What is pseudoreminiscence (memory illusion): comparison with cryptomnesia and other memory disorders

Reasons for the phenomenon

Confabulations are not always observed only in patients of a psychiatric clinic.
In everyday life, this phenomenon also occurs quite often among people without intellectual impairments or any memory disorders. In this case, the reason is very simple - we are talking about the conscious replacement of painful memories with more pleasant ones. This is an elementary form of self-defense in one form or another.

The same applies to confabulations as a result of altered consciousness against the background of alcohol intoxication. In this case, a replacement form appears, often of an everyday nature.

As for patients with primary mental disorders and memory disorders of varying severity, the causes of confabulation are as follows:

• pathological changes in the thalamus, hypothalamus and mammillary bodies as a result of acute deficiency of vitamin B1 (thiamine) against the background of chronic alcoholism,
• brain damage due to stroke, aneurysm, tumor, encephalitis or traumatic brain injury,
• dysfunction of the medial prefrontal cortex in old age (senile dementia).

For these reasons, Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, Alzheimer's disease, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia develop, which provoke the occurrence of confabulations.

Russian examples

The manifestation of mass false memory occurs quite often in history. In our country, it is customary to blame Catherine the Great for the fact that Alaska belongs to America. In fact, it has nothing to do with the sale of this part of the continent. Alaska was sold by Alexander II, who came to power almost 100 years later.

Another common myth is that the poem that begins with the words “I’m sitting behind bars in a damp dungeon...” was written by Lermontov. In fact, this creation belongs to Pushkin.

From recent history, the most striking example is associated with Yeltsin. Many are sure that before leaving he said the following phrase: “I’m tired, I’m leaving.” Although, in fact, he only said the second part of the sentence.

Almost everyone remembers the movie “Beware of the Car,” and the phrase that became a catchphrase: “Boy, get away from the car.” In fact, it was heard in a completely different film - “A Secret to the Whole World.”

People who studied in Soviet times remember that they were always taught in school that Hitler had brown eyes, which was considered a real joke, because a true Aryan cannot have eyes of that color. However, if we analyze the records of Hitler’s contemporaries, his eye color was still blue. It is unclear where such a persistent and untruthful opinion came from.

Treatment of paramnesia

All types of treatment for memory pathologies (cryptomnesia, confabulosis, phantasm, etc.) are based mainly on psychology. Psychotherapy often takes place.

To destroy false memories, it is necessary to use the person’s subconscious. For example, the Lacanian way of understanding the phenomenon of phantasms (layering of fictitious “I”s on the real “I”) leads to the decision to make a person’s dreams come true, so that the fictitious “personalities” are united into one – a really existing one.

Confabulosis and related disorders are treated, among other things, with the help of Freudian psychoanalysis - through conversations and the release of creative potential.

False memories are a psychological phenomenon in which a person “remembers” events that did not actually happen. False memories are often involved in court cases involving child sexual abuse. This phenomenon was originally explored by psychological pioneers Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud. Freud wrote the work “Etiology of Hysteria”, in which he spoke about repressed memories, about childhood sexual traumas in their relation to hysteria. Elizabeth Loftus has been a leading researcher in the field of memory retrieval and false memories since her research career began in 1974. In false memory syndrome, false memory is present as a predominant part of a person's life, affecting his character and daily life. False memory syndrome is different from false memories because the syndrome has a profound effect on a person's life, while false memories may not have such a fundamental effect. The syndrome takes effect because the person believes that their memories are real. However, research on this syndrome is controversial and the syndrome is not identified as a mental disorder, and therefore also excluded from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

False memories are an important part of psychological research due to their association with a wide range of mental disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder

Research on false memories

Unfortunately, Münsterberg’s ideas seemed too radical to the public at that time, and the guy was eventually hanged a week later. It would not be until several decades later that the idea of ​​false and distorted memories would be properly explored and began to be considered as a factor that could influence testimony.

Today, many would agree that false confessions can be obtained during highly intense, emotionally and physically overwhelming interrogation of a suspect. This is exactly what those who watch the recent docudrama “Making a Murderer” from Netflix, which created a lot of noise among American society, may think about. Whether a false confession is made under strong pressure, or whether a person really believes what he says, each case must be analyzed separately. However, Loftus is confident that you will have no reason to suspect that someone’s memories have been distorted and misinformation unless you are sure in advance that this actually happened.

However, the answer to this question may lie in our biology. This was indicated by the results of the work of South Korean neuroscientists from Daegu University, who conducted a study of brain function in 11 volunteers who had real and false memories. Scientists wanted to understand whether any characteristic distinctive features could be traced in the data obtained. People were asked to look at a list of words divided into categories. One such category, for example, was “livestock”. Then they were connected to a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and began to be questioned to see if there was a mismatch between words for one category or another. As they answered, the researchers tried to detect changes in blood flow in different parts of the subjects' brains. The experiment showed that in people who were confident in their answer (and the answer actually turned out to be correct), blood flow increased in the hippocampus region - a part of the brain that plays an important role in memory consolidation (the transition of short-term memory to long-term memory). And when participants were confident in their answers, but the answers actually turned out to be incorrect (which happened in about 20 percent of cases), an increase in blood flow was observed in the frontoparietal region of the brain, which is responsible for the so-called “sense of déjà vu.”

Forms of paramnesia

There are the following types of memory disorders:

• pseudoreminiscences;
• confabulation;
• cryptomnesia;
• phantasm.

As a rule, none of the listed phenomena occurs in their pure form, but, as a rule, are a symptom of another disease.

Next to them is the concept of confabulosis - this is a temporary disorder (disorders can be sudden or expected, i.e. chronic).

Confabulosis is characterized by inventing:

• meetings with celebrities
• heroic deeds
• great discoveries, etc.

This is megalomania syndrome, the extreme degree of its expression. Hence another name - expansive confabulosis. Sometimes confabulosis is a sign of schizophrenia.

Pseudo-reminiscences

This is an illusion of memory: the events that a person talks about actually happened. But they are confused in time: what happened a year ago is transferred to now, and what happened yesterday in the mind turns out to be decades distant from the present moment.

An extended version of pseudoreminiscence is confabulation. Some psychologists and psychotherapists suggest combining both concepts, because both the illusion of memory and confabulation imply a syndrome of displacement of events in time.

Confabulation

Confabulation (or "memory hallucination") is best understood through a concrete example:

The man is in the hospital, he claims that yesterday he went to Moscow for an interview, and is absolutely sure of the truth of the event. He did go to Moscow, but a year ago and not for an interview, but during vacation. The interview here is fictitious.

In classical psychology, memory hallucinations are strictly distinguished from illusions. Modern psychology combines them into the phenomenon of “confabulation”.

Cryptomnesia

This disorder often occurs in tense, uncommunicative, dreamy teenagers. Cryptomnesia involves the transfer of events from books or someone else's life into your reality. Early symptoms:

• dates of events are forgotten
• a person cannot remember whether an event really happened or he made it up
• thinking about an action and the actual action taken can be mixed up in the mind

Did I write the poem or copy it from someone? Did I go to the concert or did I just dream about it? Did a girl kiss me or was it in a book?

Cryptomnesia can be conscious. Loss of connection between what is actually happening and what was once seen, heard, read, etc. often caused by a feeling of misunderstanding, depression, and severe stress. Those. a person consciously goes into the unreal world, and over time “forgets” about the events that he tried on himself, passing them off as real.

Phantasm

Phantasm is a pure invention; it is the transference of fantasized events into reality. This syndrome is also often observed in adolescents (especially if they consider themselves to be a subculture that is not understood by society and have a developed imagination).

Phantasm has two forms of manifestation:

• hysterical - a person does not understand that he made up events, he really believes in their truth (this syndrome is usually observed in hysterical disorders);
• paralytic - occurs against a background of dementia, euphoria, various psychoses, sometimes equated to delusions of grandeur, here the events have a grotesque form (their absurdity is vivid, it is realized by everyone except the patient himself).

Phantasmic syndrome is dangerous; it is difficult for a person to get out of such a state, because it can destroy his psyche. Particularly delicate methods of psychology and an environment that is favorable towards the patient can help here. Otherwise, the person’s subconscious will close access to real memories (perhaps their disclosure will entail shame, a feeling of guilt, etc., and the body tries to protect itself by any means, including phantasms).

You remember this, but... it didn’t happen! False memories

An amazing property of our memory is to create false memories with the conviction of their truth. Read the stories below that happened to people because of these very false memories of other people. It's sad, but knowing this phenomenon, you can use it to your advantage.

This story happened to American Steve Titus. He was engaged to a girl, he loved her very much, and they were going to get married. One day they were driving home from a romantic dinner and were stopped by a policeman. There had recently been a rape in this area, and Steve was very similar to the suspect. He was arrested and shown to the victim for identification. The victim pointed at Steve and said she was sure he was the one who raped her.

Steve was sent to prison, his whole family was in shock.

One reporter became interested in this story and began investigating. After a while, they found the real criminal, who confessed to his crime, and Steve was released.

But he lost everything. All my savings, my job and my fiancée

He began to sue people who undeservedly put him behind bars. As a result, he could not stand it all and killed himself

Question

Why did the woman who was raped say so confidently that it was Steve?

Elizabeth Loftus, a memory researcher, conducted a series of experiments where people were shown re-enactments of car accidents and then interviewed these people

And very often they gave evidence that did not exist

If the same question was asked with the word "accident", then people said that the car was traveling at high speed

In another experiment, participants were given tasks to do various simple actions: clapping, tossing a coin, etc. Then they were asked to imagine that they were doing different tasks (others). At the end, they were told to fill out a questionnaire where they had to write what they did in reality. And many wrote what they did, although in fact they did not do it, but only imagined it. Some even wrote that they did tasks that were not even given to them either in reality or in their minds, i.e., they themselves came up with these memories

Elizabeth calls this phenomenon the fictitious memories that each of us has. Everything we remember about our lives is to some extent untrue. That is, this never happened, although you are sure that it happened

We ourselves can create these memories, but so can other people. Parents can have a particularly strong influence in this sense. For example, they can “remind” their child how much he loved books as a child, or how much he loved to eat vegetables. A similar experiment also took place when the subjects were implanted with false memories that in childhood they could not stand boiled eggs, pickles and blueberry ice cream. After which they stopped eating these products

Just think how many fictitious memories we are implanted about our history

And, since this is already happening, and most often, not in our favor, then why not specifically introduce memories for yourself or your children that will have a positive impact on human behavior. That's what Elizabeth says, what do you think?

Is it ethical, for example, to tell your child that he hated candy and was reaching for an apple?

No matter how you feel about it, remember!!!

What if they tell you something about you in the past, with complete confidence, with a lot of details and vivid emotions, then it is not necessarily true! Because that's how false memories are implanted. Especially if you are tired and sleep deprived at this moment

A moment of humor

- Dear, do you remember, you promised me iemre&

- When?

- Well, you and I were relaxing at the seaside, you were in a good mood, we also ordered delicious food, and you said that when we get home, you’ll buy me a fur coat in winter

- Yes? Did I say that? I don’t remember that

- Yes Yes! You said so (enthusiastically) “we’ll buy it in winter.” Do you remember when we were sitting in a cafe on the shore, and there were such beautiful birds there?

- Yes, I remember something like that...

— Yes

Diagnosis, or how to differentiate paramnesia

To make a diagnosis such as paramnesia “on the fly”, without knowing either the person or the conditions in which it “grew up,” is completely unthinkable. With the exception, perhaps, of cases of outright “juggling” with generally known facts and truths.

An instrumental examination of both the brain (MRI, ultrasound), and its indicators (EEG) and the state of the body in general (general clinical and biochemical studies) can also reveal only the physically embodied basis of a pathology other than paramnesia.

Memory deception does not have a material embodiment - it is an exceptional feature of the subtle mental state of a particular person.

The main credit for its differential diagnosis always belongs to the psychiatrist (or neuropsychiatrist). He is the only one who, in the intricacy of feelings and words, is able to separate the signs of paramnesia from delirium that can accompany both diseases of a nervous and mental nature.

There are similarities between delusions of any etiology and these disorders. It is that both states are variants of a false perception of reality.

There are two main differences between them. Delusional states:

• absolutely not amenable to correction;
• have a basis in the form of endogenous mental disorders.

Architect of Memories

This is the 5th day in a row that Chris has been detailing his childhood memories in his diary. He is 14, but his notes are detailed and meticulous. Now he writes about how, at the age of 5, his family went shopping to the mall as usual.

Chris walked away from his parents and got lost. “Oh, so I’m in trouble...” flashed through my head. Crying in horror, he was sure that he would never see his family again. The boy stood in tears until an elderly man found him. The kind stranger was bald, but looked “really cool”: he was wearing a blue flannel shirt and glasses sparkled on his nose. The old man took him to his mother, who was already preparing to give her unlucky offspring a thrashing.

Needless to say, Chris has never gotten lost in a shopping mall? And the cool old guy with glasses didn't really exist. But the teenager did not bend his heart, filling out his diary in the evenings. He sincerely believed in what he described. It’s just that Elizabeth Loftus’s team managed to conduct an experiment on implanting memories for the first time.

Before conducting the now classic experiment, the researchers enlisted the full support of the subjects’ relatives and received all the necessary information from them. During the experiment itself, each participant was given several true stories and one false story - about how, at the age of 5, he got lost in a shopping center and was found by an elderly man who took him to his parents.

Next, the subject was required to record his memories of the mentioned episodes for several days, trying to reproduce what happened in as much detail as possible. At the end, each participant went through an interview with a researcher. 29% of subjects falsely remembered an episode that had never happened to them in a shopping center.

It seems Professor Loftus has come up with the perfect recipe for implanting a false memory. First, you must gain access to the person's personal information, as well as gain his trust or the help of those people he trusts. Then bring in the memory itself and stimulate the object's imagination in every possible way. A dry fact will itself acquire details over time and will most likely become a memory. Taking a closer look, you can see that this whole scheme is very reminiscent of the cunning plan of DiCaprio’s hero from the Oscar-winning blockbuster.

A childhood memory of being lost in a shopping mall is generally neutral and mundane. But what about exceptional and emotionally distressing events? It turned out that they are also well implanted into memory, the main thing is to convince the subject that what happened to him is a completely ordinary occurrence. In one of the following works, Loftus wisely selected texts with mystical content, and as many as 18% of naive Florentine students confirmed that they had seen someone possessed by demons in childhood.

But still, the most ramshackle effect was achieved using a combination of all the described techniques and fake photographs. Yes, scientists photoshop too! In a 2002 study, conducted without Professor Loftus's participation, a group of psychologists from Canada and New Zealand convinced people that they had ridden in a hot air balloon as children by showing them fake photographs. 50% of the experimental subjects (half!) somehow agreed with the fact of their flight in the basket.

Diagnostics

In laboratory conditions, it is impossible to control confabulations that occur spontaneously. To study this deviation, it is necessary to deliberately induce attacks of memory substitution; this is the only way to determine errors and distortions of memory.

Confabulations can also be detected using the Dees–Roediger–McDermott paradigm. All participants in the experiment are given a recording on which there are several lists of words related thematically, and after that the participants are asked to remember words from a certain list, and if they name one that was never heard there, then this is a manifestation of confabulation.

Confabulations can be diagnosed using recognition and recall tasks. During a recognition experiment, participants are shown cards with pictures, some of them are shown several times, while others appear only once. Patients are then asked to point to pictures that they have seen before, and if the participant selects a picture that was not shown twice, this indicates a false memory.

Diagnosis is also carried out using memory tasks. That is, participants in the experiment are asked to tell well-known stories (fairy tales, historical data, or life events that are known to researchers). If distortions of facts appear in a true story, then such errors may also indicate confabulation.

How to explain the appearance of false memories

One theory that tries to explain why our brains can become filled with false memories is called fuzzy trace theory. The authors of the term are researchers and psychologists Charles Brainerd and Valerie F. Reyna. Using this theory, scientists tried for the first time to explain the work of the so-called Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm, or DRM for short. It sounds scary at first glance, but in fact it is named after its creators, scientists James Deese, Henry Roediger and Kathleen McDermott, who back in the 60s attempted to reproduce the laboratory analogue of déjà vu.

In the DRM study, subjects were offered a large list of words, for example: “pillow”, “mattress”, “bed”, “chair”, “alarm clock”, “nap”, “nightmare”, “pajamas”, “night light”, etc. Further. All these words belong to one category - the process of sleep. But the word “sleep” is not on this list. When subjects were asked after some time whether the word “sleep” was on the list, most “remembered” that it was there. Of course, the resulting effect is not very similar to real déjà vu, but the authors insisted on the identity of the mechanisms of their occurrence.

“People start to ‘remember’ words that weren’t actually on the list, but they are sure they were. This phenomenon can definitely be called false memory,” Raina told Business Insider.

“This is truly a very powerful psychological phenomenon. A complete discrepancy with reality. This is not simply a situation that can be described by saying “I don’t remember,” which in turn could be called ordinary forgetfulness. Here everything is much more complicated: “I remember exactly what didn’t really happen.” And the fuzzy trace theory was the first attempt to explain this phenomenon.”

Why does the disorder develop?

Confabulation develops as a result of the coincidence of three factors:

• Memory for the part of the event that is being reviewed weakens.
• Facts preceding the event are lost.
• Phenomena of similar nature overlap each other.

This is the so-called pathogenesis.

Memory disorder is a complex problem. As a rule, a group of pathogenetic factors is involved in the development of confabulation. Among them:

• Cognitive deficit. Disruption of the normal process of thinking and perception of reality. Most often develops in chronic mental disorders. Whether it's schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or dementia. The lower the level of intelligence, the higher the likelihood of a violation. It is not necessary that mental abilities fade during illness. Intellectual potential in the prodrome, the phase preceding the disease, is also taken into account.
• Psychotype. The most susceptible to deviations are those with schizoid or hysterical accentuation. In the former, development is associated with initial character traits, eccentricity and some fragmentation of thinking processes. For the second, excessive emotionality becomes the cause of the disorder. Speaking in terms of temperament, melancholic and choleric people are more susceptible.
• Some personality traits are gullibility and impressionability. Other features.
• History of memory disorders. If, for example, there was amnesia, complete or partial. The question of why this is so remains open.

These points predispose to a pathological process. In psychiatry, there are 5 main reasons, or more precisely, groups of reasons:

Mental disorders

Confabulations are most typical of the delusional component of schizophrenia. In an acute condition, the patient has poor orientation in time and space. If he orients himself at all. It is noteworthy that the same problems persist for several months or more after the acute condition. Psychosis. Similar problems occur in manic-depressive psychosis. In bipolar disorder, memories are replaced only in one phase - the manic phase, when the person is “on the rise.” False memories are also possible in depression.

Organic lesions of cerebral structures

Including tumors of the brain, cerebral hemispheres, if the frontal cortex is affected. She is precisely responsible for the normal construction and internal perception of memories. There are deviations in Alzheimer's disease and atherosclerosis. Also for dementia of various types. Affected by dementia, mild mental retardation. Confabulations especially often develop after severe traumatic brain injuries with damage to brain structures.

Toxic poisoning of the body

The reasons for the development of confabulation can be toxic, for example, due to alcohol poisoning. While intoxicated, a person does not remember many facts. They are replaced by others. Sometimes fundamentally different, which did not exist at all in the past.

The same thing happens with patients suffering from drug addiction. Especially when taking amphetamines, less often opioids. Memories are restored on their own. The main condition is to give up drugs and alcohol. How quickly the effect is achieved depends on the severity of the disease and how long you have been taking drugs or alcohol.

Mental trauma

Confabulation is possible due to psychological trauma, if its intensity was so great that a defense mechanism was activated. This is a way of compensation. Unpleasant memories are eliminated and repressed into the subconscious. A more acceptable option remains relevant; the brain constructs it independently.

Memory confabulations are common in psychiatric practice. Especially in patients with thinking and personality disorders. After injuries and illnesses, emergency conditions such as stroke. There are many options.

False memories - can they be distinguished from real ones?

Criminal psychologist Julia Shaw explains what false memories are, whether they can be distinguished from real ones, and why the eye-witness justice system is failing. Sometimes our memories turn out to be wrong. The brain plays tricks on us all the time, and the tricks it plays can mislead us into thinking that we are able to accurately reconstruct our personal past. In reality, we are surrounded by false memories.

False memories are memories of things we never actually experienced. These can be small errors of memory, such as making us think we saw one road sign instead of another, or large errors, such as believing that we once flew in a hot air balloon when we never did. Another frightening feature of false memories: they can be imposed on us from the outside. In his book A World Full of Demons: Science Is Like a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan argued that implanting false memories in people is not only possible, but in fact very easy - the main thing is to correctly assess the level of gullibility of the person you are dealing with. He gave examples of people who, at the insistence of doctors or hypnotists, actually began to believe that they had been abducted by a UFO, or to remember childhood abuse that never happened. For these people, the distinction between memory and imagination became blurred, and events that never happened were firmly sewn into memory as real. Participants in the experiments could even describe these fictitious events extremely accurately and incredibly vividly, as if they had taken place. Carl Sagan noted:

“It’s easy to mess up a memory. False memories can be implanted even in a mind that does not consider itself vulnerable and uncritical.”

As you can see, this is a very important feature of the psyche, which is at least worth keeping in mind. To find out what new people would like to know about this phenomenon, criminal psychologist, false memory researcher and author of The Memory Illusion, Julia Shaw, took a poll on Reddit and answered the six most interesting, in her opinion. questions.

Is there a way to check if our memories are real or false?

An analysis of the scientific literature shows that once a person is possessed by false memories, they are almost impossible to distinguish from the true memories stored in our brain.

More on the blog: You can do without reality

This means that false memories have the same properties as any other, and are no different from memories of events that actually happened. The only way to test them is to find corroborating evidence for any particular memory that needs to be “tested.”

Are there people more prone to creating false memories than others?

There are groups of people who are traditionally considered more vulnerable, such as individuals with low IQs, children, adolescents, and people suffering from mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, which themselves make it difficult for those with this illness to “monitor reality.” Essentially, anyone who is poor at separating fact from fiction is more likely to create false memories.

However, in my study of “normal” adults, I did not find any systematic personality differences between those who tend to form false memories and those who do not. I conducted a study looking at fantasy propensity, malleability, and Big Five personality type differences, in addition to testing for gender, age, and education. And I didn’t find anything.

This does not mean that such personality vulnerabilities do not exist - they probably do, but perhaps they are not as important as we assume. I am convinced that everyone can (and does) have false memories.

Where are false memories formed?

Everywhere. The question is not where our memories become lies, but how lies become our memories.

Complex and comprehensive false memories of entire events are probably less common than partial ones (where we inaccurately recall only the details of events that occurred), but we have naturally already filled in so many gaps between memory fragments and made so many assumptions that our personal past is , essentially, just a bundle of fiction.

Do you think the implications of your research could impact the current justice system?

The implications of false memory research have profound implications for the criminal justice system. This challenges our current reliance on memories from suspects, victims, witnesses, even police officers and lawyers.

More on the blog: What is it like to think positively?

Now memories can confirm or destroy the accusation. However, by showing that memories are inherently unreliable, we call into question the very basis of how evidence is currently used in criminal proceedings. This raises the question of whether we can truly be sure "beyond a reasonable doubt" that someone has committed a crime in cases that rely solely on the recollections of those involved. It also shows us how easily poor interview/interrogation techniques can create false memories. And it forces us to rethink existing policing practices.

Can false memories be useful or have positive consequences?

I think false memories are a magnificent consequence of a beautiful and complex cognitive system, the same system that allows us to have intelligence, vivid imaginations, and problem solving. Overall, false memories are part of it all, and they are neither positive nor negative. They simply ARE.

Whether they are considered “good” or not also depends incredibly on the circumstances. For example, a situation in which the victim does not remember part of the crime committed against him may be considered bad for the investigation, but good for the victim.

Did the data you received have any impact on how you use your own memories?

Definitely. I always felt a little awkward because I was always very bad at remembering things that happened in my personal life. On the other hand, I have always been good at remembering facts and information. This was partly what bolstered my confidence that my research on false memories could work, because if my memory was so unreliable, then my research might help others whose memories were also unreliable.

Although I have always been cautious in assessing the accuracy of memory (as far as I remember, ha!), I am now convinced that no memory should be trusted. I am sure that we create our memories every day anew.

It's such a scary but beautiful idea that every day you wake up with a slightly different personal past.

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Differences from other types of amnesia and paramnesia

In psychiatric practice, the following main types of amnesia are distinguished:

• anterograde and retrograde. With these types, information is erased until the disease occurs;
• anterograde: the patient cannot perceive information after the onset of the disease;
• Korsakoff's syndrome: a severe form of memory loss characterized by acute deficiency of vitamin B1;
• fixation: characterized by the inability to retain new information;
• perforated: information is partially accumulated;
• traumatic: is a consequence of a head injury, accompanied by the disappearance from memory of facts relating to the patient’s personal life;
• children's: no memories of early childhood.

The fundamental difference between other types of amnesia and pseudoreminiscences, as well as other types of paramnesia, is that with the latter only distortion of memories occurs. In most amnesias, memories are lost completely.

Pseudo-reminiscence is characterized only by the displacement of events in time, while they actually happened, but most often earlier than the person talks about it. It also happens vice versa, events are transferred to a more distant period of time.

The disorders are typical for people of mature age who have disturbances in the functioning of the central nervous system. They often appear as part of Korsakoff's syndrome.

Cryptomnesia - fictitious events are presented to patients as real. In some cases they may be taken from literature or a feature film. Sometimes such a diagnosis is given to people who talk in detail about the events they experienced in a past life.

Confabulations - the other side of the same coin

Confabulations – in these types of disorders, hallucinations are presented as real facts. There are several types of disorder. There are two main classifications. By content:

• mnemonic – fiction about current events;
• ecmnestic, in which a shift into the past occurs;
• fantastic ones contain many fictitious facts.

The violation is also classified by origin:

• suggested - provoked by hints or leading questions;
• delusional – arise as a consequence of delusional ideas;
• mnestic - replace gaps in memory;
• oneiric – caused by disturbances of consciousness of a non-productive type;
• expansive - characterized by ideas of delusions of grandeur, the patient tries to show himself as a brilliant inventor, intellectually gifted, excessively rich, and so on.

The main difference between confabulation and pseudoreminiscence is that the first is a hallucination of memory (i.e. the event did not happen at all), and the second is

illusion (the event happened, but at the wrong time).

Cryptomnesia, confabulations and pseudoreminiscences represent the same problem, only slightly modified.

Distinctions are made for correct understanding and adequate communication with the patient in order to avoid a negative reaction and distinguish real events from fictitious ones. This is also required for correct diagnosis, and therefore treatment of memory disorders.

The illusion of memory

It is unlikely that anyone in the world knows more about the phenomenon of false memories than University of California professor Elizabeth Loftus. More than 40 years of research into the mechanisms of memory have earned her recognition as the world's leading expert on false memories. A fascinating and vivid account of her scientific journey can be found here.

In one of her first academic papers, Loftus examined the influence of the nature of the question on a person's memory of the event. Thus, if, after watching a video of a car accident, viewers were asked at what speed the cars smashed into each other, the viewers gave a higher estimate of the speed, compared to those who heard that the cars collided (collided) or hit (hit). ). The very form in which we access memory influenced its recall.

Around the same time, Loftus began serving as an expert on the credibility of witnesses in court hearings. To date, Loftus has participated in more than 250 legal proceedings. In the course of this difficult work and parallel experiments on volunteers, she became convinced that eyewitness testimony can be influenced by a variety of circumstances. The information contained in memory was easily mixed, confused and replaced by newly arrived information.

It turns out that memory is dynamic, and, influencing our decisions, it itself is easily distorted under the influence of new impressions and experiences. Even just thinking about the past changes our memory of it. Falling into grandiloquence, one can even say that it does not look at all like a stone with a carved relief (as is commonly thought), but like soft pliable clay, crumpling with every touch. Moreover, as we just learned, one of the most powerful means of implanting false memory is our own imagination. The line between “remember” and “invent” turns out to be vanishingly thin.

Perhaps the most exciting phase in Professor Loftus's career began at the dawn of the 90s. During this time, she became interested in the suspiciously numerous cases of sexual harassment lawsuits. Often the accusing party was women who suddenly remembered a crime that occurred in their childhood - many years, or even decades ago.

The most interesting thing was that a fair portion of these memories took place at an appointment with a psychotherapist. Could the influence of psychotherapy trigger the emergence of false memories? Loftus began her investigation.

It turned out that psychotherapists routinely asked patients about childhood trauma associated with violence, and popular psychology books provided entire lists of potential symptoms characteristic of victims of molestation. If the possible victim did not remember the very fact of what happened, she was asked to imagine how and under what circumstances she could have been harassed.

There could be a clue here. The lion's share of memories of sexual abuse may simply have been implanted into memory through reading books, visiting psychotherapists or specialized self-help groups. Loftus could only confirm this guess experimentally: try to introduce a false memory into a person’s consciousness herself.

Paramnesia - the taste of a non-existent life

Paramnesia (“parallel”, false memories) is a common attribute of neurological and mental diseases. But this is optional

So.

In one form or another, it can also be characteristic of creative and artistic individuals (or simply overly sensitive and impressionable).

It is also characteristic of ages “specially created” for it – children’s and old age. Ages when there is still – or no longer – enough strength to create in matter.

The cause of the condition may also be chronic, ongoing intoxication (both as a result of alcoholism, and as a result of a chronic infection, for example, with tuberculosis).

In a word, paramnesia is the essence and destiny of those powerless to create physical life. But only those who already know (or still remember) its taste.

And on the basis of this memory and knowledge they create a new life - a life based on false memory. With myself (not realized in true life) in all the main roles.

But there are a great many main roles. This means that there must be no less options for “plot development” in order to be able to play them all.

And they exist. Here they are.

Examples from life

If we don’t talk about extremes, then the so-called gray zones of memory are present in every person, and some non-existent facts are perceived as real throughout life. For example, Marilyn Monroe claimed in many interviews that she was raped at the age of 7. However, each time she called a different name of the rapist.

Marlene Dietrich had similar memories. She was sure that at the age of 16 she was raped by a music teacher, and she clearly always said the same name. However, after a thorough check, journalists found out that such a teacher really existed, but at the time when Marlene was 16 years old, he did not even live in Germany.

There are many more cases involving false memory. Some stories even ended in litigation. One thing is clear: if a person constantly convinces himself that this or that event has happened, then over time it will become a reality for him. And political strategists and marketers use this quite successfully.

Confabulation: examples

In most cases, the individual himself is not aware of the specifics of his condition. However, if he talks about something that other people remember well, then they may suspect a violation.

Tell me, have you ever had a situation where you or someone said to you: “You told me that yourself then, remember?”, and in response: “I remember our meeting, but I definitely didn’t say that.” The most common example of confabulation in healthy people: we confuse or invent places, words, actions.

Among pathological manifestations, a striking example is the story of a patient from the Highland Psychiatric Hospital. He claimed that the government had sent him to secretly obtain drawings of the catacombs. He talked about it in great detail and excitingly. So brightly that the orderlies even began to believe at some point. But it soon became clear that the patient had schizophrenia, and confabulation was its symptom.

How "false memories" are created

Our memory can be “rewritten”

After conducting a series of experiments, Loftus discovered that memories could be implanted into someone's mind. For example, when a person is deliberately misinformed immediately after an event or if he is asked leading questions about the past.

In one of the experiments conducted by Loftus, subjects were shown photographs of road accidents. After viewing them, the experimenter asked questions. One group was asked to simply list the damage they remembered, while the other group was asked probing questions: “Did you notice that the car’s headlight was broken?” The result was stunning: respondents in the second group were 2 times more likely to distort their own memories.

It turns out that our memories can not only change over time, but with the help of leading questions, an outsider can “correct” them. If we are gradually instilled with deliberately incorrect information about the events that happened to us, our ideas about the past can be distorted. We will remember what actually did not happen, and sincerely believe in the reality of what we allegedly experienced.

We are ready to believe in the impossible

In her experiments, Loftus implanted false memories in subjects. Wondering whether it was possible to implant not just a single “broken headlight”, but also a whole memory, she came to interesting conclusions. Some of the subjects perceived what they heard as their actual memory, and moreover, they added colorful details to it.

Interestingly, in addition to hypothetically possible memories (“you got lost in a supermarket when you were 5-6 years old”, “you almost drowned as a child”), the subjects were also instilled with memories that were a priori impossible. So, in one of the experiments they were told that when they visited Disneyland, they communicated with Bugs Bunny there. 16% of subjects later recalled this memory as their own, adding that they hugged the character and even heard his catchphrase (“What’s up, Doc?”) from him.

At the same time, they were not at all embarrassed that Bugs Bunny was a character from the Warner Brothers studio, and therefore could not possibly be in Disneyland.

Context influences our memories

Gary Marcus, director of the Child Speech Center at New York University, says that our memories can be compared to audio recordings. Moreover, every time we reproduce them, we rewrite them in our memory, and therefore the context in which this reproduction occurs can be recorded along with the very essence of the memory and lead to memory errors.

It turns out that our memory is a very fragile thing. This does not mean that we absolutely cannot trust our memories, but it is worth considering that we all have memories that are malleable and susceptible to external influences.

Examples of confabulation

Confabulation is a multifaceted phenomenon considered in psychology. Its manifestations occur in healthy people, but are not the cause of serious mental illness.

One of these minor manifestations is forgetfulness. For example, while talking with a friend, you forgot that you were going to stop by for milk on the way home. But as soon as you cross the threshold of the house, the memory of milk immediately appears in your memory. Or you told several acquaintances about one event, and then you start talking about it again to one of these acquaintances. He stops the story, but it seems to you that this conversation is happening for the first time.

A common manifestation is illusions that make a dream seem like reality. Dreams can be quite realistic, so memory transfers them into real life. For example, you dreamed that there was a red sweater in the closet. In reality, there are no red items in your wardrobe at all, but in the morning a thorough search begins. The realization that it was a dream comes a little later.

The most famous example of confabulation in the study of this phenomenon is the story of a patient from the Highland mental hospital. The man was sure that he was a secret government agent. He was on a mission and had to get secret drawings of the catacombs. The memory impairment was so vivid that the patient made up incredible details of his “agent’s” life on the fly. The orderlies were so impressed by these stories that they even began to believe them. However, the agent was later revealed - he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Confabulation was a symptom of illness.

In life there are fleeting confabulations that mean nothing. The brain is designed in such a way that it sometimes forgets some information. This most often happens with short-term memory. For example, you went to the store to buy flour, but instead you bought a whole basket of groceries. When you come home, you just want to shout: “Flour!” Sometimes people go to the store several times, each time forgetting why they went.

Occult News

December 5, 2013 In 1996, the first black president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, passed away. And literally on the same day, Internet search engines received millions of requests asking whether this information was false. A huge number of people were convinced that the outstanding African died in prison in the sixties and seventies of the last century.

As you know, Nelson Mandela led the armed struggle against the apartheid regime and was arrested in 1962, after which he actually spent twenty-seven years in captivity. It was while in prison that this human rights fighter gained worldwide fame. However, in 1989 he was honorably released, and in May 1994 he became the president of South Africa and led the country for five years. Why did so many people in different parts of the world have no idea about this and believed that Mandela died without ever being released?

This phenomenon attracted the attention of participants in the American multi-genre convention “Dragon Con”, held annually in Atlanta. They carefully studied this issue and came to the conclusion that a rational explanation for what happened could not be given. Moreover, it turned out that there are a number of other facts that were deposited in the memory of many people in a distorted form. It was then that the term “Mandela effect” was introduced by enthusiasts. Congress participant Fiona Broome began to popularize it and collect information about other events that for some reason are incorrectly stored in human memory.

False memories in large groups of people

Thus, the Mandela effect is a phenomenon that refers to the emergence in a large group of people of memories that contradict the real state of affairs. It is noteworthy that false memories do not relate to any difficult-to-verifiable events, but to well-known events: historical, astronomical, geographical, and so on.

In other words, checking such information is as easy as shelling pears, especially now that everyone has access to the Internet. However, when faced with this phenomenon, people become somewhat confused and confused. How so? They remember very well that Mandela died behind bars! This was reported in “News”, written in numerous newspapers, and the funeral of an African revolutionary was even shown on TV!..

But no, in fact, no one wrote anything, reported anything, or showed anything. Would journalists all over the world really decide to concoct such a “duck” at the same time? The question is, why? Enthusiasts searched long and hard for newspaper articles and television reports about the event, even if they were made by some provincial reporters who suddenly wanted to have fun like this. However, there were never such publications, therefore, people could not get this information from the media.

The Inexplicable Details of Fake Memories

Another strange feature of the Mandela effect is that such memories are not just false information recorded in a person’s memory, but an entire system of sequential memories. Let's give an interesting example.

What color were Adolf Hitler's eyes? Most people would swear it's brown. Moreover, many of them will confidently tell you that they know this fact very well since their school days. Like, the history teacher specifically emphasized that the Fuhrer was brown-eyed and at the same time advocated for Aryan racial purity, according to which the eyes of a “superman” must certainly be blue.

Obviously this couldn't happen. All of Hitler's contemporaries claimed that he had blue eyes, and liked to emphasize this fact when talking about the chosenness of the leader of the Third Reich. Why do so many people remember not only his brown eye color, but even ridicule Hitler about this?..

Writer Agatha Christie disappeared briefly in December 1926. The disappearance of the famous detective story caused a loud public outcry, and the police immediately began searching for the woman. Eleven days later, Christie was found alive and unharmed in a remote English spa hotel. She returned home and continued writing her wonderful books. However, a significant number of people “remember” that the writer disappeared forever without a trace.

If you think that there is an Arctic continent in the Arctic Ocean, then you, like many others, are mistaken. There is only abundant ice cover there.

Non-existent books, films and various works of art are a completely different matter. For example, thousands of Russians “remember” how in the mid-eighties a very dark adaptation of the fairy tale “Dwarf Nose” was shown on television. It was very different from other film adaptations of the same tale in 1953, 1970 and 1978. In fact, such a movie never existed, and not a single copy of it has ever been found.

Among the numerous portraits of the English king Henry the Eighth, there is not a single one where the monarch is holding a roast turkey leg in his hands. However, a huge number of residents of Foggy Albion claim that they have seen such a picture with their own eyes in museums, at exhibitions and on the World Wide Web.

Probably everyone knows the American song “Only You”. Many people experience a real shock when they find out that in the fifties it was not sung by the “King of Rock and Roll” Elvis Presley, but by the black quintet “The Platters”. But many clearly “remember” how Presley performed “Only You” at his concerts, how this song was included in his official records. Needless to say, such records were never found, despite the wild popularity of Elvis?..

Russian examples of the Mandela effect

There are also such examples in Russia and the former Soviet Union.

Many of our compatriots “remember” from school that Alaska was sold to the Americans by Catherine the Great, although in reality this happened during the reign of Alexander the Second. Therefore, the Russian Empress is in vain accused of this oversight.

Everyone probably remembers the common phrase from the film: “Boy, step away from the car.” However, for some reason the majority is convinced that this line was heard in the film “Beware of the Car.” In fact, it was uttered in the film “In Secret to the Whole World,” which many have a hard time believing.

Do you remember how Yeltsin, before leaving the presidency, said: “I’m tired, I’m leaving”? This saying also became popular, but in fact Boris Nikolayevich only said then: “I’m leaving.” Why many of us “remember” the words about his fatigue is a real mystery.

In the former USSR, everyone knows the poem that begins with the words “I am sitting behind bars in a damp dungeon.” But for some reason many are convinced that its creator is Mikhail Lermontov. However, the real author of this work is Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin.

Possible explanations for the Mandela effect

So, there are several of them, and one is more fantastic than the other:

Firstly, many Mandela effect researchers believe that this phenomenon is a consequence of the movement of people from one parallel worlds to another - the so-called quantum immortality, when a person, unnoticed by himself, moves from one reality to another, neighboring one. In the past reality, the world could have been somewhat different. For example, there Lermontov appropriated a poem by Pushkin, Agatha Christie really disappeared (perhaps she also moved somewhere), and America grabbed a piece of Canada or Mexico, acquiring one or two new states. A person retains certain memories of the reality where he lived before;

Secondly, it is quite possible that someone created a time machine and went back in time, where something was accidentally or deliberately changed. That is, an unknown inventor could trigger the butterfly effect, when even minor changes in the past (like killing an insect) give rise to a chain of changes that significantly affect the future. Thus, some of us still have memories from that version of reality where the events of the past and, as a result, the present were not changed;

Thirdly, there is also an opinion that we all live in a matrix - a simulation of reality created by intelligent machines, people of the future or representatives of an extraterrestrial civilization. In this simulation, glitches and certain problems sometimes occur. For example, on the same day you can meet the same stranger in different parts of your city. Or notice a car on the road that simply disappears, dissolving into thin air. Similar failures can occur in our memory, which is entirely formed by the matrix, since the real world has never been accessible to us, and we do not even know what it is.

Traditional science also studies the Mandela effect. So, in this regard, confabulation is often mentioned - a psychopathological phenomenon of false memory, when a person is completely convinced that certain fictitious events actually happened. However, scientists are unable to explain why such a false memory can sometimes be observed among tens of millions of earthlings living in different parts of the world...

source

Treatment

Currently, there is no specific drug treatment that could restore memory processes, since there is no proven and tested pharmacological agent.

Indirect treatment methods are mainly used, among which the following are worth noting:

• treatment of underlying mental illness;
• the use of nootropics that restore brain structures, these include nootropil, phenotropil and many others.
• stabilization of blood circulation in the main brain structures;
• psychotherapy;
• diagnosis and exclusion of traumatic situations in a person’s life, elimination of stress.

Treatment must be carried out under conditions of clinical observation; constant registration of all changes is necessary. Treatment depends on the specific features of the underlying pathology that the person suffers from. In addition to nootropics that accelerate the functioning of nerve cells, vitamins and antioxidants are prescribed

It is also important to ensure and create a favorable environment around the patient. The patient should be limited from any factors that provoke stress.

Diagnostics

Diagnosis of confabulations is carried out by a psychiatrist or neurologist.
The initial treatment involves a comprehensive examination, based on the results of which the underlying disease can be established. The patient’s conversation with the specialist takes place in the presence of a close relative. This helps to refute fictitious facts or, conversely, confirm their veracity.

In this way, anamnesis is collected with parallel monitoring of the patient’s verbal behavior. At the same time, the presence or absence of hallucinatory symptoms and delusions is determined.

During the neurological examination, the doctor checks the integrity of reflexes, muscle tone, sensitivity and motor skills. After this, it is necessary to conduct a more detailed assessment of the state of the central nervous system and thus discover the underlying problem.

Depending on the situation and the severity of specific symptoms, this may require the results of an EEG and CT or MRI of the brain.

A psychopathological examination in this case will require the patient to perform a number of simple tests:

1. Dies-Rodiger-McDermott paradigm. The patient is asked to listen to an audio recording with several thematic categories of words. If the patient confidently names words that were not spoken, this is a clear sign of confabulation.
2. Memory tasks. The patient must remember any story that is well known to everyone and to him. Based on his story, all distortions and errors are recorded, which consist either in the substitution of actual facts for fiction, or the inclusion of extraneous episodes that could not have happened in history.
3. Recognition tasks. The test consists of a series of rapidly shown images. In this case, some images are shown only once, while others are shown several times. If the patient has already seen the image before, he should signal this. After a short time, the task is repeated. If the patient makes more errors on repeat than on the first presentation, this indicates confusion and inherent false memories.

Causes

There are several potential causes of the Mandela Effect.

False memory

The concept of false memories provides one possible explanation for the Mandela Effect. False memories are incorrect or distorted memories of an event. Some false memories contain elements of fact that are very similar to the actual event in question. However, others are completely false.

Although the idea of ​​false memories makes some people uncomfortable, errors in memory are quite common. Memory does not work like a camera; it objectively catalogs images, events and statements in their purest form. Emotions and personal biases can influence memories. Researchers have even discovered a simple method for inducing false memories called the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) task paradigm. During the DRM task paradigm, participants read a list of semantically related words such as:

• zebra
• monkey
• whale
• snake
• elephant

After reading the list, the researchers ask participants if they remember a word, such as “lion,” that was not included in the list. Although this word is semantically related to other words in the list, it is not. Participants usually recognize the word and remember reading it, even if it was never on the list.

According to scientists in a 2021 scientific paper, people remember false memories induced by the DRM task paradigm for as long as 60 days.

Confabulation

Confabulation

is another potential mechanism underlying false memories and the Mandela effect.

Confabulations are false statements or retellings of events that have no relevant evidence or factual support. Although confabulations are technically false statements, the speaker will treat the statements as fact.

According to Lisa Bortolotti, a philosophy professor at the University of Birmingham in the UK, people don't intentionally get confused. In a 2021 paper, Professor Bortolotti said that most people "don't know the information that would make their explanations accurate" and are unable to provide better explanations.

Confabulation is a common symptom of neurological diseases that affect memory, such as Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia. When a person with dementia makes things up, they are not lying or trying to deceive. He simply does not have the necessary information or awareness to accurately remember a specific event.

Priming

In psychology, priming describes the phenomenon in which exposure to a stimulus directly influences a person's response to a subsequent stimulus. For example, if a person reads or hears the word “grass,” they will recognize another related word, such as “tree” or “lawnmower,” faster than an unrelated word.

Priming is also known as suggestibility. It can affect a person's reaction and memory. For example, the phrase: “Did you take the red ball from the shelf?” is more suggestive than the phrase: “Did you take anything from the shelf?”

This is because the second phrase contains a general, open-ended question, while the first describes picking up a specific object: “the red ball.” Therefore, the first phrase has a stronger effect on memory than the second.

Alternative realities and parallel worlds

Broome describes the Mandela effect as a clear memory of an event that never occurred in this reality. Her explanation ties into several popular theories that suggest that the Mandela Effect occurs when our reality interacts with other alternate realities or parallel universes.

The concept of alternate realities has its origins in quantum physics and string theory. This theoretical framework explains the universe and the very nature of reality in terms of tiny strings that vibrate in 10 dimensions. Based on string theory, it can be argued that our Universe is just one of many, potentially infinite, other universes. This is called the multiverse. Although the mathematical basis of string theory works, the theory itself remains unproven and highly controversial.

Features of the Mandela Effect may include:

• having distorted memories in which some aspects are partially or completely inaccurate
• whole events that did not happen are clearly remembered
• people who do not know each other share similar distorted or inaccurate memories

The Mandela Effect occurs when a person believes that their distorted memories are actually accurate memories. They may clearly remember events that happened differently, or events that never happened at all.

The bottom line is that the Mandela Effect does not involve lying or deception. Instead, it occurs when a person or group of people has clear but false memories.

A different type of paramnesia from others: “at the level of hallucination”

From the point of view of psychology, confabulations are similar to “patching holes” in memory - missing fragments are filled in with suitable material, and it is reconstructed using information received in the present time.

And not only mentally ill people suffer from this “sin” - it can also be the actions of a healthy person, carried out throughout his life (either completely conscious or being an unconscious falsification - a defense against what is disturbing).

But at the beginning of the century before last, the classic of psychiatry L. Kahlbaum called confabulations “hallucinations of remembering,” considering them a type of paramnesia. Where the memory presents to the patient events that are completely fictitious, which cannot in any way be facts of his life, in contrast to “illusions of remembering” - pseudo-reminiscences, where the events that really happened in the patient’s life are only displaced in memory to a different time.

Both interpretations come down to the concept of “false memories,” which often mask incipient hypomnesia or progressive amnesia, where confabulations either fill “gaps” in the patient’s memory or exist as independent structures.

In addition to fantastic content with a lot of implausible details that increase the general mood, due to paraphrenic syndrome, vascular, senile, traumatic and intoxication psychoses, confabulations can also be of a delusional nature (retroactive delirium), associated with clouding of consciousness.

Or expansive, reflecting the “great idea”: extraordinary, heroic health, intellectual (to the point of genius) superiority over others, high destiny.

Confabulations can create “surges” in which confusion sets in - the person is completely lost, disoriented in space and time; As a result of confabulosis, even thinking disorder can occur.

Memory hallucinations should not be confused with:

• nor with cryptomnesia (alienation from one’s own reality);
• nor with echonesia (with repeated returns in false memories to the current topic);
• nor with phantasms (uncontrollable pathological deceit).

Modern psychiatry interprets the phenomenon of confabulations precisely as a distortion of memories of actual events that took place in time and place in combination with fictitious events and with their transfer to another time.

How to escape from false memories?

A group of scientists from the University of Hagen (Germany) conducted a study of false memory and ways to get rid of it. Scientists were able to create false memories (confabulations) in most participants, after which they educated the latter about what it is and how it is created. After such “training,” people were able to successfully distinguish real memories from false ones both immediately after the experiment and a whole year later. Details of this very unusual work are presented on the electronic pages of the journal PNAS.

Credit: public domain

False memories

In 1999, Elizabeth Loftus, a leading researcher into the phenomenon of false memories, published her research on a boy who got lost in a shopping mall. 14-year-old Chris, a participant in that experiment, had to describe in detail the details of four events every day for five days. One of them was false. It told about how one day, while going to the shopping center with his mother, the boy got lost, got scared and cried. In this story, a stranger approached him and helped him find him. The other three stories were real, which Loftus was convinced of thanks to the boy’s relatives.

After some time, the child was asked to name which of all the memories was false. Chris chose one of the real ones.

Since then, the topic of “false memory” or confabulation has captivated cognitive scientists. In another study, Loftus showed that this phenomenon can have a serious negative impact on justice: eyewitnesses to crimes or people who have once been subjected to violence may form an incorrect image of the criminal, and distort their memory of the event itself. As a result, the wrong people may be punished. It turned out that investigators themselves can form a false memory among witnesses if they ask the “right” questions or show fake photographs.

The memories we form influence the decisions we make. So, in one study, Loftus asked participants about their food preferences. The questionnaire contained a number of questions about bad food experiences, for example: “poisoning after breakfast with a soft-boiled egg.” Taking a second similar questionnaire after a certain time, the respondents showed that they were less willing to eat the product that supposedly made them sick.

Briefly about the experiment

Scientists from Germany decided to find out how to prevent the effect of false memories. We have already seen that confabulations are quite simple to create. However, according to the authors of the articles, at the moment there is no method to “remove” them.

“In this study, we made the first attempt to create an interviewing technique that can help people understand which memories are real and which are false,” says lead author Hartmut Blank.

Scientists recruited 52 volunteers and created two false memories for them. With the help of relatives, they “embedded” these confabulations in the participants’ memories. Such memories included situations where the person got lost, ran away from somewhere, or got into a car accident.

Then, over the course of a series of interviews, the researchers asked participants to report on four events (two real and two implemented). By the third session, most participants believed that the false events had happened to them (40 percent rated them as real).

Next, the researchers used one of two strategies to educate participants about the existence of the phenomenon of “false memories.”

In the first strategy (source sensitization), the researchers reminded participants that their memories were not always based on their own life experiences. They can also be formed by external sources: stories from parents, photographs, and so on. After that, the scientists asked respondents to say which of the four events were from their own experience and which were introduced.

The second strategy (false memory sensitization) included an explanation that the constant repetition of certain events can trigger the appearance of false memories. After the explanation, participants were asked to recall all four events and indicate their level of confidence in them.

According to Dr. Blank, such strategies increased participants' awareness of false memories. After this, respondents critically assessed the content of their memory and were able to identify confabulations. Their level of confidence in false memories approached that of the first interview (∼15% and ∼25% for the first and second strategies, respectively).

In addition, the level of confidence in real memories remained virtually unchanged at different stages of the experiment. A survey conducted a year later allowed scientists to understand that confidence in false memories had dropped to 5%: participants had no problems identifying confabulations and distinguishing them from real events.

Both techniques have a great advantage - they do not affect real memories in any way and act at the level of meta-memory, forcing you to review the contents of your memory.

“We have developed ways to combat false memories that can be applied in real, everyday life. Essentially, we have encouraged people to believe more in their own life experiences rather than relying on external means of memory. And thanks to this, we showed them that they could independently distinguish between false and real memories,” the authors comment.

It is worth noting that the technique developed by experts is not the only way to combat confabulations. Now they can be dealt with quite successfully through transcranial electrical stimulation. It can reduce the accuracy of false memories by 70% compared to the original level. However, unlike stimulation, according to scientists, their method allows not to affect real memories.

Text: Nikita Otstavnov

Rich false memories of autobiographical events can be reversed by Aileen Oeberst, Merle Madita Wachendörfer, Roland Imhoff, Hartmut Blank in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Published March 2021.

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2026447118

Classification

Confabulation as a symptom is observed in various psychopathologies. Accordingly, in each specific case there is a different etiology, different depth and severity of memory impairment, and different accompanying symptoms. As a result, the manifestations of such a disorder are also quite different.

For this reason, in psychology and psychiatry, confabulations are divided into two main groups, in which the patients’ fiction differs both in its content and in its original origin.

By content

Mnemonic.
False memories affect everyday life or professional activities in the current time. Ecmnestic confabulation most often accompanies progressive amnesia in middle-aged and elderly patients.

False memories are associated with the past: from youth to childhood. There is no idea of ​​real age and present time.

Fantastic. Such memory deception is a typical symptom of paraphrenic syndrome - a combination of affect with delusions of grandeur, influence and persecution. False memories differ from all previous forms in their scale of unreality: from historical events of the distant past to the no less distant future. Often this type of confabulation runs parallel to paraphrenic delirium.

By origin

Suggested is the most common form. It is expressed by a laconic and expected answer to the question posed. No matter how absurd the tips are, the patient does not notice the catch.

Spontaneous - the patient tells impressive stories invented on the spot. He answers the question posed incorrectly, while embellishing his answer as much as possible in order to impress the listener.

Oneiric - caused by a violation of consciousness of the productive type. Fictional memories relate to the subject of psychosis experienced in schizophrenia, oneiric syndrome, hallucinations or epilepsy.

Occasionally occurs in organic, infectious or intoxication psychosis.

Expansive - fictitious facts are associated with delusions of grandeur and obsessions, when the patient considers himself a genius, extremely rich and even a titled person.

Replacement mnestic - confabulation is expressed by replacing memory gaps with events of both past years and the present.

Delusional - does not refer to clouding and memory impairment. Arises as a result of the patient's delusional ideas. Typical of the paranoid syndrome of schizophrenia.

Symptoms

Manifestations of paramnesia include many different qualitative distortions of memory. Depending on their specificity, several types of this disorder are distinguished. Paramnesias include:

• pseudoreminiscence;
• confabulation;
• cryptomnesia;
• phantasm;
• reduplicating paramnesia;
• false recognition.

The main symptom of pseudoreminiscence is that a person passes off past events as present. He describes facts from ordinary life that actually happened, but at a different time, and do not relate to the current situation. Pseudoreminiscence is characteristic of dementia, Korsakoff's syndrome and other conditions accompanied by hypomnesia.

The main manifestation of confabulation is the transformation of real memories by introducing fictitious elements (objects, actions) into them. Types of confabulations:

• replacement - filling gaps in memory with real events from other time periods;
• ecmnestic – transfer of early childhood events into recent memories;
• fantastic - memories of fantastic events in which the patient participated in his opinion;
• delusional – distortion of memories by introducing delusional episodes into them;
• hallucinatory – supplementing descriptions of events with fragments of visual and auditory hallucinations.

A sign of cryptomnesia is the perception of information read, heard or seen as actually experienced. As a rule, cryptomnesia is combined with different types of amnesia. At the same time, patients are poorly oriented in time and space, get tired quickly, but retain acquired knowledge and skills well. Cryptomnesia occurs with senile psychoses, brain damage and cerebral atherosclerosis.

Phantasms are memories in which hallucinatory events are embedded. They occur in people with multiple personality disorder and schizophrenia. Fantasies are distinguished by their crudeness and absurdity, and in some cases, by an intriguing plot.

Reduplicative amnesia (dual perception) is expressed in the repetition of memories: it seems to a person that the same events are happening several times. He experiences a feeling of incomplete déjà vu.

False recognition occurs when people, objects, and places are mistakenly identified. In severe cases, a person cannot recognize loved ones or his own reflection in the mirror.

False memories in depth psychotherapy

Many areas of depth therapy are based on the fact that by remembering an amnesic trauma, you will get rid of your symptom. And this idea was widespread for quite a long time: in the mid-nineties, some American states even extended the statute of limitations in cases of sexual abuse of children, since, according to psychologists, they could remember what had been forgotten [1].

The first scandal was not long in coming, and it was associated with the actions of psychoanalysts. Unexpectedly, the rise in popularity of psychoanalysis in the United States has coincided with a rise in lawsuits over sexual abuse by relatives.

A huge number of people have filed lawsuits against their relatives and friends for the fact that they somehow acted sexually towards them in childhood. Many people went to prison and paid huge compensation.

However, it soon turned out that all these plaintiffs were patients of psychoanalysts who at that time relied on S. Freud’s theory of repression of sexual trauma. It turned out that these psychologists deliberately led clients to remember such events, hinting at certain actions of relatives with sexual overtones.

This situation even led to the creation of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation by Peter Freud, who was accused of childhood sexual abuse by his now adult daughter Jennifer Freud [2]. A revealing surname, isn't it?

As a result of these events and new discoveries in the psychology of memory, some countries, for example, have banned the taking of testimony from witnesses under hypnosis, and in general, criminologists have become much more careful about the strategies for interrogating witnesses so as not to lead them to suspect completely innocent people.

All these measures gave impetus to research in the field of false memories.

False memory research

Elizabeth Loftus was a pioneer in the field of false memory research.

In her experiments, for example, she forced people to change their assessment of a fact from their memories. For example, she showed people a video recording of an accident, only to some she asked “how fast were the cars going when they touched?”, and to others: “how fast were the cars going when they crashed into each other?” As a result, in the second case, people rated the speed much higher [3].

In another experiment [4], with the help of leading questions, the researcher introduced the memory that the subject was lost in a shopping center at the age of 5 years. It turned out that about 25% of participants believed that the information was reliable.

Subsequently, she conducted many similar experiments, for example, studying how the interrogator's speech could affect the child's testimony. As a result, in all these cases, people's memories quite easily deviated from the true ones.

Thus, it was proven that memories are not recorded in memory, but are recreated each time under the influence of the current situation. And this happens through a number of mechanisms.

The cognitive dissonance. The basic mechanism for reconstructing memories is cognitive dissonance, when we adjust different elements of experience to each other when they do not match.

Each time remembering a particular situation, a person will rely on his current knowledge and beliefs. Therefore, the memories of a 10-year-old child can be enormously different from the same memories at an older age.

For example, a small child may believe that he met a monster yesterday, but an adult, knowing that monsters do not exist, will believe that he once simply had a bad dream. Although who knows, maybe he really met a monster, it’s just that our current knowledge and experience do not allow for such a possibility and therefore repress such knowledge and memories.

In the same way, a girl can repress the memory of sexual abuse by her father, because for her it is simply unacceptable, because she believes in the holiness of her father and his kindness. Or it may be the other way around: belief in the theory of sexual trauma may make a girl remember sexual abuse from her father that never happened.

Inflation of the imagination. If the basic mechanism for correcting memories is cognitive dissonance, then there are many more specific ways to change them. One of them was called imagination inflation. It lies in the fact that a person can accept as real the event that he vividly imagined [5].

For example, this sometimes happens when sexual abuse of a minor is suspected. The child begins to be questioned, asked leading questions, and he can imagine the experience being described. And perhaps later he will “remember” that this actually happened to him.

The Gestalt therapist may hint to the client that he must have experienced a full range of feelings when breaking up with his girlfriend, and he may indeed decide that he had these feelings, although in fact he was simply indifferent to the girl.

And a cognitive therapist can lead a person to think that during a panic attack he thought that he would die and suffocate and begin to work with this thought, although in fact the person during a panic attack was not thinking about anything at all, but was simply terrified.

Interference of memories. Memory can be distorted by interference (or confusion) of memories of another event. Thus, in 1971, John Bransford and Jeffrey Franke showed that memories are not stored separately from each other. They presented students with a list of sentences describing one incident. For example, there was a list like this:

The ants ate the sweet jelly that was on the table.

There were ants in the kitchen.

The ants ate the sweet jelly.

and other phrases.

Next, students were presented with another list of sentences and asked to identify which ones were on the first list. The students were confident that the option was correct: “The ants in the kitchen ate the sweet jelly that was on the table.” Although in reality this item was not on the first list.

This happened because this sentence contains a combination of phrases from the first list. Simply put, people don't just remember sentences: they create and remember the big picture. When one piece of information is connected to others, it is difficult to understand what belongs to what. From here, false memories can also be born, for example, a person can remember some terrible event only because he once saw it or heard about it, and now perceives it as something that happened to him.

Hindsight bias. Another effect is a false sense of knowledge. This effect was demonstrated in experiments by Frenkel and Doob, who surveyed people immediately before voting and immediately after it. It turned out that voters were much more confident in their candidate's victory after the vote than before.

Exactly the same thing happens in psychotherapy, when a person is cured as a result of remembering an event. If this happens, then he becomes more confident that this event is true and true and that it could well have happened even if it did not.

Social influence. Our memories are also subject to social influence, which is expressed in the conformity of our memory [6]. The client is quite capable of believing the therapist that some event really happened simply because the therapist insists on it and is confident that he is right. This, for example, often happens in family constellations, when the therapist, out of the blue, declares that he sees in this constellation a terrible conflict that occurred among the client’s ancestors. And the problem here is not in the ancestors, but in the fact that the client gains confidence that something terrible really happened; in other words, he receives plus one psychological trauma to the existing ones.

Emotional distortion. Your mind may contain an incredibly vivid memory of a particular event, the validity of which you have no doubt about. However, practice shows that such a memory is not always true.

A great many scientific studies have been devoted to this phenomenon, including a study of memories of the September 11 tragedy, in which 1,500 respondents took part [7]. They were interviewed a week after the disaster, a year later, three years later and ten years later. The most emotional memories of respondents about personal circumstances at the time of the tragedy seemed to the respondents the most reliable. But paradoxically, it was these memories that changed the most over the years, while the less emotionally charged details remained.

A good example of such a distortion is described in the book by Frances Shapiro, where Shapiro’s client sincerely believed that she was raped by the devil himself as a child, but in the end, it turned out that it was an acquaintance of her father who was wearing a carnival mask.

Thus, we found out that our memories are not once and for all fixed information coming from our receptors. This is mobile and changeable knowledge. Moreover, you can influence a memory quite simply and there are quite a large number of mechanisms for this.

How memories are distorted in psychotherapy

Essentially, there are several ways in which false memories are created in psychotherapy.

1. Initial expectations and attitudes of the subject. The subject may initially be predisposed to forming false memories simply due to the theoretical input that we offer him. For example, we may claim that all the causes of our problems lie in past lives, in past generations of trauma, or in the perinatal periods. Obviously, all this is absolute nonsense, but if a person believes in it, then most likely he will remember it all. Moreover, if a person does not believe in past lives, he will definitely not remember them.

At the same time, the very assumption that repressed traumas exist will already give rise to a tendency in people to remember exactly what they normally do not remember, and the easiest way to remember, in this case, is to simply invent it.

2. The therapist's reinforcing influence. Some regression therapist may force a person to remember all earlier situations, even if he has already remembered all the significant traumas. As a result, when the client reaches the earliest memory under the influence of the therapist’s persuasion, he will again begin to invent.

Or, for example, a psychoanalyst can ignore some memories that do not confirm the theory and reinforce those that do. He will remain silent when remembering some fights at school, but will immediately become active when the client even slightly hints at a relationship with his mother. In this way, the client will increasingly focus on the topic that is important to the therapist, and gradually change his point of view towards that proposed from the outside.

3. Leading questions and phrases. If the client first told us about his mother, and then started talking about his relationship with his girlfriend, then we can ask: “How does what you said before relate to what you are saying now?” And even if there is no connection, a person will start looking for it and find it.

Or, for example, if a person complains of suppressed aggression, we can ask, “How did this manifest itself in your childhood? How was your aggression suppressed?” Again, the client will definitely find situations where his aggression was suppressed in childhood.

Well, or some client-centered therapist, using the phrase “When your hand hurts, I feel sad,” says: “When your hand hurts and you feel sad, you also feel a lack of responsibility,” also instills in you that you are irresponsible, although this has nothing to do with the problem at all

4. Presuppositions. Presuppositions are when we postulate something in speech as an implied fact. For example, if a client shares that his mother once left him at the mall, the therapist might respond, “So how did your mother's abuse affect your current situation?” As a result, the mother could simply accidentally lose the child, but the therapist interpreted this as cruelty, and the client, in turn, accepted this idea, and it is quite possible that he will soon remember some truly cruel cases, incorrectly interpreting the mother’s behavior.

Surely there are some other options, but they all indicate that in the process of psychotherapy you need to extremely seriously monitor your speech and not introduce your own material into the client’s thoughts and feelings, and also use the clearest possible language.

Literature

[1] Robbins SP (1998). "The Social and Cultural Context of Satanic Ritual Abuse Allegations." Issues in Child Abuse Accusations. 10.

[2] Whitfield, Charles L.; Joyanna L. Silberg; Paul Jay Fink (2001). Misinformation Concerning Child Sexual Abuse and Adult Survivors. Haworth Press. p. 56.

[3] E. F. Loftus & J. C. Palmer, Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13 (1974), 585–589.

[4] “Elizabeth Loftus. Memory. Piercing revelations about how we remember and why we forget”: KoLibri, ABC-Atticus; Moscow; 2021.

[5] M. Garry, C. G. Manning, E. F. Loftus & S. J. Sherman, Imagination inflation: Imagining a childhood event inflates confidence that it occurred, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 3 (1996), 208–214, and L. M. Goff & H. L. Roediger, Imagination inflation for action events: Repeated imaginings leading to illusory recollections, Memory & Cognition 26 (1998), 20–33.)

[6] H. L. Roediger, M. L. Meade & E. Bergman, Social contagion of memory, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 8 (2001), 365–371.

[7] J. M. Talarico & D. C. Rubin, Confidence, not consistency, characterizes flashbulb memories, Psychological Science 14 (2003), 455–461, and W. Hirst, E. A. Phelps, R. L. Buckner, A. Cue, D. E. Gabrieli & M. K. Johnson, Long-term memory for the terrorist attack of September 11: Flashbulb memories, event memories and the factors that influence their retention, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 138 (2009), 161–176.

How can doctors help?

The last word in the treatment of such a pathology as paramnesia has not yet been said by psychiatrists - it does not exist yet.
Methods of treatment and “strengthening” of the brain and similar drugs that improve blood supply and metabolism of its structures are proposed (Phenotropil).

A balanced diet with sufficient content of vital substances, rational physical activity, and distracting outdoor games are necessary.

Methods of psychological influence include hypnotherapy, relaxation therapy, as well as methods of oriental medicine: acupuncture, qigong, yoga, which allow you to achieve maximum concentration of attention on the present moment, without “running away” into the events of the past and future.

And, undoubtedly, the main condition for the success of treatment should be the desire for cooperation between the patient and the specialist doctor.