A study by Elizabeth Loftus demonstrates how false memories can be planted in research subjects. It was conducted in 1997, at a time when lots of “therapists” hypnotized patients and led them to believe they were abused–sometimes in outlandish satanic rituals–when they were children. You might remember hearing about some of the crazier ones on shows like 20/20. In the study, subjects were given stories to read about their own childhoods, three of which were true (as told by the subject’s parents or other close relative or friend) and one made-up scenario in which the subject got lost in the mall (which also was verified to have NOT happened by the parent or relative). A surprising number of people reported remembering this fictive stressful situation. To read further: http://cogprints.org/597/0/199802007.html
Also, I believe that later studies have correlated susceptibility to forming false memories with high fantasy-proneness, but as I can’t think of a source offhand, I won’t say it’s for sure. Makes sense, though.
I have two memories like this, but I’m not convinced they’re wrong.
My first memory has to do with the George Michael video for “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me”. I was at that concert where they did the filming of the video.
When it finally surfaced on one of the music television shows, one of my nieces happened to tape the video knowing I’d been there. I hadn’t seen the video yet and when I saw it, I was stunned to see the ending shot. It was a high level zoom (the boom camera) to the Elton John side of the stage and then into the audience sitting there in the bleachers. The last thing I see is a hand, barely lit, doing the sign language sign for I love you. I was pointing it out excitedly to my niece and nephew who were watching it with me because it was MY hand! I recall rewinding the tape to watch where the camera zoomed in, because our seats were easy to pick out due to our proximity to the stage and where it zoomed in.
Any time I saw the video after that, it was cut off sooner! How frustrating! Fast Forward many years later when a DVD compilation of George Michael videos is released. I buy it, thinking I can finally see the full version! I see the camera zoom in, and just as it should have gotten to that point, the freaking thing fades out!!! Now I wonder if I hallucinated it, or if they edited it later because the ending really did go on after the song ended for a few seconds.
My second weird memory glitch is from a Def Leppard concert. I can swear that when I saw them in June of 2003, they sang a song that rarely ever gets played live. However, the set lists I can find show no mention of it. Other people from that same show have sworn it wasn’t played. I can recall where I was sitting, what I was doing when the song was being played and the words used to announce the song. After much digging, I did find that it was played at a concert I’d seen 11 years prior!
The show from 1992 I was nowhere near the stage, nor was I in floor seats, but my memory has me placed on the floor at the 2003 show where I swear I heard the song. It stuck out because it was a song I wasn’t familiar with and it’s a vaguely depressing song so I wanted them to get onto the rest of the show with something more upbeat.
Just too weird!!!
Perhaps they were watching CNN.
Until 2006, the nickel faced to the left. Currently, the nickel faces towards the viewer.
I was going to mention this. Loftus was also able to get people to remember seeing Ariel at Disney resorts at visits occurring before the release of The Little Mermaid.
And then, there are the people that think Greedo shot first…
It was Johnnie Cochran’s famous Chewbacca defense that did it.
The interesting question is then of course “How often did he call a home run, but miss the next pitch?”
Which is related to the false-memory issue, because humans are really good at forgetting misses and remembering hits in situations like this. Examples are cold-reading ‘psychics’
Just like I prefer my version of what Hannibal Lecter says to Clarice about the survey she presents him with: “Did you really think you could dissect me with this blunt little instrument?”
He says “tool,” which is inelegant to my ears and misses an excellent opportunity for a pun.
For a long time my sister insisted thet she could clearly remember me being attacked by dozens of cats in the street in front of our house. My other sister and brother also seemed to remember it, although not as clearly. I didn’t remember such an event at all, but it did seem vaguely familiar–as if I had heard about something like that before, somewhere.
Finally she brought it up with our mother. Mom quite clearly remembered Sis coming to her, crying, after waking up from the nightmare in which the attack took place.
Regarding the “Thunderbird photo”; I very clearly remember going to the school library when I was in the fourth or fifth grade and seeing the photo in a rather slim book with a sepia-toned photo of a man’s face on the cover. I still insist that I could not have been influenced by other people’s reported memories of the picture because I had never talked about it with anyone nor read about it until after I spontaneously recalled it from my youth and thought to look for it on the 'net. I was surprised both by the fact that it wasn’t anywhere to be found and by the number of other people looking for it and talking about it.
Understand, I’m not claiming that the photo depicted real events–just that such a photo existed. I have no theory as to why it is so hard to find, and I don’t blame people for doubting that it ever existed.
There’s an urban legend that Oprah threw Tommy Hilfiger off of the show because he said that if he’d known so many black people were going to wear his clothes, he’d never have gotten into the business. My ex and his sister both swore they had seen the episode on tv. Snopes disproved it, and when I showed him the Snopes page, he was baffled.
I’m very prone to this kind of thing. More than once, I’ve told a story about something I “remembered” happening to me, and it turned out it was a story someone had previously told me that actually happened to them. One memorable (heh) occasion, I was telling a story to a group of friends that included the person it actually happened to. He called me on it, pissed because I was “lying” about it happening to me. I don’t deliberately co-opt other people’s stories, I just somehow integrate interesting stories into my memories, without realizing I’m doing it.
No record of it live, it’s true, but Jane Fonda told the story live, which was almost as good.
I also saw the Challenger explosion live. We lived in rural West Virginia and had one of the old C-band satellite dishes. We had a raw feed of the NASA channel.
It had snowed the night before, so school was cancelled that day. IIRC, the consensus was that launch wasn’t going to happen that day (they had already put it off a few times) and it was still below freezing at the Cape at launch time.
So, we watched regular programming until about 10 minutes before launch, realized that we hadn’t heard anything about a scrub, so we flipped over and saw it live…
Alot of people have heard the line “That’s great, but what does it do?–It doesn’t do anything, that’s the beauty of it”
None of them can ID the movie.
“If every vampire who said he was at the crucifixion was actually there, it would have been like Woodstock.” /Buffy quote off
Yeah, see the work of Elizabeth Loftus (cited above). Great stuff.
I have a really disctinct memory of being on an airplane and the pilot announcing the Challenger disaster, but my dad insists I wasn’t on an airplane at the time and a pilot wouldn’t announce that in-flight anyway. As clear as the memory is, he might be right. Memory is a weird thing.
A year or two ago, someone here managed to unearth the movie clip that that came from, and it was from some obscure old movie nobody had ever heard of. The speculation is that some radio DJ was playing random movie clips between songs, as some do, and that most of the general public first heard the line from such a radio clip.
Here is an earlier thread where we discussed that particular scene (and Morbo’s Betamax tape) at great length:
I remember Bill Clinton reminiscing about blck churges getting blown up by bombs (in Arkansas). Except there were never any church bombings in Arkansas-they happened elsewhere.
The Zapruder film was one of four films taken of the Kennedy assassination. The others were taken by Orville Nix, Marie Muchmore, and Charles Bronson (not the actor). The Muchmore film was purchased by United Press International on November 25, 1963, and shown on New York television station WNEW-TV on November 26, 1963, four days after the assassination.
Many other films were taken in the seconds immediately before or immediately after the assassination by Robert Hughes, F. Mark Bell, Elsie Dorman, John Martin Jr., Patsy Paschall, Tina Towner, James Underwood, Dave Wiegman, Mal Couch, and Thomas Atkins. Some, such as the Wiegman and Couch films, were shown on network television later that day.
I have had this happen several times- but I don’t recall many…
Back when I was in middle school I remember very clearly showing my mother a novel that I had borrowed from a teacher when I was home over the weekend. On Monday morning I asked her for it, sure that I had left it with her. I recalled the discussion we’d had about it and all.
It was in my desk at school in a classroom where I had left it the previous Friday. There is no possible way she had seen it or that we had the conversation I remember…
speaking of miss Fonda, she wasnt nude in the opening credits of “Barbarella” no matter how many people think she was.