 OK, we're just after six, so perhaps we can get started. So good evening to everyone. My name's Paul Paul Martin. I'm the Director of the Research School of Psychology here at the Australian National University. Welcome to the fourth annual psychology lecture to be delivered by distinguished professor Elizabeth Loftus. I would like to start with an acknowledgement of country. We acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and pay our respects to the elders of the non-Iranian people past and present. Now let me just say a few words about the annual psychology lecture series. The first three have been delivered by very distinguished people. So the first annual lecture was delivered in 2015 by Professor Pat McGory, Executive Director of Origin, which is the National Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health. Professor McGory had been awarded Australian of the Year just a few years before in 2010. And his address was entitled Early Intervention in Youth Mental Health Reform, Paradigms for 21st Century Mental Health. The second annual lecture was delivered by Tim Sootpumar Son, who at the time was the Race Discrimination Commissioner of the Australian Human Rights Commission. And his talk was entitled The Challenge of Social Cohesion. The third annual lecture was delivered by Professor Pat Dudgeon from the University of Western Australia. Professor Dudgeon was the first Aboriginal psychologist to graduate in Australia and is a commissioner in the Australian National Mental Health Commission. Her talk was entitled Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Mental Health Research in Australia. Now, Professor Mike Calfer will introduce tonight's speaker and we'll be talking to you about the eminent position that Professor Loftus holds globally in psychology. But before he does, let me just point out that psychology really is enormous and expanding. So holding such an eminent position in psychology is particularly impressive. For example, psychology attracts more students than any other academic discipline in many countries, including Australia. It's a worldwide phenomena. Stevens and Wedding sampled 27 countries and imported evidence of growth in psychology in all these countries. An extreme example is Brazil, which graduates 10,000 newly trained psychologists each year. I want to end with a quote that I find amusing. The quote goes, in the 1980s, it was said that all the inhabitants of Spain would be psychologists somewhere in the early decays of the next century if the exponential growth of students registering for psychology continues. There's a thought. I now hand over to Professor Mike Calferd, the province of the Australian National University and also Professor Psycoli to introduce Professor Elizabeth Ath Loftus. Thank you, Paul, and thank you very much for arranging for our guest speaker to be here tonight. I'd like to add my acknowledgement to the traditional owners of the lands on which we meet. So 20 years ago, I used to give the lectures here on the physiological basis of memory. So it's a great pleasure to welcome Elizabeth Loftus because she's one of those people we used to talk about in those lectures. In a recent profile in nature, she was described as having done more than any other researcher to document the unreliability of memory. And the National Academy of Sciences described her work as having had a profound impact on the field of psychology and on scholars outside the field and on the administration of justice around the world. In fact, our guest has been ranked as one of the top 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century and the highest-ranked woman in that field. She's distinguished professor at the University of California at Irvine. She holds faculty positions in psychological science, criminology, law and society, cognitive sciences, and in the School of Law. She moved to UC Irvine in 2002 from her prior position as professor of psychology and adjunct professor of law at University of Washington, Seattle. Elizabeth received her undergraduate degree in mathematics and psychology from UCLA and her PhD in psychology from Stanford University. In her career, she has published 23 books. Many of these have won awards and most have been translated into Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Chinese, and other languages. And she has published more than 600 scientific articles on the male ability of human memory on eyewitness testimony and on courtroom procedure. She has been president of the major international associations in psychology and law, including the Association for Psychological Sciences, APS, the American Psychology Law Society, and the Experimental Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association, the APA. She has been awarded many of the highest honors in the field of psychological science. The James McKean Cattell Fellowship Award from the Association of Psychological Science for, and I quote, a career of significant intellectual contributions to the science of psychology in the area of applied psychological research. She was awarded the William James Fellow Award for ingeniously and rigorously designing research studies that yielded clear objective evidence on the most difficult and controversial questions. She has received the Gold Medal Award for Lifetime Achievement in Science from the American Psychological Foundation. And she has also been acknowledged for her contributions to criminal justice from the American Academy of Forensic Psychology, which gave her their Distinguished Contributions to Forensic Psychology Award, the American Psychology Law Society, also awarded her the Distinguished Contributions to Psychology and Law Award. And more recently, Cornell University bestowed their Lifetime Achievement in Human Development Law and Psychology Award. Her own university, University of California, Irvine, has given the UC Irvine Medal for exceptional contributions to the vision, mission, and spirit of UC Irvine, the highest honor that university bestows. In broader recognition of her research, Professor Loftus has also been elected to prestigious societies around the world, including National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the American Philosophical Society. She has also served as an expert witness in hundreds of cases, and been a strong advocate for those who've been wrongfully convicted based on inaccurate eyewitness memory. Indeed, she has dedicated much of her career to understanding why memory can be faulty, whether the results of her research were welcomed or not. This university couldn't think of a more deserving awardee for the Research School of Psychology's inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award. So it now gives me great pleasure to present this award and to welcome Distinguished Professor Elizabeth Loftus to present her lecture entitled The Fiction of Memory. Oh my gosh, that's beautiful. Okay, you will. Thank you. That is fabulous. Thank you. Well, you can't see it, but it's really beautiful. It's really beautiful. And it is a pleasure to be here in Canberra and have a chance to talk with you about the work that I and my collaborators, research students and other collaborators have done in the area of memory and on something that I'm calling The Fiction of Memory. And because I'm gonna be talking a little bit about The Fiction of Memory, I wanna at least start by acknowledging the importance of memory for all of us because think about it, without memory, you wouldn't know how to get up in the morning and make the coffee. You wouldn't know how to find your car keys. You wouldn't know how to make toast. You wouldn't know how to walk into school. All of these things require memory. Memory is important. It's the place where we keep many of the happy things that have happened to us in our lives and also the sad things. That's how I've usually talked about the importance of memory until last fall when I read this unbelievably articulate description of the importance of memory. And it was just said so beautifully that I clipped out a little bit of it to present to you. In this article in The New Scientist talking about the importance of memory, the writer says memory, perhaps the only thing that links the you sitting here today to the many us from every previous day of your existence. That's what memory is. Without memory, your relationships would mean nothing, not to mention your knowledge, tastes, and your many adventures. It might be no exaggeration to say that your memories are the essence of you. But tonight I'm gonna present some older and some fresh reasons that maybe we shouldn't always believe in our memories. And so let me ask you just off the bat, do you think? Do you think that I could make you remember if it didn't happen to you? Do you think I could make you remember that when you were about five or six years old, you saw a cat stuck in a tree and you went up there and rescued that cat? Could I make you remember that if it didn't happen? Could I make you remember that when you were a child, you were attacked by a vicious animal if it didn't happen? Could I make you remember that when you were a teenager, you committed a wrongdoing. In fact, it was a crime and it was serious enough that the police actually came to investigate. Could I make you remember that if it didn't happen? Could I make you remember that just a week ago, you played a card game and you cheated and you took money out of the bank, the game bank, when you weren't entitled to take it? Could I make you remember these things? Could I pour these ideas into your mind and make you think that you had these experiences? Many people off the bat say, well, no way I could be led to believe I was attacked by an animal or that I cheated last week if I didn't. I just don't think you could do that to me. But I'm gonna ask you this question again in another 45 minutes or so and we'll see what you might say then. So I study memory and I study false memories. And over the course of my career, I've developed with my collaborators a couple of paradigms for studying memory and for studying this phenomenon. One of them and the psychology students in the room might know about this one. It's called the misinformation paradigm. And what we do when we're doing these misinformation studies is we'll give people some kind of event that they get exposed to and later on we will expose them to some post-event information. Often it's misleading information, misleading in some way. And then finally, we'll test people and say, tell us what you remember about that event that you were exposed to just a little while ago. And so, for example, we might show people simulated accidents and then give them post-event misinformation about the accident and then test them to see what they remember. In one of my early, early studies, we showed people a simulated accident where a car goes through an intersection with a stop sign right before the accident occurred and by asking a leading question that suggests it was a yield sign, we get lots and lots of people to believe and remember and insist that they saw a yield sign at the intersection, not a stop sign. That old study, by the way, planted the misinformation with a leading question. And I just would want you to appreciate how cool this question is. It was something like, did another car pass the Red Dotson while it was there at the intersection with the yield sign? You think this is a question about whether the other car is passing, you're concentrating on that part of the question and we slip in the information that it was a yield sign there, you're not even paying that much attention to it, it invades you much like a Trojan horse because you don't even detect that it's coming. Those early studies got criticized because they were laboratory studies. This is a common criticism that psychological work sometimes has to respond to. These laboratory studies don't really capture what happens when people are enduring a really stressful experience like a true accident or witnessing a crime. And one of our ways of responding to that concern is to actually go out and do the work, the same kind of work, with people who are going through a naturally stressful experience for one reason or another. And I've had a chance to do that with a really interesting group of subjects. With the collaboration of a psychiatrist named Andy Morgan, we have studied soldiers in America who are going to survival school. And what happens in this survival school is our soldiers are learning what it's gonna be like for them if they're ever captured as prisoners of war. You can imagine this would be a very stressful, arousing, frightening experience for people. Well, the survival school imitates this experience. As part of this survival school, these soldiers endure a half hour extremely aggressive, hostile interrogation. Afterwards, at the end of the study, they're gonna have to try to identify the person who conducted that interrogation. And I talked Morgan into introducing misinformation into the survival school experimental situation, and we did so. So they may have seen, these soldiers might have seen the guy you see on your left as the one who conducted the interrogation, but with misinformation, we can get lots and lots of people to identify the guy on your right, somebody who doesn't even resemble the actual perpetrator. We also planted objects into the minds of these soldiers. So in that interrogation room, there was no telephone, there was no weapon in the hands of the interrogator. The interrogator was not wearing glasses. And if soldiers were not exposed to misinformation, they rarely, not never, but rarely claim to have seen these items. But if we fed these soldiers misinformation about a telephone, about a weapon, about glasses on the interrogator, now lots and lots of people claim to have seen a telephone, a significant minority claiming to have seen a weapon or even glasses on an interrogator who wasn't wearing any glasses. And so now I've shown you something that we've been studying for about 40 years or more called the misinformation effect. When you put people into like a misled condition, when you feed them misinformation, it depresses their memory performance. They accept that misinformation and often adopt it as their own. The National Geographic program actually wanted me to demonstrate for television the misinformation effect, but they wanted to film me doing this with actual witnesses. And this happened just a few years ago. So what they did is they staged this event in a park in New York. These witnesses were brought in to watch somebody playing a card game. I took a couple of screenshots from the actual video that was made of this crime scene. And what you see there is a woman starts screaming at a man. He's a tourist. And while she's screaming at him, another perpetrator comes up, grabs a wallet out of his bag, runs off, hands it off to some other perpetrator. That's the basic crime that these actual witnesses saw. So I was brought in to try to plant misinformation into the minds of the witnesses so National Geographic could capture it on television. And my plan was to convince these witnesses that the woman who was part of this thief team was wearing a red coat, not a gray coat as you can see she was. When we've done experiments with these materials, we can ask a leading question, like think about the woman in the red coat who was screaming at the man. What color hair did she have? That's one of those clever questions because it diverts your attention to one part of the question while we slip in the information that the woman's coat was red when it wasn't. What actually happened when I was interviewing these witnesses and trying to plant the misinformation, the way I planted it was not with a leading question but having a shill sit in there that I called on first who talked about the screaming woman with the red coat. And one of the real witnesses said, no, that coat was not red. And I'm sitting here at that moment with all these expensive cameras rolling saying, oh my God, my study is ruined. They've spent all this money to create this thing. They've flown me from California to New York to do this for them. And now it's blown because there's a witness who was observant and said the coat was not red. And the next thing out of that witness's mouth was, it was white. And another witness, a real witness said, yeah, it was white. And so there they did. They misled each other. And the whole thing was saved and you can now even watch this program on National Geographic Mind Games television but saved by the white coat. So the misinformation effect. You feed people misinformation after an event or it can happen inadvertently and it depresses memory performance. And why should we care about this? Because out there in the real world, misinformation is everywhere. We get misinformation when we talk to other witnesses after an event. We get misinformation when we are interrogated by let's say a police officer or an investigator who's got a hypothesis about what the right answer should be and perhaps communicates that information even inadvertently. We get misinformation if we've seen a high publicity event and then turn on the television or get newspaper or other kind of coverage about the event. All of these situations provide an opportunity for new information to become available to enter the memory system and cause a contamination, distortion, transformation in somebody's memory. Well it was really in the 1990s that we began to see a more extreme kind of memory problem, a more extreme and bizarre kind of memory problem. We began to see people, for example, going into therapy with one problem. Maybe they were depressed or they had anxiety or they had an eating disorder and they come out of this therapy with a different problem. A collection of extensive memories of horrific child abuse ostensibly perpetrated upon them by their parents, their former teachers, their other relatives. Sometimes so bizarre they have memories that they were forced into satanic rituals, that they were forced to sacrifice animals, that they were forced to breed babies and sacrifice those babies. And court cases arose out of these accusations. And when I began to be involved as a consultant on some of these court cases, I asked, as were the attorneys who were defending these accused people, where are these bizarre memories coming from? And one thing became clear that in many of these cases there was some form of psychotherapy, some form of psychotherapy that involved things like guided imagination or sexualized dream interpretation or sometimes hypnosis to try to extract recalcitrant trauma memories, occasionally exposing people to false information. Were these activities going on in this psychotherapy responsible for creating these really rich memories that were completely uncorroborated such as the satanic ritual abuse memories? I wanted to study this. I wanted to study how is it you can plant a seed in somebody's mind, a little memory seed, and it can grow into such a big memory. Well, I had done so many studies using the misinformation paradigm where we could change a stop sign into a yield sign, we could make a soldier believe that there was a telephone in the interrogation room when there wasn't, but something different was going on here. We needed a different paradigm and so we developed something that we now call the rich false memory paradigm where there's no event to begin with but we ply people with suggestions about the past and then we test them to see what they remember about their childhood or about their more recent past. So that was the plan. We're gonna plant these rich false memories so we can study the process, but what should we plant? Where should we start? And here we are at ANU, you know that universities and colleges that are involved in research with human subjects have to put their research protocols through review committees, ethics committees, even in the name of science we can't do whatever we want to people so we needed to get approval for our study of planting false memories, rich false memories and it didn't seem very likely that our ethics committee would look too kindly on a proposal that said we're gonna make our subjects believe and remember that their fathers forced them into satanic rituals and made them sacrifice animals. It was not gonna fly. We needed an analog and a lot of psychological research involves such analogs. Let's try to think of something we can plant that if it had happened, it would have been at least mildly traumatic and we came up with the idea eventually why don't we try to make people believe and remember that when they were five or six years old they were lost in a shopping mall. They were frightened, crying and ultimately rescued by an elderly person and reunited with the family and we planted that false memory in the minds of ordinary healthy adults succeeding with about a quarter of our sample of adults in planning a complete or partial false memory. Well, the critics of this work they could see where we were going particularly the subset of psychotherapists who were engaging in what we thought were problematic practices. They said this is highly suggestive but it's also so common for people to get lost. Show us you can plant something that would be more upsetting, more bizarre, more unusual if it had actually happened and other investigators came forward and we too met that challenge. So a group in Tennessee at the University of Tennessee planted a false memory that when you were a kid you nearly drowned and had to be rescued by a lifeguard succeeding with about a third of their sample. A group in Canada planted a false memory that something as awful as being attacked by a vicious animal happened to you when you were a child succeeding with about half of their sample. I collaborated with an Italian collaborator and in Italian subjects we planted a false memory that when you were a kid you witnessed someone being demonically possessed and a fairly recent study also out of Canada planted a false memory that when you were a teenager you committed a crime and it was serious enough that the police actually came to investigate. Succeeding with a shocking 70% of their sample. How often does it happen that people fall for these suggestions and develop rich false memories? Not long ago a group of investigators from Canada, the US and Britain got together and analyzed data from a whole bunch of these rich false memory studies using a common coding scheme. So they had memory reports from 423 subjects and when they analyzed those memory reports they found, we'll see if I can get this to work this, there's always a sort of a glitch right at this point. They found that there were false memories in 30% of the sample and an additional 23% of that sample developed a false belief that the event happened even though they didn't have that sense of recollection. We think those belief people are pretty important because often the first step down that royal road to developing a false memory is to get people to believe that the thing happened to them before they actually start remembering that it happened. We and others have used other techniques often modeled by what we see going on in that questionable psychotherapy. So we've used guided imagination and that can get people to develop false memories. We've used dream interpretation and that can get people to do if done cleverly can get people to develop false memories. Hypnosis exposure to other people's memories plying people with false information. These are just some of the other ways that we can get people to come to believe and remember that they had these richly detailed experiences that they never actually had. And I should say also that we've shown that if I plan a false memory in you it has consequences for you. It can affect your later thoughts your later intentions and even your later behavior. With my former postdoc Dan Bernstein and a couple of graduate students Carolani and Aaron Morris we planted a false memory in some people you got sick on eggs in others you got sick on pickles in others you got sick on strawberry ice cream and guess what happens when people develop a false belief or a false memory they're not as interested in eating those foods anymore. We can put people out in a picnic and put foods in front of them and if they develop the false memory about getting sick on those foods they don't eat as much of those foods. We can also do the opposite. We can plan a warm fuzzy memory about a healthy food and people want to eat that food more and we did this with asparagus. And by the way this works not just with food you can also plan a false memory that you got sick on a vodka drink as shown in a study led by Sima Cliffasifi that we collaborated on. We can plan a false memory you got sick on a vodka drink and people are not as interested in having a vodka drink. This study has not worked on me but it worked on these experimental subjects. So I get asked a lot of questions about these false memories and the people who develop them and so I can anticipate what some of your questions might be. I get asked for example, is there any way to tell the difference between a true memory and a false memory? I was thinking about this recently when I was reading my hometown newspaper which had published an article about an accusation against Woody Allen way back long ago. Woody Allen's seven year old daughter, Dylan Farrow had apparently accused Woody Allen of sexual abuse and incident. It was investigated extensively way back then by the Yale Medical School people and found to be no evidence. Years go by now the grown up daughter is back and she's saying given the Me Too movement will people believe me now my father molested me? Woody Allen has always denied it. After this article somebody wrote a letter to the editor to the Los Angeles Times and you can't read that letter but there's just one part of it I want you to read. She writes as a therapist who has worked with many sexual abuse victims I can recognize when the stories are valid and Dylan Farrow's story rings very true. Well, think about this. What is ringing for this therapist? What is ringing? Maybe the therapist noticed that the daughter seemed emotional when she talked about the memory. Maybe that's what's ringing. That rings for some of these therapists and for some people judging. And so it is natural for us to ask and it's a question psychologists can address. Well, is it true that true memories are more emotional than false memories? This was the subject of the dissertation research of one of my PhDs, Carol Lainey and basically she planted false memories in the minds of some people, got their emotional reactions, got the emotional reactions of people who truly had had those experiences and the emotions are very similar. All right, maybe the brain knows. Maybe if we could put somebody in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine while they are recounting a true memory versus a false one, maybe we'd be able to tell the difference. Well, collaborating with Okado and Stark, some scientists who know a lot about fMRI, we put people into an fMRI machine, a scanner while they were recounting true or false memories and the overwhelming impression from this work is the similarity of the neural signals for false memories and true memories. We have a recent paper just published a few months ago in PNAS that also talks about brain to some extent trying to see if there are any brain regions that can differentially be sensitive to true and false memories but I'm gonna, in the interest of time, not go into that. Next question, is everybody susceptible to these kinds of manipulations? We found a group of people and we thought if anyone is immune, it's gonna be them. There is a group of people who have highly superior autobiographical memory. They can remember just about everything they've done every day of their adult life. They're extraordinary, they've been on television many, many times, they've been studied extensively by the neuroscientists on my campus and so that lab and my lab got together to ask the question, what if we take these highly superior autobiographical memory people and run them through some of these false memory experiments? What will they do? Will they be immune? Will they be susceptible? The beauty of this study is it almost didn't matter how it came out, it was gonna be interesting to people and to us and so we took these H-Sams, highly superior autobiographical memory people. We found gender age match controls. We ran them through a whole bunch of false memory paradigms and those H-Sams were just as susceptible to memory distortion as their controls. We're now working on something called memory blindness. It's a slight twist on this theme. What happens in a memory blindness study is basically you tell people, when I interviewed you last week, you told me X when really they had said Y. Do people even detect this? And what happens to them afterwards? So they may see a crime where the bad guy takes a wallet out of the woman's bag and puts it in his green jacket. Later on when they have to identify the color of the jacket, they can be fairly accurate. But then we come back to them maybe a week later and say something like earlier, by the way, you told us that the jacket was this brown color. We now wanna ask you what brand was it? Do they detect and then what happens to them? Well, in fact, they rarely detect and then their memory shifts in the direction of what you falsely told them they had said before. Kevin Cochran, my recent PhD, has done the latest work on memory blindness, showing that you can manipulate people's memories for the amount of pain that they felt in the past. He studied this by having people put their hand in ice cold water for 90 seconds. It's a pretty painful experience. Afterwards they have to rate their pain on a pain scale to how painful was it, 0 to 100. Maybe they say it's an 80. Later on we're gonna say to them earlier, you told us this pain was a 60 on that 100 point scale. Why did you rate it that way? And do they even detect that you've given them an answer that's different from the one they actually told you? Basically only 11% showed any sign of detection and even later when we try to probe them and see is there any evidence of detection? It never got higher than about a third. So what is happening here one to two weeks later is they're giving a different pain score. I won't walk you through the actual data here. And it also has repercussions. So it even has a little bit of an effect on how likely they are to wanna participate in a study like this again. We just published this paper with co-authors just a couple of months ago in memory and cognition if you want to read our paper called Remembering Pain. So memory blindness. And I will say there's a lot of deception in the studies that I've talked about but you don't need this kind of deception in order to get false memories. Getting somebody to lie about the past or just make up a story about the past, a convincing story can get people to develop false memories in line with that story. This was shown in the dissertation work of one of my recent PhDs, Stephen Frenda, who had people make up a story about rescuing a cat stuck in a tree. And guess what? After doing this convincing story, he found many people started to believe and remember that this experience actually happened to them. So with this mind technology, with our ability to plant false memories and control people's behavior, a lot of ethical questions for us to think of in society. And notable among them are these. When should we use this mind technology, if ever? Or should we think about banning its use? Where I see things going in the future is even scarier because I wanna say a little bit about doctored photographs because doctoring photographs is a really easy way to get people to develop false memories of things that had happened to them personally or even false memories about public events. In some research we published just a few years ago, we showed subjects, some photographs that apparently were in the news. Here's a photograph of our former president shaking the hand of the former president of Iran. Subjects are asked, do you remember seeing this in the news, because it was in the news? A lot of people said yes. How about this one? Do you remember seeing former president Bush vacationing during Hurricane Katrina on the Bush Ranch with a famous baseball player? Remember that one? A lot of people said yes. Well, in fact, these things never happened, they were created with Photoshop. And yet many people claimed to remember seeing these photos would give you descriptions of how they felt and whether they fell for the false memory depended on their political orientation. So the conservative Republicans are more likely to develop a false memory of something that makes the Democrat Obama look bad and the reverse is true for the liberal Democrats being slightly more likely to develop a false memory for something that makes Bush look bad. Two days ago, I and my Irish collaborators in a study led by Jillian Murphy published an example of this kind of phenomenon in the context of an actual election. You may know that Ireland had amongst the most restrictive abortion conditions, bans, in the world. And there was a referendum last year that voters could vote to repeal that ban on abortion. And in fact, that's what the voters did. In conjunction with this actual election, we showed voters some true news stories like this one. You don't have to worry about this one. Or we showed them some false news stories, completely made up news stories. So on the left is a false news story that the yes campaign, that was the campaign for repealing the ban, I had to destroy 25,000 posters because they were illegal posters because they were funded by foreign funds from some American lobbying group. Or they got a false story that the no campaign basically had to destroy those posters. And I won't walk you through these graphs, but I will just tell you that the Cliff Notes version of this graph you're looking at is the no voters, people who were actually voting no, were much more likely to develop a false memory about an illegal yes poster campaign with the posters had to be destroyed. And similarly, the yes voters were more likely than no voters to develop a false memory that the no poster campaign actually existed. They developed these false memories in line with their political orientation. There's a beautiful study that fits nicely in with the work that we do that's done by Rob Nash. He is in fact my academic great grandson. And he's teaching now in England. He showed people photographs from the wedding, Kate and Wills leaving their wedding after the marriage in 2011. Others saw a doctored photo that showed a lot of protesters and a lot of chaos and aggression in that scene. And when people saw this doctored photograph, they remembered the event differently. What was really shocking though is that he had a third condition. The Photoshop was so bad, so fake. The horse's feet weren't even on the ground. It was so fake, so obviously fake and still people were influenced by this photo and it affected their memories and what they thought would be their future behavior. So this does not bode well but what even scares me more is what I've been reading about deep fakes. Because if I don't know very much about deep fakes, just what I've got newspaper knowledge basically, but through sophisticated computer technology you can basically make it look like anybody is saying or doing anything you want them to be saying or doing. This was demonstrated in a widely available video on the internet where it looks like Obama is saying all these like crazy things but it's really a comedian who is speaking into this sophisticated equipment and has Obama's voice, his accent, his mannerisms and you think it's Obama saying something that he has never said and never would say. The article describing this that I was most impressed with had the apt title, fake media is coming for our memories. So I'm gonna close by asking the question I asked you at the start. Do you think I could make you remember? If it didn't happen, could I pour these memories into your mind? Could I make you remember you rescued a cat? You were attacked by a vicious animal as a child. You committed a crime as a teenager. I didn't talk about the excellent work of Wade and Nash from Britain showing that you could make people believe they cheated in a card game by suggestive information just a week ago. All of these have been done by research scientists with otherwise ordinary, healthy people. I think these two women, you know, they already know what I have to say here. So I gave a TED talk about this a few years back. I said, what's the one thing I'd like to leave this audience with? And I'm gonna leave this audience here with that same message, one take home message. Just because somebody tells you something and they say it with a lot of confidence, just because they describe it in a lot of detail, just because they cry when they tell you the story, it doesn't mean that it happened because false memories have these same and can have these same characteristics. And so these characteristics are not a good way of distinguishing true memory and authentic experience from one that is a product of some other process, imagination, suggestion, dreams, or what have you. And I'll leave you finally with this Salvador Dali quote. I wish he were still alive. It's a famous quote. He said the difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels. It's always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant. Now if I could meet him, which I can't since he's dead, can't meet him yet, I would say to him, you know, Salvador, you didn't quite get it right. It's not that the false memories are the most real and the most brilliant, but what we're really showing is they can be equally real and equally brilliant. Thank you for listening and I so appreciate that wonderful award and recognition. Thank you. It's a terrible thing, I don't need a microphone. So do we have any questions for Elizabeth? I'm already asking a question here about whether you can erase a memory. I mean, could we do something like eternal sunshine of the spotless mind and take away some really bad relationship that we don't wanna remember anymore? And I will say that we have tried to take away memories and it's a lot harder to do. What we can do is convert a memory into something a little bit different. I mean, just like the stop sign into a yield sign or make people believe that the people standing around the wedding procession were more aggressive than they actually were. So I do think you could probably distort that memory in certain ways that maybe would allow a person to be a little happier and to live a little happier life but I don't know that it's gonna be that easy to erase a memory. There's some really great therapists in this world. I mean, and some of them are my friends and I even went to one once and thought he was great. And I don't like to give advice to therapists. When I'm writing about advice to therapists, generally I invite a clinician, a clinical psychologist or a mental health professional to join me in that writing effort because since I am obviously not a clinician I do wanna be careful about that. But that being said, I have read so many therapy notes. I have read through and sat through so many depositions of therapists. I have watched audio tapes or video and audio, listened to audio tapes of therapy sessions and I've seen some therapists do things that I would consider incredibly dangerous. Like, you got an eating disorder and you're depressed. Everyone I've seen with those symptoms was sexually abused as a child. I wonder if something like that happened to you. The patient says, no, nothing like that happened to me. Well, the therapist says, you know, people often repress their memories and we're gonna have to dig those memories out in order to cure your depression. So let's work on that. Let's do a little guided imagination and why don't you just imagine who might have been the one who abused you. That's a common technique, this guided imagination. How about this dream interpretation? The patient dreams about a snake and the therapist says, that's a penis. Really, there's nothing wrong with talking about dreams because if you recognize the day residue gets into the dreams at night and so what you're worrying about during the day can find its way as dream material. It's okay to talk about dreams in therapy. But to tell the patient, when they've told you I dreamt about a snake, that's a penis. Well, I could kinda see that maybe. Another patient dreamt about a serpent and the therapist said it was a penis. But when I testified in an actual case in the state of Washington where the patient dreamt about a cinnamon roll and the therapist told the patient that's a penis, I thought, I don't get this one. Fortunately, it was a trial and there's cross-examination so the therapist could be cross-examined by the attorney who was representing the accused. And the attorney said to the therapist, now why was it that you thought that the cinnamon roll that your patient dreamt about was a penis? And the therapist said, well, cause there's that goo, that goo on the cinnamon roll. And I know you'll never look at cinnamon rolls in quite the same way after this but what is going on with these therapists who are doing this? And I can go on from there. Not that particular example but I've seen so many false memories out there in the real world, even amongst very intelligent, educated people that nothing really surprises me. For many years I talked about a false memory that Hillary Clinton had when she was running for the Democratic nomination for the US presidency. And when she was running she started talking about this time when she had landed in Bosnia under sniper fire and there was supposed to be a reception for her, a greeting reception but it had to be canceled and they just had to run with their heads down to get to the vehicle. I don't know what Hillary Clinton was thinking but she did go to Bosnia, she didn't go alone, she went with other people and some of those other people were taking photographs and videos. And so we could see these videos of these children greeting her and having flowers and her daughters there. What is going on here? And she would ultimately apologize. She said, you know, I had a false memory. And I have since learned a little bit more about where that false memory might have come from that there was discussion about sniper fire in the distance, that they were preparing the passengers on this plane for what might happen if there is sniper fire at the airport and they do have to cancel and then more than a decade later she's remembering the preparation and the anticipation rather than what actually happened. But this is just an example of an intelligent, educated Yale law school degree very experienced having a very embarrassing false memory. Well, okay, that was a very long question and it sounds a little like, a little similar to a previous question in this audience. And so I'm not sure which part of the question to answer. Part of it was what do I do when I get involved in court cases and they are usually what I'm looking for is how did this memory develop? How did the sausage get made? The trier fact, the judge, the jury, you know, they listened to the final version but there's often a long history and there are many cases where the person starts saying, no, absolutely nothing happened and they are very convincing when they do that and then there is evidence of ample suggestion, massive suggestion, now they're telling a different story. I think we need to be suspicious of those situations. A different part of your question seemed to now wanna be about treating people who maybe have a trauma memory and getting them to weaken the memory or have the emotional grip of that memory be weakened. There are some drugs that are in clinical testing that supposedly will, if you take them, soon after a traumatic experience, will weaken your memory for the traumatic experience and minimize your chances of developing post-traumatic stress disorder. But in a piece of research that I did with Professor Newman who's now here at ANU, we showed that many people don't wanna take that drug. They're afraid of taking a drug that might weaken their memory for a traumatic experience and reduce their chances of post-traumatic stress disorder. In other words, they wanna hang on to a memory even though it's bad for them. So we gotta think about whether we want to do that to people, especially if they don't want it. Thanks for all your questions. So the Provost is just going to make some closing comments. On behalf of you all, I wanna thank Professor Loftus for a very entertaining and enlightening hour. But it is a confronting topic because as she said at the outset, what are we without our memories? Yeah, we're defined by them. But henceforth, I will repress any aversion to strawberry ice cream. And I've got a new idea on how to deal with the university budget. So tomorrow, tomorrow when I meet with the deans, I'm gonna remind each of them of the 20% budget cut they agreed to last week. And I'll simply ask them which school it's going to come from. Have a good evening. Thank you.