Of Course I Remember!

Chapter 7 focuses solely on the construction, recollection, and deterioration of human memory, along with the many complications involved in each stage. What most interested me, then, was the "development" of implanted and impossible memories by individuals. Implanted memories, or memories of an event that subjects were told had happened but never had, had been studied by the Loftus's "lost in the mall study". The obvious distress with this experiment and its outcomes is that there is a strong potential that many individuals, including ones in our class, have memories of events that had never happened to them, but had perhaps been implanted by a person or media entity. What's more, the Wade experiment on impossible memories proves that some fifty percent of individuals recall false memories about an even after seeing a photoshopped picture of themselves in a hot air balloon as a child. In both cases and both studies, neither of the events had happened but a mere mention or picture was able to persuade people that it had occurred and pushed their brains to develop a false memory for it.

Now, I find this interesting for two reasons: the first is that I'm a pretty big fan of Dr. Who and these phenomenon occur throughout the show, along with some of the other memory complications outlined in the chapter, but my second reason is that these two events shed even more light on one of my favorite novels, 1984. Both implanted and impossible memories play a key role in Orwell's dystopian society through doctored magazines, photographs; basically anything Winston is told to do, and it's pretty awesome to see exactly the basis for Orwell's ideas in our psychology book. It makes psychology easier and more enjoyable to learn, I think, when the content is applied outside of the psychiatrists' offices and school counselors, and in our own personal media favorites.