Many of us have already seen the movie Inception and might have been shaken with its fantastic plot. Planting nonexistent memories into someone's brain, that sounds great, isn't it? Yet scientific evidence in memory shows that it can be real in some certain circumstances.
Researchers found that using suggestive memory techniques can strongly encourage people to recall memories, even creating memories that they might have never really experienced. In one study, researchers using different verbs like "contacted", "collided", and "smashed" to describe the same video of a car accident to different people letting them estimate the car's speed. And the more severe the word researchers use to describe the accident, the higher speed the participants tend to estimate, even the video of this accident is exactly the same. 
In another study, researchers asked participants questions that contain misinformation-- in this case, they suggested that there's a stop sign while actually there's not-- about some details in a car accident video tape. Participants who had been asked such misleading questions generally had some false memories about the detail, which is their memory of a stop sign, while those participants who didn't receive such information mostly recalled the exactly sign correctly. 
According to scientific theory, this can be due to misinformation effect, which is the creation of fictitious memories by providing misleading information about an event after it takes place. Evidence also shows that memories that are more acceptable by our rational reasoning are more easily to be planted in. For instance, having experienced a hot-balloon trip with family members in childhood is more rationally acceptable than experiencing physics professor dancing in a Golden Gopher custom, thus is much more easily to be planted. It seems that what the movie shows can be real in life if the planning is elaborate enough, but that will associate with ethical issues and there'll be long lasting debates to go.
liux1445: October 2011 Archives
It's a quite frequent idea that people would share similar experiences when they underwent situations where they "almost" died. We've seen such episodes in a bunch of films, and even learned some story of near-death experiences from family members or even ourselves. The world suddenly seemed static, and a life review of all the memorable times when we spent with the ones we loved, as well as a light through a dark tunnel came to our mind step by step.
According to the textbook, near-death experience (NDE) is an out-of-body experience reported by people who've nearly died or thought they were going to die. Giving a few illustrations about NDEs differ across persons and cultures as well as other facets, the authors generally alleges that those claims are extraordinary but without extraordinary claims. And though they didn't show absolute words denying NDEs and souls, readers can easily feel their contempt toward such phenomenon through some insufficient refutations and their fondness of materialistic theories even when both of them have little evidence.
And that behavior of belief perseverance can be a problem, especially making their critical thinking not as "critical" as they think they do. Before college, I've watched an online course of
Here's a story my father told me. When he was on voyage to Antarctic as one of the crew before I was born, one night he suddenly woke with tears in his eyes. He dreamed that his grandpa, who brought him up when he was little, died and came to see him the last time. As the communication in China was not that convenient more than twenty years before, he simply marked the time when he dreamed of his grandpa. Finally when he came back, he asked his mother how his grandfather was, she told him that his grandpa had died for a long time. And when he checked the time his grandpa died, it is exactly the same day when his grandpa came into his dream and said good bye to him. You may say that this is anecdotal, or say that it's just a father who wants to show mystic toward his son, or you may refer this as just a coincidence. If you do, then you're not a scientist because you evade from things that you can't explain and deceive yourselves instead of facing them. And science should be not only all about finding the truth, but also introspect ourselves, eliminate flaws in thinking, to better serve this process.
And here comes the question: Is "unfalsifiable" meaning something is not able to be real? Any cautious readers of the book will tell that unfalsifiable only means that they are not in the Science realm and we thus are not going to examine them because they're not already part of science. But, if something is shown real even though their nature lets them not replicable or falsifiable so far, will our scientists largely ignore them and refer them to either invalid anecdotes or metaphysical realm that science will not pay attention to kind of deceiving ourselves? Science is not a government department, which is only responsible for this part or that part. It's supposed to examine everything that does exist and try to find "why and how". If anyone insists the border between science and religion, we who know a little world history will tell them that initially everything is of religion before science appears. After all, before we gradually accumulate former experiences and methods, how can whether the sun surrounds the earth or vice versa be testable?
It's just personal idea. Hope that they're not that wrong.
