 Elizabeth Loftus she's a professor at the University of California of course her talk is called the memory factor and her limerick is this the guy was a guest not a member the month was July not December the shirt wasn't red it had blue stripes instead see I told you you just can't remember please welcome Elizabeth Loftus very much I'd love to get my hands on that limerick it's it's a pleasure for me to be back at Tam I last spoke here in 2011 and it's possible that some people are here hearing me talk for a second time and many of you I know are hearing this for the first time so I just want to tell you that three years ago I had a half hour I showed 41 slides today I have a longer period of time they gave me a whole hour I'm very honored I have 128 slides to show you I have at least seven new studies that we've done in the memory factory but as before and today I want to begin with one of my favorite memory examples because as somebody who who studies memory problems I go through life finding memory mistakes wherever I go and I talked last time and I still love this one about a memory that Hillary Clinton talked about when she was campaigning for the Democratic nomination for the presidency she talked about this trip that she had taken to Bosnia it was a harrowing memory she said we landed under sniper fire there was supposed to be some kind of greeting ceremony at the airport but instead we just had to run with our heads down to get to the vehicles to get to get to our base now I'm not sure what Hillary was thinking she did go to Bosnia she went in 19 she went some years earlier but she didn't go alone she went with other people and some of those other people were taking photographs and here are some of the photographs of Hillary's landing in Bosnia she was greeted by children she's that she's there with her daughter Chelsea in those days when Chelsea had really curly hair and the trip admittedly happened in 1996 so what is going on well the pundits had a field day one of them gave her four Pinocchios four Pinocchios because there was no corkscrew landing as she had described no sniper fire no canceled airport reception and she was not the first lady to go into a war zone obviously the insinuation here that she was deliberately lying I don't think she was and she did come forth with an explanation when confronted with the evidence that her memory was false she said I made a mistake I had a different memory I made a mistake that happens it proves I'm human which for some people is a revelation she said well just to show you now the bipartisan nature of my collection I want to tell you about a memory of Mitt Romney when he was running for the presidency recently in 2012 he talked about a very very fond childhood memory that he had of the Golden Jubilee now the Golden Jubilee was a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the automotive industry in the United States and Mitt Romney had some very fond recollections he said he was about four years old something like that his dad a famous politician before him was the Grand Master the Main Street Woodward Avenue was painted gold a very fond memory there was just one problem with Mitt's memory and that is this the Golden Jubilee happened on June 1st 1946 nine months before Romney was born and so we we might be able to say that he he could have been conceived at the time but it is inconceivable that he was actually there so so so far a Mitt Romney I don't think has come up with an explanation for this mistake and you know most of what I do actually in my work as a memory scientist and the applications of that work is to look to legal cases I'm very interested in the legal cases where someone's memory has gone awry and it has had some some tragedies for other people you just have to go to the website of the innocence project where you will find a collection of more than 300 individuals who have been convicted of crimes spent five 10 15 20 years in prison until DNA proved their actual innocence and when these cases have been analyzed which they have pretty thoroughly three quarters of them three quarters of these wrongful convictions are caused by faulty human memory faulty eyewitness testimony in this case and so I care a lot about memory and its connection to freedom and liberty but let me tell you a little bit about what I've learned about memory over the last four decades of studying it I've developed a couple of different paradigms for looking at memory for many years I did experiments on something called the misinformation paradigm what happens here in this research is we show people some kind of an event maybe a simulated crime or a simulated accident we later expose them to some post event information some misleading information and then we test their memory to see what it is that they are now remembering about that crime or that accident and so just to give you some example of the richness of materials that we use in these misinformation experiments one common set of materials is a scenario that that it's a woman she's walking down a street a lot of things happen to her I'm not going to show you a whole scenario but notably in the middle of this scenario a man bumps into her causes her to drop her purchases and while he looks like he's helping her pick them up he reaches into her bag pulls out her wallet and puts it in his jacket pocket now more things happen to this woman eventually she looks in her bag she notices the wall is gone she starts to talk to other people did anyone did you see anyone come near me in what direction did he go in the post event information after this crime is completely over is delivered as a ostensible version of the event reported by another witness so this other witness might mostly talk about accurate things about the event but sprinkled into this basically accurate recollection are some pieces of misinformation and so here you see although I have trouble seeing that the writing is so small that this other witness is talking about how the man when he bumped into the woman he caused her to drop her belongings he put his hand in her pocketbook he pulled out her wallet and he put it in his pants pocket and the other witness goes on to recount some other details so now you can see what's happening here the man in the crime really put the wallet in the jacket pocket the misinformation that is supplied in the form of another witness's version talks about how the wallet got put in the pants pocket that's the misinformation and now our subject witness has to tell us what do you actually remember seeing where did you actually remember seeing him put that wallet and many of our research subjects will say I saw him put it in his pants pocket they've responded to the misinformation it has become their memory this research on memory distortion in which we can change memory for the details of actual events follows a long work that I did decades ago where we showed simulate a simulated accident a car goes to an intersection with a stop sign and by asking a single leading question that insinuates it was a yield sign we get lots and lots of people to believe and remember they saw a yield sign controlling the intersection not a stop sign well today the misinformation effect continues to be studied and I thought I would tell you a little bit about some relatively new research on memory for faces and engage you in a demonstration this is a collaboration with a couple of former graduate students Maya Cook Julie quack and my colleague Don Hoffman at the University of California Irvine and I thought it would be interesting for all of you to get a feel for this study if you'll permit me to do a demonstration with you and I just don't want you to think too much I want you to kind of go with the flow so I'm going to start this demonstration by just showing you a few faces this is what we call the study phase okay now I'm going to give you a quiz now you don't actually have to take a piece of paper out because you can just think to yourself what your answer would be I'm going to show you with these actual materials we'd have a longer passage of time before the quiz I don't want to use up my whole hour we're waiting for the passage of time so I'm going to quiz you right away I want you to think to yourself I'm going to show you two faces and you just think don't say anything to anyone just think to yourself in the study phase did you see the one on the left or the one on the right so you are just thinking left or right think to yourself in the study phase did you see the one on the left or the one on the right just think to yourself don't say anything in our studies with these materials we'd have another passage of time. I don't want to wait for that before I gave you another test. And I want to do something a little different for this other test. I'm going to this time show you a pair of faces and I would like you to vote for the one you saw in the study phase, the one you remember seeing in the study phase. And so here's the first test trial. Raise your hand if in the study phase you saw the face on the left. Look around. I see tons of face of hands going up. I was going to try this with clapping like Steve Novella did, but it seems to work with hands. How about the one on your right? Raise your hand. I see one hand here. Are you feeling a little strange right there? It's hard for me to see with the lights the way they are, whether they're any other hands, but I think you can see overwhelming preference for the one on the left. Let's have another test trial. Raise your hand if in the study phase you saw the face on the left. Well, I see a hand there. Not too much interest in voting for the are you feeling a little strange there too then? Okay, how about the one on the right? Raise your hand. Look around. Tons of hands. An obvious overwhelming preference for the face on the right. How many in the study phase saw the face on the left? Raise your hand. I see a bunch of hands. How many saw in the study phase the face on the right? I see a bunch of hands. And then I see a whole lot of people who wimps who aren't voting at all because you don't know what to do, but those of you who did vote, you're deeply divided. You can't both be right. Half of you are wrong. Why are you wrong? I made you wrong. And I made you wrong right here in the middle of a talk on memory distortion. So how did I do that? I showed you three faces in the study phase, phase one, two, and three. And then for the final test, I tested you with pairs of faces. The right answer for the first test trial is the one on the left. Overwhelmingly, you preferred that. The right answer for the second face is the one on the right. Overwhelmingly, you preferred that. The right answer for the third face, the one on the right, and that's where you were divided. And you may think, well, maybe it's that last pair, they're just more similar to each other. But that's not the reason you made the mistake, because the same algorithm was used to create these faces. The external features were kept the same, and the internal features were changed, and that algorithm applied to the alterations of all the faces in a pair. What is different is what happened during that quiz phase, because for the first face, I gave you a quiz. I paired the true face with a completely novel one, and as you sat there silently, you said to yourself, I saw the one on the right. For the second face, I didn't quiz you at all. And for the third face, I gave you a quiz that included the altered face and a novel one. And most of you, as you sat there silently, said to yourself, I saw the one on the left. Later, when I tested you, you stuck with the altered face, even though the true face is staring you in the face, so to speak. You don't, many of you recognize it anymore. And in our experiments with these materials, we have found that a post-event activity that induces people to make a particular choice, to pick a different person, affects their later ability to pick the right person. And we, then, as psychologists are also interested in other questions, like in that quiz phase, do you have to actually pick the altered face? Or is it enough to merely be exposed to it? Both of these have these impairing effects on memory. This phenomenon makes me think about one of those cases of wrongful conviction. It's one of the most famous of the cases of wrongful conviction that people talk about who work in this field. The conviction of Ronald Cotton for rape. The rape victim was Jennifer Thompson. She was a college student in North Carolina. She was raped by an African American. And ultimately, she would identify Ronald Cotton as the person who raped her. She was a very, very impressive witness. She had studied the face she said of her rapist so that she would one day, hopefully, be able to identify him. She was a very, is a very articulate person today and was then as well. And the jury was quickly convinced by her confident identification Ronald Cotton convicted. And what made this case different from many of the other cases of wrongful conviction, many of the other cases of wrongful conviction in a rape case, many of the other cases of wrongful conviction that involved across racial identification where a member of one race tries to identify a stranger of a different race, what made this case different is what happened after the DNA results came out years later. The sheriff, a detective who had been investigating this case, learned about the DNA and he wanted to tell Jennifer about it in person. So he went to her home and he said, I have some news to tell you. It turns out the DNA testing is back and your rapist was not Ronald Cotton. It was another man named Bobby Poole. And Jennifer felt absolutely horrible, absolutely horrible. And at some point, she said, I wonder if I could meet Ronald and maybe ask if he would forgive me. And so that meeting was arranged. She said, can you ever forgive me? He forgave her. The two of them became friends and they started giving talks together, trying to promote reforms that will minimize this from happening. And together they wrote a book aptly called Picking Cotton, which is the story of, which is the story of, from their two different perspectives of their ordeal. 60 Minutes did a story on this book. And I had a chance to be interviewed by Leslie Stahl for the 60 Minutes program, just to talk about, you know, how common this is, what had happened here, and so on. And so there I am being interviewed by Leslie Stahl. And you can see there that even though they paid distinguished professors a decent salary at the University of California, Irvine, there I am wearing the same jacket, because it's like my, my favorite, my favorite jacket, but, but the bracelet is new. So in any event, one of the interesting things about this case is that Jennifer had had a chance to see Bobby Poole after the cotton conviction, because there were rumors going around that it might have been that somebody else, Bobby Poole, might be bragging about this. And when she saw him, she said, no, it's not him. It's Ronald Cotton. That had become her memory. So I did the demonstration for 60 Minutes that I did with you here. I did it for Leslie Stahl. And when she got to that pair of faces, she looked at them, you know, for the longest time. And then she said, I'm baffled. And she went ahead, she picked the wrong face. So all of you in this room who did so as well, you are an excellent company with one of our leading investigative journalists. Sometimes when I'm talking about this work, particularly the faces, to members of the legal community, to judges, or sometimes even to lawyers, well, they wonder, you know, these, these faces and these altered faces and seeing a lot of faces and seeing them in a laboratory. I mean, this is not the same thing as somebody who goes through a very, very stressful experience. And maybe the same kind of findings wouldn't occur. Well, I want to tell you about a study that was done on people who went through a very, very stressful interrogation. My access to this unusual group of subjects comes from the chief investigator, Charles Morgan, a psychiatrist, who has been studying military personnel who are going through survival school, which is a school that is set up to train our military. What's it going to be like if you are ever captured as prisoners of war? And Morgan and colleagues' original paper on this subject was done maybe 10 years ago. What these soldiers are learning is how to evade the enemy, how to escape if they're hunted down, how to resist if they're captured or tortured. They're put into a mock prisoner of war camp. It looks something like this. Once they're caught, they're hooded, strapped together, stripped of their identities, thrown into these little cells with these third world toilets, no toilet paper. One of my worst nightmares there. They are rescued by a helicopter, which is what's going to happen to them if they're being held in a jungle area where it's too dense for the helicopter to land. And ultimately, they're rescued and there's an absolute flood of emotion. Morgan and collaborators have studied the stress hormone levels associated with this experience of going through this survival school. And you can see these are cortisol levels for a variety of activities. The survival school is shown in red. And those stress hormone levels are as higher, higher than stress hormone levels associated with other kinds of activities that are known to be pretty stressful, like skydiving for the first time shown there in green. So I had a chance to talk Morgan into introducing misinformation into one of these survival school studies. And we just published this paper last year. So just to tell you a little bit more about the study where we did this, the survival school starts with some classroom instruction over several days. Then these soldiers are sent out into the field where they try to evade being captured. They're out there for four days. They're not going to be able to evade being captured. They are captured. They're put into the mock prisoner of war camp. They undergo a 30-minute, extremely stressful interrogation. And some of them are going to get misinformation and others will not after the interrogation and eventually they're going to be released and their memory will be tested. One of the ways we introduced the misinformation into the minds of these military personnel is we held up a photo and said, look at this photo of your interrogator. Did he give you anything to eat? Did he give you a blanket? Did he let you speak with any other people? The trick here is this is a photograph of a completely different person. So the real interrogator or perpetrator could be this individual, but the photo shown to the misinformation subjects looks completely different. And what we ended up using in this study is something called a target absent test, where the real guy isn't there. That's what target absent means. But the foil shown to the misinformation soldiers is in the number two position. And I blocked out the faces of the other individuals in this array for national security purposes. Without any misinformation, what did these soldiers do? Slightly more than half of them went ahead and picked someone as their interrogator. They were all wrong, of course, because it was target absent. And not particularly often did they pick the foils shown to the other group as misinformation. But here's what happened with these trained soldiers in the face of misinformation. 91% of the time they picked someone, and mostly the person they picked was the photograph that had been shown to them. We also had some other conditions in this study where we tried to mislead people that suggest to them that certain objects existed that didn't. Without any misinformation, only 10% remembered a telephone that wasn't there. 3% remembering a gun, 2.5% remembering glasses on the main interrogator. But after being exposed to misinformation, the rates of people telling us they remembered things that didn't happen skyrocketed. And so what this study is showing is that even these highly trained soldiers make false identifications, they can do so with high confidence. Misinformation leads to more of them and more reports about non-existent objects. And so now you have a primer of something that I've been working on for many decades, the misinformation effect. When people are exposed to misinformation about things that they have experienced themselves, it negatively affects their memory. And out there in the real world, misinformation is everywhere. We get misinformation not only when we're interrogated by the police who might have an agenda and slip in information even inadvertently, we get misinformation when we talk to other witnesses who might have seen something similar to what we saw when we're exposed to media coverage where occasionally misinformation is filters in and all of these provide an opportunity for a memory distortion, contamination, transformation of the sort that we're seeing in these studies. In the 1990s, I began to see an altogether more extreme kind of memory problem. Some people were going into therapy with one kind of problem. Maybe they had an eating disorder, maybe they were depressed. And coming out of therapy with a different problem, memories for horrific brutalization, sometimes memories for being raped in satanic cults, animal sacrifice, baby breeding, baby sacrifice, the works, all their parents supposedly involved in this cult. When you start to look at these cases, you find out that certain kinds of psychotherapy was involved in a lot of this. And so we needed something different than the misinformation paradigm in order to study this. And we developed something that's now called the rich false memory paradigm. If these memories aren't real, where are they coming from? So in our new research paradigm, 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 either about their childhood or their more recent past. We're looking to see, can we plant a very rich whole false memory, not just turn a stop sign into a yield sign, or make people believe that the guy had curly hair instead of straight hair. So how are you going to study this? How are you going to study this? What kind of rich false memory should we plant in the minds of people in order to study this phenomenon? We do have to worry about the human subjects review committees on our colleges and university campuses. They're going to review our proposed research with human beings. And they're not going to let us go forward if they think we're going to harm the subjects. Didn't seem too likely that the human subjects committee would look kindly on a proposal that we want to see if we can convince people that daddy raped them in satanic rituals. So you know, we need an analog. And that's what a lot of psychological work is about. We need something that would have been mildly traumatic, at least if it had actually happened, but something that wouldn't harm the subjects and would pass muster with the human subjects committee. And at some point, we came up with the idea. Why don't we try to get people to believe and remember that when they were five or six years old, they were lost in a shopping mall, they were frightened, crying, ultimately rescued by an elderly person and reunited with the family. And when we did this first study of rich false memories, we found that with three suggestive interviews, we could talk and convince about a quarter of our subjects to develop a complete or a partial false memory. Well, the study got criticized even before we had a chance to publish it. One of the criticisms was, you know, getting lost is common. Show us you can plant a memory for something that would be more bizarre, more unusual, more traumatic. And other investigators and we two stepped in to do this. So when a study done in Tennessee, the researchers 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 subjects. And in a study done in Canada, researchers 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 a half of their subjects. And in a study done in Italy, researchers succeeded in planting a false memory that you witnessed a person being demonically possessed as a child. And in a study done in the state of Washington, the researchers planted a false memory that you had an accident at a family wedding when you were a child and you spilled punch all over the parents of the bride. And so we can plant these rich false memories using various forms of suggestion. We've tried using forms of suggestion that we see going on in some psychotherapy sessions like guided imagination. You don't remember anybody abusing you, but you have the symptoms in my opinion. So why don't we just imagine who might have done that? Sexualized dream interpretation, hypnosis, exposing people to other people's memories, plying them with false information or even showing them doctored photographs. I love the doctored photograph work and so did Slate. On my UC Irvine website, I have a link to an article by Will Salaton called The Memory Doctor. And what Slate did that was really cool is they did an experiment with their Slate readers in advance of introducing this article on The Memory Doctor. And so they showed their online viewers some politically oriented photographs like this one of Obama shaking the hand of the former president of Iran or this one of former president Bush, vocationing on the ranch with Roger Clemens during Katrina. And the readers just had to say, do they remember these events, seeing these photos and what do they remember about them? It turns out many of them said they remember these photos, but they couldn't have because they were created with Photoshop. So someone else was actually visiting Bush, but Roger Clemens' photo was photoshopped in. And our president didn't shake the hand of the president, former president of Iran. Someone else did, but the photo was photoshopped. And here you see some data on how often people said, yes, there were five different fake photos. The green tells you how often people remembered the, let's see, that's the Bush Clemens one, about 15% of the time. And the Obama handshake looks like a little over 25% of the time. These readers said, yeah, I remembered it. And they didn't just say, yeah, I remembered it. It turns out who has a false memory depends on your political orientation. I'll tell you what else they had to say, but along with my, one of my graduate students, we got our hands on the slate data and published an article last year that basically showed which kind of false memory you have depends on whether you're a liberal Democrat or a conservative Republican. So, for example, the conservatives are far more likely to think they saw the photo that kind of paints Obama in a sort of bad light and something similar happens the opposite way with the liberals. People don't just say, yeah, I saw it. They have a chance to type in what they remember. And here's one of our responses about the Obama reddit on the internet at work, remember it perfectly. I do remember Fox freaking out about this. They said it made America look weak. And for the vacation photo, big Astros fan live in Texas very much remember this. Or I really hated the fact that while Bush is entertaining a baseball legend, the Astrodome is being used as a makeshift hotel. All that rich detail wrapped around these false recollections. And that rich detail, unfortunately, can make people who don't have the evidence believe that the story is true. More recently, we've asked this question. If I plant a false memory in your mind, does it have repercussions for you? Does it affect your later thoughts, your later intentions, or even your later behaviors? Now how are we going to study this? What we decided to do is let's see if we could plant a false memory that you got sick eating a particular food as a child. If I could get that memory going in you, then maybe you wouldn't want to eat the food as much. And we would be demonstrating a repercussion of the false memory. And so with my former postdoc and grad students, we did our first study on the consequences of a false memory, getting some people to believe that they got sick eating hard boiled eggs. Others to believe they got sick eating dill pickles. Here's how we did it. We gathered a whole bunch of data from people, data about their personality, their thoughts about food. We waited a week. We brought them back to the lab. We told them we've fed all their data into our really smart computer program. And it revealed certain things happened to them. And so here is the profile. They think it's very individualized. Johnny gets one that says, our smart computer says, you felt sick after eating a hard boiled egg. He's got to think about this for a while and then tell us how much at a hypothetical party he wants to eat certain foods that are laid out on a buffet table. On that list are hard boiled eggs and dill pickles. So here's how much people want to eat the eggs and pickles. If they don't get any false feedback at all, they slightly prefer the eggs in that setting than the pickles. We're not even interested in that. Here's how much they want to eat the foods if they were exposed to the manipulation but they didn't buy it. They didn't develop a false belief or false memory. And here's how much they want to eat the foods. If they were exposed to the manipulation and they fell for it, they don't want the foods as much. And I will tell you this is one of the great moments in the life of an experimental psychologist. When the grad students, you know, bring you the Excel spreadsheets and the graphs and I, you know, I looked at those data and I thought, wow, it was possible to plant the false memory of getting sick. It did have consequences. If we could do this with a fattening food, think about it. I mean, we could be on the brink of a new dieting technique, you know, move over Atkins. And so we did a similar study with strawberry ice cream of fattening food. Same methodology. Gather data from subjects in one session. They come back a week later. We tell them we fed their data into our really smart computer program and we ask them some questions. So Mary gets told, by the way, our computer reveals that you felt ill as a child sometime after eating a strawberry ice cream. She has to think about these experiences. That one false item is embedded in a list of other items that we think are true of most kids or many kids like you didn't like spinach. And she's got to think about the experience and try to remember it if she, if she can. Here's how much people want strawberry ice cream. If they weren't given any false feedback, here's how much they want it. If they were exposed to the manipulation and they didn't buy it. And here's how much they want the food. If they were exposed to the manipulation and they fell for it, they don't want the food as much. We've done other studies where we show it's not just a hypothetical party where people tell you what they think they want to eat. When we give people a chance to actually eat the foods after we have planted the false memory, they don't eat those foods as much. In one study done in the Netherlands, people were given a chance to eat egg salad after they had developed a false memory that they got sick on it as a child. They don't eat as much egg salad. And in some beautiful studies in Canada done by scaboria and collaborators, similar kind of thing. You plant a false memory. This time it was peach yogurt that you got sick on peach yogurt as a child. Give them a chance even a month later to eat some peach yogurt and they don't eat as much. It's not just food. Last year we published a study showing that we could have a similar effect on your preference for an alcoholic drink. Done with my collaborators who you see pictured there. Here's how much people want vodka. If they haven't gotten any false feedback at all, here's how much they want to drink vodka if they were exposed to our manipulation but they didn't buy it. And here's how much they want to drink the vodka. If they were exposed to the manipulation and fell for it, they don't prefer that vodka drink as much. It was natural at some point for us to say, OK, if we can make people not want something, can we do the opposite? Could we plan a warm fuzzy memory and make them want to eat something healthy? That seemed like a good thing to do for society. And so we tried to do it with asparagus and we succeeded. We planted a false memory, a warm fuzzy memory about a childhood experience with asparagus, asked people then what they wanted to eat in this hypothetical visit to a fancy restaurant, little restaurant. Asparagus is on the menu and we found that we could create this warm fuzzy memory and those who bought into the memory and developed a false memory wanted to eat more of the food. After I saw this result, you know, I had a fantasy that I wanted to do a case history. If I could if I could only get my hands on our first president Bush, who famously said he didn't like broccoli. He said, I do not like broccoli. This is a quote. I haven't liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. I am president of the United States and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli. And well, I do have some sympathy with this position. I also feel if we could just get our hands on the former president and ply him with our manipulation, it would just be a matter of time before broccoli was one of his very favorite vegetables. Well, there are many questions that you might have about this false memory phenomenon and ones that we in my lab have also been interested. Is there any way to tell the difference between a false memory that you create through these processes and a true memory? And one of my graduate students tested the idea in her doctoral dissertation work that maybe we would be more emotional about our true memories than our false memories. But after she planted false memories like you witnessed your parents accidentally witnessed them having sex or having a violent altercation, when she planted the false memory in the minds of people and compared it to people who really did have the experience, she found that false memories can be emotional. They can be just as emotional as true memories and emotion is no guarantee of memory accuracy. In contrast to what I hear from opposing experts in many of the cases that I have been involved in, where those opposing experts will say I believe her trauma memory is real because she shows emotion when she tells me about it. You might think maybe neuroimaging, maybe brain signals are different when we are recounting a false memory versus a true memory. Well, I teamed up with some other investigators and we did a neuroimaging study as people were recounting true memories and false memories. And the overwhelming pattern that we saw was the similarity in terms of the neural activity. Even though there was slightly more activity in the visual cortex when people were recounting a true memory and slightly more activity in the auditory cortex when people are recounting a false memory, the impression really here is of the great similarity. You might think that true memories would persist longer than false memories, but in a study done with my Chinese collaborators, one of the largest studies of subjects in a misinformation experiment, we came back to people a year and a half later to see what was still in their memory and the true memories and false memories persisted equally often. Much more than just a novel non misinformation false memory. You might wonder when are people more susceptible to these kinds of memory contaminations. In a study that we will publish in a month headed by one of my graduate students, Steven Frenda, on sleep deprivation, we wondered whether sleep deprivation would be associated with susceptibility to false memories. And so in this study, some individuals were allowed to sleep. Others were sleep deprived. They were kept up all night in the lab. They were then put through a misinformation experiment and we found that those who were sleep deprived were much more susceptible to contamination of their memories. And we like to think of this in conjunction with some of the practices of interviewing suspects when they are sleep deprived, fatigued, kept in the station for 15 hours and what might this do to their susceptibility to leading questions and other forms of contamination. You may wonder whether we are all susceptible to these contaminations. Is anyone immune from having their memories be modified by these kinds of tactics? Well, we got our hands with the help of another lab and in a study headed by one of my graduate students, Lawrence Patias, we found a group of individuals who have highly superior autobiographical memories. You might have seen these people be studied, be interviewed and shown on 60 minutes. 60 minutes has done a few programs on them. They remember what they did just about every day of their adult life. It's pretty astonishing. So we got a group of these people with superior memories and then an age-match control group of people with normal memories and put them through a misinformation experiment. If anything, those HCAMs, highly superior autobiographical memories, had somewhat more in terms of misinformation memories. We put them through a number of other false memory tasks and our basic conclusion about this group really is that people with extraordinary autobiographical memories nonetheless are vulnerable to false memories as shown in different memory paradigms just like people with normal memories. So it makes us wonder whether there's any group that would be immune to these kinds of contaminations. We do know that some people are more susceptible than others and in a study done with my Chinese collaborators, for example, we've done misinformation studies. Some people adopt lots of misinformation. Some adopt relatively little bit of misinformation. Who are the people? We can do correlations with sort of measures, standard measures of intelligence. And we do find some significant correlations so that if you score higher on standard tests of intelligence, you are somewhat more resistant to having your memory be influenced in this way. But do keep in mind that some of the most educated, intelligent people on our planet have shown that they too can be susceptible to developing false memories. So all that Harvard degree for Mitt Romney and that Yale Law School degree for Hillary didn't protect them from having false memories. So in closing, I just want to make a few remarks. I believe that this work has a lot of implications for our understanding of the nature of human memory and the malleability of memory. If we can get people to believe that they witnessed demonic possession, that they witnessed Barack Obama shaking a hand and that they have all kinds of other details associated with this, it shouldn't surprise us when people remember UFOs or other kinds of bizarre things, bending spoons that they claim they saw with their own eyes and that they are definitely remembering. The practical implications here, I never thought I'd be getting into the business of influencing nutritional selection, maybe making a dent in the obesity problem in our society, but I think some of that food and work with other substances can go in that direction and of course their implications for legal cases. And with this ability to plant memories, to control people, to influence their later thoughts and intentions and behaviors, a number of interesting ethical issues arise here, such as when should we use this kind of mind technology and should we ever be banning its use? After decades of working on memory distortion and hundreds and hundreds of experiments involving probably more than 40 or 50,000 individuals, plus just take the whole literature in this field contributed by many scientists across the world, if we've learned anything, I think it's this, that just because somebody tells you something with confidence, just because they tell it in a lot of detail, just because they express emotion when they're describing their memory to you, it doesn't mean that it really happened. Without independent corroboration, we can't know whether a memory is real or not. Such a discovery, I think, has made me a little more tolerant of the memory mistakes that some of my friends and family members sometimes make. You don't need to call people a liar, you can just think that maybe they have a false memory and it's just a part of the process, although I'm not always this tolerant as an individual recently published something that either is an out, out lie, Dr. Kutcher, or possibly a memory distortion but a completely false statement about something about me, but we don't need to go there. I'll answer that after a glass of wine. So this discovery, you know, it might have made a difference in the life of Ronald Cotton. It might have made a difference for those hundreds of individuals who've been falsely accused and wrongfully convicted. And I think they all learned the hard way, this, that memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing. Thank you, thank you. Elizabeth Loftus, Elizabeth Loftus, excellent, excellent.