Science AMA Series: I’m Dr. Julia Shaw, a memory scientist and criminal
psychologist, back to discuss how we create complex false memories and
my new book on it. AMA!
Abstract
SIGNING OFF. It’s 8:50pm. What a great way to spend three hours! If you
still desperately want your questions answered and I could not get to
you, they are probably addressed in my book “The Memory
Illusion”… or you can Tweet me your question @drjuliashaw or
email me through my website www.drjuliashaw.com Over and out, Julia I
also encourage you to take a peek my last AMA favourites post, because I
have probably already answered some of your questions!:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/how-false-memory-changes-what-happened-yesterday/
Hi Reddit! I really enjoyed my last AMA and I’ve come back for another
to coincide with the publication of my book The Memory Illusion on June
16th. You can watch a trailer about it here:
https://youtu.be/72dhjGWB0gg I study how we can create incredibly
detailed memories of things that never actually happened. In particular,
I implant rich false memories of committing crime with police contact
and other highly emotional autobiographical events. I thought I’d share
my work with the community since I’m an avid Redditor. The technique I
use in my research is essentially a combination of what’s called
“mis-information” (telling people convincingly that something happened
that didn’t) and an imagination exercise which makes a participant
picture the event happening. The goal is to get my participants to
confuse their imagination with their memory. I find, as do many other
scientists who study memory, that it is often surprisingly easy to
implant memories. All of my participants are healthy young adults, and
in my last study 70% of them were classified as having formed these
full false memories of crime by the end of the study. I am currently
working on further research and analysis to see whether I can replicate
this, since this success rate was incredibly high. Last year some of
this research, which I did with Stephen Porter at UBC, went viral. It
was so amazing to see such a great reaction from the press and public.
There really seems to be a thirst for wanting to understand our faulty
memories. You can see my favourite write up of the research here. In
“Memory Hackers,” a NOVA documentary that aired on PBS, you can
actually see some real footage from the videos that I made during the
interviews, which you can see here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfPLTtlo2oY My book, The Memory
Illusion, is the first popular science book of its kind, and I’m super
excited about it! If you find my research interesting you’ll definitely
like the book. The book will be released in 12 languages over the next
year (English, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Taiwanese, Chinese,
Japanese, Turkish, Russian, Czech, and Serbian). I’ve put a couple of
links below. The eagle-eyed of you should spot a few Reddit references
throughout my book when you read it, along with some Easter eggs,
including my favourite Kurt Vonnegut quote (very) hidden in the text!
UK: http://bit.ly/MemoryIllusion US: http://bit.ly/MemoryIllusionUS
English language version internationally: http://bit.ly/TMIinternational
If you want to know more about me and my science, and get free access to
all the research I have published to date, go here:
http://www.drjuliashaw.com/ Read my Scientific American contributions
(almost all of which focus on memory errors) here:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/search/?q=julia+shaw Follow me on
Twitter: @drjuliashaw Proof Julia