Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Well, it doesn’t happen all the time, but I think what may be happening is it’s a partial match to something that we have, and it’s not enough to trigger that sense of… that ability to pull together all the pieces. But it’s a close enough match to give you that intense sense of familiarity, without the recollection of exactly what happened when. But it’s also a spatio-temporal familiarity. So, it’s also in time. There’s a weird blending of time that happens, and we’ll probably talk about time because I think that’s a really interesting idea how time relates to memory. But you also kind of… Artificial memory brings to mind this idea of false memories that comes in all kinds of contexts. But how do false memories form? Well, I like to say there’s no such thing as true or false memories. It’s like Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols, he had a saying that’s like, “I don’t believe in false memories any more than I believe in false songs.” And so the basic idea is that we have these memories that reflect bits and pieces of what happened, as well as our inferences and theories. So, I’m a scientist and I collect data, but I use theories to make sense of that data. And so, a memory is kind of a mix of all these things. Where memories can go off the deep end and become what we would call conventionally as false memories are sometimes little distortions where we filled in the blanks, the gaps in our memory, based on things that we know, but don’t actually correspond to what happened. So, if I were to tell you that a story about this person who’s worried that they have cancer or something like that, and then they see a doctor and the doctor says, “Well, things are very much like you would’ve expected or what you were afraid of,” or something. When people remember that, they’ll often remember, “Well, the doctor told the patient that he had cancer.” Even if that wasn’t in the story because they’re infusing meaning into that story. So, that’s a minor distortion. But what happens is that sometimes things can really get out of hand where people have trouble telling the difference between things that they’ve imagined versus things that happen. But also, as I told you, the act of remembering can change the memory. And so what happens then is you can actually be exposed to some misinformation. And so Elizabeth Loftus was a real pioneer in this work, and there’s lots of other work that’s been done since. But basically, it’s like if you remember some event, and then I tell you something about the event, later on, when you remember the event, you might remember some original information from the event as well as some information about what I told you. And sometimes, if you’re not able to tell the difference, that information that I told you gets mixed into the story that you had originally. So, now I give you some more misinformation or you’re exposed to some more information somewhere else, and eventually your memory becomes totally detached from what happened. And so sometimes you can have cases where people… This is very rare, but you can do it in lab too, or a significant… not everybody, but a chunk of people will fall for this, where you can give people misinformation about an event that never took place. And as they keep trying to remember that event more and more, what happens is they start to imagine, they start to pull up things from other experiences they’ve had, and eventually they can stitch together a vivid memory of something that never happened because they’re not remembering an event that happened. They’re remembering the act of trying to remember what happened, and basically putting it together into the wrong story.…

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