report wasn’t issued until after he had already confessed to the crimes and been convicted.

He was then unable to withdraw his guilty plea.

Paul Ingram remained in jail until 2003 and is still a registered sex offender despite many doubting his guilt.

The extremes of false memory

The case of Paul Ingram along with the experimental studies on false memory probably represent two extremes of a continuum.

At one end, when politely asked within the context of a psychology study, some people can be induced into believing relatively benign false memories.

Perhaps as many as 50 percent.

At the other end, when placed under incredible psychological pressure, like Paul Ingram, who knows what people will claim to remember.

→ This post is part of a series on the seven sins of memory:

1. Short-Term Memory vs. Long-Term Memory: Definition And Examples
2. Absent-Mindedness: 2 Factors That Cause Forgetfulness
3. Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon Or Lethologica
4. Misattribution: How Memories are Distorted and Invented
5. Suggestibility: How Memory Is Biased By Suggestions
   • False Memory: Dramatic Examples Of Fake Memories
6. Commitment and Consistency Bias: How It Warps Memory
7. Long-Term Memory: When Persistence Is A Curse

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