• Question: Can the brain create a false reality when you are in a certain situation?

    Asked by natashareyn to Ben, James, Jen, Michael, Susanna on 11 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Jen Todd Jones

      Jen Todd Jones answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      Perhaps not create a false reality, but the brain is certainly capable of producing false memories. When we remember something we don’t take a snapshot picture of each moment, we remember all of the parts of a situation like where we were, who was there, and what was said separately. When we remember that situation we pull all of these details together to reconstruct the memory, specifically *reconstructMATOMO_URL It’s this process that can break down and means we don’t necessarily remember things totally correctly, they can get muddled up being memories.

      Watch Clip 1 on this website for an example of how our memory can be incorrect and we can add in new false facts http://onlineclassroom.tv/psychology/catalogue/psychology_critical_issues/eyewitness_testimony#header

    • Photo: Susanna Martin

      Susanna Martin answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      I find this a really interesting area of psychology, especially as research has shown that you can trick people into generating false memories. For instance one psychologist showed participants lots of photos from the participants child hood and asked them to talk about events, eg a picture of them riding a bike. He also put in a fake picture of them in a hot air balloon. To begin with the participants denied being in a balloon, but after a few weeks and their family telling them they had been in the balloon the participants started to ‘remember’ and even when the experiment had finished some of the participants believed that they had been in a hot air balloon!

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