The Power of Suggestion: How to Implant False Memories

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/07/14/Elizabeth_Loftus_Whats_the_Matter_with_Memory

Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus discusses studying the power of suggestion, including implanting false memories in test subjects. After three suggestive interviews, Loftus found she was able to convince subjects they had been lost in a shopping mall as a small child.

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Elizabeth Loftus, psychologist and distinguished professor at the University of California, Irvine, discusses the prevalence of false memories. She describes her own experiments in creating false memories, and explains how this impacts fields ranging from law to dieting. - Chautauqua Institution

Elizabeth Loftus, Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine, studies human memory. Her experiments reveal how memories can be changed by things that we are told. Facts, ideas, suggestions and other post-event information can modify our memories. The legal field, so reliant on memories, has been a significant application of the memory research. She is also interested in psychology and law, more generally.

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• brainwashing
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[rzoggyie]

I have started a blog to get the FM()F to stop speaking for survivors of child sexual abuse. The claim children don’t dissociate. You can Google my blog memoir of a redemptive life. Once you get to the blog you’ll find the link on the right side of the page. Thanks, Rosie

[HaphazardCrappola]

@fartsam08 Fart Sam, my name is more amazing.

[fartsam08]

@HaphazardCrappola I can't decide which is more amazing. The truth in your comment or your channel name.

[HaphazardCrappola]

I think this experiment just proved that as easily as you can implant a false memory of something bad happening. You can easily implant a false memory that something bad didn't happen.

[tracyeldred]

Makes you wonder how much of our memories is 'made up' from misguided beliefs or suggestion from others doesn't it?

[sweethippy67]

having an eating disorder may correlate to abuse but not neccessarily have to have been the cause of it one bit.

[jfsfrnd]

@deezee871 2 - I still don't see how creating a memory of being lost in a mall or spilling punch on someone and being upset by it has any relation to being emotionally, mentally and physically/sexually violated/tortured and repressing all of part of it. One therapist tried this with me - told me my eating disorder meant I was sexually abused as a child. I left the therapy. So I am not saying that therapists did not start doing this, I am asking what their motivation was for doing so.

[jfsfrnd]

@deezee871 1 - What about the adults who (as children or teens) repressed and afterward remembered sexual and ritual child abuse who NEVER got therapy. Elizabeth Lofthus seems to be saying that ALL these memories if repressed come from someone who went to therapy and were manipulated to believe in them. If she was to be honest she would create memories of sexual and ritual child/teen abuse in adults who had no previous memory of them.

[jfsfrnd]

@deezee871 People can also create fads when it is convenient to do so.

[deezee871]

@jfsfrnd I don't know exactly when everything happened. It's not like it was in a textbook or something. I just know that there was a repressed memories fad and it took a long time for it to die down a little. There are some references to it in psychological journals; I remember reading about it last year when I was looking for a research topic. But memories have been long-proven to be highly malleable and easily manipulated.