In 1988, shocking memories of childhood sexual and even satanic ritual abuse began to sweep America. Buried and forgotten for many years, these seemingly repressed memories were finally dredged up by adults under the encouragement, guidance, and leading questions of a controversial psychotherapeutic technique known as "recovered memory therapy." The book that started the movement was written by two authors, one a poet and the other a childhood incest victim, neither with training or background in psychotherapy, medicine, experimental psychology, memory research, or other specific qualifications. Yet at its peak, recovered memory therapy had become a common practice among psychotherapists.
False memories. There was a major problem, however: many of these recovered memories were false. Far from being buried and then recovered they were actually implanted, by therapists, unhappy patients desperate for relief, and the expectations and over-active imaginations of both. Thousands of otherwise ordinary families were torn apart by false yet strongly believed accusations that incestuous and even mind-boggling satanic ritual abuse had taken place long ago. Many patients were made unhappier by this process rather than happier. Who wouldn't be made less happy by traumatic stories masquerading as memories implanted in the mind? The resulting likely alienation from parents and family often compounded the patients' difficulties.
Traumatic memories can indeed sometimes be repressed, forgotten, and sometimes later recalled. Yet false memories can also be implanted and made to seem real. The creation of a false memory is an important and unfortunate event: a "battle for the mind" has been fought... and lost.
Understanding memory implantation. That false memories can be implanted and then sincerely remembered may seem surprising compared to facts like that some things (e.g. landscapes) are more likely forgotten than others (e.g. faces). No one knows more about implanting memories than National Academy of Sciences member Elizabeth Loftus, of the University of California, Irvine. Loftus's early research looked at the malleability of memories of vehicular collisions. Working together, she and J. Palmer showed people a film clip of a vehicular collision. They then asked some people how fast the cars were going when they "smashed," and others when they "hit." One week later they were re-interviewed. Asked if broken glass was present, the results were dramatic. "Smashed" subjects were significantly more likely to remember seeing broken glass than "hit" subjects. Yet as Loftus and Palmer state, "There was no broken glass in the accident."
Numerous experiments deepened and extended the findings. In one test, a third of eye witnesses remembered an experimental "perpetrator" from a lineup which in fact did not include the perpetrator. In a similar test, this time falsely told that the perpetrator was in the lineup, witnesses remembered someone incorrectly over three fourths of the time. Battle for the mind: willingly lost.
In another experiment, Loftus & colleagues persuaded 18% of people that even an event they themselves considered implausible - witnessing demonic possession as a child - probably happened to them personally. That, of course, is different from actually remembering such an event. Yet in a later study, 16% of people tested were induced to remember shaking hands with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. Yet Bugs Bunny is not even a Disney character! The silly wabbit is owned by Warner Bros. and does not live in Disneyland. Harmless fun? Perhaps with cartoon characters. But things can get scarier. The obvious extensions to engineering false eyewitness testimony in court, manipulating jurors, and political machinations are worrying.
Overzealous and unprincipled prosecutors are bad enough, but history shows that political partisans can say anything, do anything to manipulate. The Chinese government systematically attempted to alter memories of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre on a society-wide scale. Tools included doctoring photographs and inducing people to recount false versions to others that blamed the protesters. The power of this technique relies on the well-known capability of social pressure to modify memory. Could memory manipulation happen in America and other free countries? Vocal and wily political partisans will stop at nothing, as any aware citizen knows. If they could alter society's memories to suit their purposes they would; if they can they will. You may wish to care, because "to accept a false reality as truth...is the very essence of madness."
Hypnosis and hallucination. As a teenager I found an old book on hypnosis in the attic. Part overhype about its strange and awesome powers and part hands-on how-to, I was soon experimenting with a friend, who turned out to be a good hypnotic subject. Let's call him "Will." We lost touch decades ago but, concerning implanted memories, Will surely remembers this one. Under hypnosis I informed him that, upon awakening, there would be a mouse - a friendly mouse which would hang around him, visible and unafraid. When he woke up from the hypnotic trance, sure enough, there was the mouse. Of course I explained why the mouse was there, which he was fine with. Why not pick the mouse up, I asked later by phone. It will have a white stomach. Furthermore, its stomach will have an image of a rhinocerous on it, outlined in black hairs. Will picked up the mouse and reported that indeed it did have a white stomach with the black outline of a rhinocerous. Note that the stomach coloration and the rhinocerous were mentioned later, when he was wide awake and not under hypnosis at all. Regardless, there those characteristics were, implanted for Will to see and doubtless remember to this day.
Many people have memories not arising from objective reality. These memories can be vivid. Will's rhimouserous is one example. Such memories can arise from dreams and nightmares; hallucinations caused by psychoactive drugs like LSD, Salvia divinorum, etc.; psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia and severe mania; mystical visions; and hypnotic suggestions. Often, these memories are judged to be real by the people who have them. In my case, a hypnotically induced hallucination occurred accidentally during high school class. Eyes glazed over as so often happened during lectures (and not just in high school), a hazy fog descended, probably caused by retinal fatigue at least in part. The teacher then uttered a sentence containing the phrase, "write this" of which I remember only those two words. My hypnotized mind took the phrase literally, and the word "this" progressively inscribed itself in glowing, graceful cursive within the gray haze. I wakened in surprise. The hallucination disappeared immediately but the memory this imagined event implanted remains to this day.
It can happen to anyone. Leading memory expert Loftus herself was told by an uncle that she, at the tender age of 14, was the one to tragically discover her mother drowned in a swimming pool. The awful memory returned...and then the uncle admitted lying and "relatives confirmed that her aunt ...had found the body." Battle for an expert's mind - lost. The flesh of the toughest soldier is no more resistant than yours, and minds can resist - or not - analogously.
False memories and the future. How effective will memory implantation get? As the future unfolds, will fake memories of vacations to Mars be mass marketed commercially, as in "We Can Remember it for You Wholesale," the Philip K. Dick story which became the motion picture thriller Total Recall? Will propagandists in politics and advertising revise our personal histories for us? Will psychotherapists do it for our own good, for example implanting memories of getting sick from ice cream to improve our nutrition and reduce obesity, as proved possible by Loftus? With our blessings? Will electronic chips containing "memories" of learning difficult subjects - foreign languages, history (revised or not), business and legal cases (actual or instructive but fictional), technical, mathematical, and so on, be implanted in our skulls or "merely" piped into our brains via ultrasonic, transcranial magnetic, or pharmaceutical manipulation? Would you want them to be? What legal restrictions should be placed on memory manipulation? According to Loftus, "Over the next 50 years we will further master the ability to create false memories. [...] The most potent recipes may involve pharmaceuticals that we are on the brink of discovering." When we battle for our minds and memories what counts as a win and what as a loss?
Recommendations. Cleverly and willfully used, advertising has been shown able to modify human memories. By its very nature, advertising will do this to serve the interests of the advertiser, not the interests of those exposed to it. Consider the term 'propaganda': "A concerted set of messages aimed at influencing the opinions or behavior of large numbers of people." Obviously those with power have always known about propaganda and how to use it. Britain's Lord Acton (1834-1902) famously observed, "Power tends to corrupt." As obviously as it applies to politics, this definition also applies to commercial advertising, the purpose of which is typically to separate its targets from some of their money. When the almighty dollar rules, the ethics of memory revision...don't.
To help guard and protect memory, the "insidious" methods and mechanisms of memory modification should be taught in grade school so that people can tell when it is being tried, and can actively resist such mental manipulation. (Those who want to perpetrate memory modification will learn it regardless.) For example, people should know that memories from adolescence are the best targets for beer merchants, and so on. People should also know that memory revisionists "want the consumer to be involved enough [to] process the false information," yet not enough to "notice the discrepancy between the advertising information and their own experience." And people should know that "imagining a childhood event inflates confidence that it occurred." This imagining technique can be used to "recall" memories from infancy, before birth, and even as a sperm or egg cell! If that is not early enough, the same method suffices to recall "memories" from past lives. As Loftus put it, "Memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing."
References
"Battle for the Mind": chapter title quoted from the title of the well-known book by W. Sargant, Battle for the Mind, a Physiology of Conversion and Brainwashing, Doubleday & Company, 1957; Penguin Books, 1961; Malor, 1997.
"In 1988, shocking memories of childhood sexual and even satanic ritual abuse began to sweep America." R. Ofshe and E. Watters, Making Monsters: False Memory, Satanic Cult Abuse, and Sexual Hysteria, University of California Press, 1996. See also False Memory Syndrome Foundation, http://fmsfonline.org.
"That false memories can be implanted and then sincerely remembered may seem surprising compared to facts like that some things (e.g. landscapes) are more likely forgotten than others (e.g. faces)." P. Isola, J. Xiao, A. Torralba and A. Oliva, What makes an image memorable? Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2011, pp. 145-152, http://cvcl.mit.edu/papers/IsolaXiaoTorralbaOliva-PredictingImageMemory-CVPR2011.pdf.
"Loftus's early research looked at the malleability of memories of vehicular collisions." E. F. Loftus and J. C. Palmer, Reconstruction of automobile destruction: an example of the interaction between language and memory, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, vol. 13, pp. 585-589, 1974, https://webfiles.uci.edu/eloftus/LoftusPalmer74.pdf.
"In one test, a third of eye witnesses remembered an experimental "perpetrator" from a lineup which in fact did not include the perpetrator." W. Saletan, Leading the Witness, Slate, 5/26/10, http://www.slate.com/id/2251882/pagenum/all.
"The power of this technique relies on the well-known capability of social pressure to modify memory." M. B. Reysen, The effects of social pressure on false memories, Memory & Cognition, 2007, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 59-65.
"to accept a false reality as truth...is the very essence of madness." R. Frederickson, Repressed Memories, Simon & Schuster, 1992, p. 160.
"relatives confirmed that her aunt ...had found the body." W. Saletan, Leading the Witness, Slate, 5/26/10, http://www.slate.com/id/2251882/pagenum/all.
"We Can Remember it for You Wholesale," P. K. Dick, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1966, and many subsequent collections.
"Will psychotherapists do it for our own good, for example implanting memories of getting sick from ice cream to improve our nutrition and reduce obesity, as proved possible by Loftus?" D. M. Bernstein, C. Laney, E. K. Morris and E. F. Loftus, False beliefs about fattening foods can have healthy consequences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Sept. 27, 2005, vol. 102, No. 39, pp. 13724-13731, http://www.pnas.org/content/102/39/13724.full.pdf.
"Over the next 50 years we will further master the ability to create false memories. [...] The most potent recipes may involve pharmaceuiticals that we are on the brink of discovering." Elizabeth Loftus forecasts the future, NewScientist, Nov. 18, 2006, issue 2578, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19225780.112.
"A concerted set of messages aimed at influencing the opinions of behavior of large numbers of people." en.wiktionary.org/wiki/propaganda.
"To help guard and protect memory, the 'insidious' mechanisms and methods of memory modification should be taught...": K. A. Braun and E. F. Loftus, Advertising's misinformation effect, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 1998, vol. 12, pp. 569-591. https://webfiles.uci.edu/eloftus/BraunLoftusAdvertisingMisinfoACP98.pdf.
"For example, people should know that memories from adolescence are the best targets for beer merchants, and so on." K. A. Braun, R. Ellis and E. F. Loftus, Make my memory: how advertising can change our memories of the past, Psychology & Marketing, Jan. 2002, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 1-23. http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/BraunPsychMarket02.pdf.
"People should also know that memory revisionists 'want the consumer to be involved enough [to] process the false information,' yet not enough to 'notice the discrepancy between the advertising information and their own experience.'" K. A. Braun-LaTour, M. S. LaTour, J. E. Pickrell and E. F. Loftus, How and when advertising can influence memory for consumer experience, Journal of Advertising, Winter 2004, vol. 33, no. 4, pp. 7-25. https://webfiles.uci.edu/eloftus/BraunLaTourPickLoftusJofAd04.pdf.
"And people should know that 'imagining a childhood event inflates confidence that it occurred.'" M. Garry, C. G. Manning and E. F. Loftus, Imagining inflation: imagining a childhood event inflates confidence that it occurred, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1996, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 208-214.
"This imagining technique can be used to "recall" memories even from before birth - even as a sperm or egg cell!" (1) J. Sadgar, Preliminary study of the psychic life of the fetus and the primary germ, Psychoanalytic Review, July 1941, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 333-. (2) L. R. Hubbard, Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health, 1950.
"And if that is not early enough, the same method suffices to recall 'memories' from past lives." (1) International Association of Past Life Therapists, http://www.pastlives.net. (2) I. Stevenson, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, second edition, University of Virginia Press, 1974.
"Memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing." E. F. Loftus and W. H. Calvin, Memory's future, Psychology Today, March-April 2001, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 55-.
False memories. There was a major problem, however: many of these recovered memories were false. Far from being buried and then recovered they were actually implanted, by therapists, unhappy patients desperate for relief, and the expectations and over-active imaginations of both. Thousands of otherwise ordinary families were torn apart by false yet strongly believed accusations that incestuous and even mind-boggling satanic ritual abuse had taken place long ago. Many patients were made unhappier by this process rather than happier. Who wouldn't be made less happy by traumatic stories masquerading as memories implanted in the mind? The resulting likely alienation from parents and family often compounded the patients' difficulties.
Traumatic memories can indeed sometimes be repressed, forgotten, and sometimes later recalled. Yet false memories can also be implanted and made to seem real. The creation of a false memory is an important and unfortunate event: a "battle for the mind" has been fought... and lost.
Understanding memory implantation. That false memories can be implanted and then sincerely remembered may seem surprising compared to facts like that some things (e.g. landscapes) are more likely forgotten than others (e.g. faces). No one knows more about implanting memories than National Academy of Sciences member Elizabeth Loftus, of the University of California, Irvine. Loftus's early research looked at the malleability of memories of vehicular collisions. Working together, she and J. Palmer showed people a film clip of a vehicular collision. They then asked some people how fast the cars were going when they "smashed," and others when they "hit." One week later they were re-interviewed. Asked if broken glass was present, the results were dramatic. "Smashed" subjects were significantly more likely to remember seeing broken glass than "hit" subjects. Yet as Loftus and Palmer state, "There was no broken glass in the accident."
Numerous experiments deepened and extended the findings. In one test, a third of eye witnesses remembered an experimental "perpetrator" from a lineup which in fact did not include the perpetrator. In a similar test, this time falsely told that the perpetrator was in the lineup, witnesses remembered someone incorrectly over three fourths of the time. Battle for the mind: willingly lost.
In another experiment, Loftus & colleagues persuaded 18% of people that even an event they themselves considered implausible - witnessing demonic possession as a child - probably happened to them personally. That, of course, is different from actually remembering such an event. Yet in a later study, 16% of people tested were induced to remember shaking hands with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. Yet Bugs Bunny is not even a Disney character! The silly wabbit is owned by Warner Bros. and does not live in Disneyland. Harmless fun? Perhaps with cartoon characters. But things can get scarier. The obvious extensions to engineering false eyewitness testimony in court, manipulating jurors, and political machinations are worrying.
Overzealous and unprincipled prosecutors are bad enough, but history shows that political partisans can say anything, do anything to manipulate. The Chinese government systematically attempted to alter memories of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre on a society-wide scale. Tools included doctoring photographs and inducing people to recount false versions to others that blamed the protesters. The power of this technique relies on the well-known capability of social pressure to modify memory. Could memory manipulation happen in America and other free countries? Vocal and wily political partisans will stop at nothing, as any aware citizen knows. If they could alter society's memories to suit their purposes they would; if they can they will. You may wish to care, because "to accept a false reality as truth...is the very essence of madness."
Hypnosis and hallucination. As a teenager I found an old book on hypnosis in the attic. Part overhype about its strange and awesome powers and part hands-on how-to, I was soon experimenting with a friend, who turned out to be a good hypnotic subject. Let's call him "Will." We lost touch decades ago but, concerning implanted memories, Will surely remembers this one. Under hypnosis I informed him that, upon awakening, there would be a mouse - a friendly mouse which would hang around him, visible and unafraid. When he woke up from the hypnotic trance, sure enough, there was the mouse. Of course I explained why the mouse was there, which he was fine with. Why not pick the mouse up, I asked later by phone. It will have a white stomach. Furthermore, its stomach will have an image of a rhinocerous on it, outlined in black hairs. Will picked up the mouse and reported that indeed it did have a white stomach with the black outline of a rhinocerous. Note that the stomach coloration and the rhinocerous were mentioned later, when he was wide awake and not under hypnosis at all. Regardless, there those characteristics were, implanted for Will to see and doubtless remember to this day.
Many people have memories not arising from objective reality. These memories can be vivid. Will's rhimouserous is one example. Such memories can arise from dreams and nightmares; hallucinations caused by psychoactive drugs like LSD, Salvia divinorum, etc.; psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia and severe mania; mystical visions; and hypnotic suggestions. Often, these memories are judged to be real by the people who have them. In my case, a hypnotically induced hallucination occurred accidentally during high school class. Eyes glazed over as so often happened during lectures (and not just in high school), a hazy fog descended, probably caused by retinal fatigue at least in part. The teacher then uttered a sentence containing the phrase, "write this" of which I remember only those two words. My hypnotized mind took the phrase literally, and the word "this" progressively inscribed itself in glowing, graceful cursive within the gray haze. I wakened in surprise. The hallucination disappeared immediately but the memory this imagined event implanted remains to this day.
It can happen to anyone. Leading memory expert Loftus herself was told by an uncle that she, at the tender age of 14, was the one to tragically discover her mother drowned in a swimming pool. The awful memory returned...and then the uncle admitted lying and "relatives confirmed that her aunt ...had found the body." Battle for an expert's mind - lost. The flesh of the toughest soldier is no more resistant than yours, and minds can resist - or not - analogously.
False memories and the future. How effective will memory implantation get? As the future unfolds, will fake memories of vacations to Mars be mass marketed commercially, as in "We Can Remember it for You Wholesale," the Philip K. Dick story which became the motion picture thriller Total Recall? Will propagandists in politics and advertising revise our personal histories for us? Will psychotherapists do it for our own good, for example implanting memories of getting sick from ice cream to improve our nutrition and reduce obesity, as proved possible by Loftus? With our blessings? Will electronic chips containing "memories" of learning difficult subjects - foreign languages, history (revised or not), business and legal cases (actual or instructive but fictional), technical, mathematical, and so on, be implanted in our skulls or "merely" piped into our brains via ultrasonic, transcranial magnetic, or pharmaceutical manipulation? Would you want them to be? What legal restrictions should be placed on memory manipulation? According to Loftus, "Over the next 50 years we will further master the ability to create false memories. [...] The most potent recipes may involve pharmaceuticals that we are on the brink of discovering." When we battle for our minds and memories what counts as a win and what as a loss?
Recommendations. Cleverly and willfully used, advertising has been shown able to modify human memories. By its very nature, advertising will do this to serve the interests of the advertiser, not the interests of those exposed to it. Consider the term 'propaganda': "A concerted set of messages aimed at influencing the opinions or behavior of large numbers of people." Obviously those with power have always known about propaganda and how to use it. Britain's Lord Acton (1834-1902) famously observed, "Power tends to corrupt." As obviously as it applies to politics, this definition also applies to commercial advertising, the purpose of which is typically to separate its targets from some of their money. When the almighty dollar rules, the ethics of memory revision...don't.
To help guard and protect memory, the "insidious" methods and mechanisms of memory modification should be taught in grade school so that people can tell when it is being tried, and can actively resist such mental manipulation. (Those who want to perpetrate memory modification will learn it regardless.) For example, people should know that memories from adolescence are the best targets for beer merchants, and so on. People should also know that memory revisionists "want the consumer to be involved enough [to] process the false information," yet not enough to "notice the discrepancy between the advertising information and their own experience." And people should know that "imagining a childhood event inflates confidence that it occurred." This imagining technique can be used to "recall" memories from infancy, before birth, and even as a sperm or egg cell! If that is not early enough, the same method suffices to recall "memories" from past lives. As Loftus put it, "Memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing."
References
"Battle for the Mind": chapter title quoted from the title of the well-known book by W. Sargant, Battle for the Mind, a Physiology of Conversion and Brainwashing, Doubleday & Company, 1957; Penguin Books, 1961; Malor, 1997.
"In 1988, shocking memories of childhood sexual and even satanic ritual abuse began to sweep America." R. Ofshe and E. Watters, Making Monsters: False Memory, Satanic Cult Abuse, and Sexual Hysteria, University of California Press, 1996. See also False Memory Syndrome Foundation, http://fmsfonline.org.
"That false memories can be implanted and then sincerely remembered may seem surprising compared to facts like that some things (e.g. landscapes) are more likely forgotten than others (e.g. faces)." P. Isola, J. Xiao, A. Torralba and A. Oliva, What makes an image memorable? Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2011, pp. 145-152, http://cvcl.mit.edu/papers/IsolaXiaoTorralbaOliva-PredictingImageMemory-CVPR2011.pdf.
"Loftus's early research looked at the malleability of memories of vehicular collisions." E. F. Loftus and J. C. Palmer, Reconstruction of automobile destruction: an example of the interaction between language and memory, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, vol. 13, pp. 585-589, 1974, https://webfiles.uci.edu/eloftus/LoftusPalmer74.pdf.
"In one test, a third of eye witnesses remembered an experimental "perpetrator" from a lineup which in fact did not include the perpetrator." W. Saletan, Leading the Witness, Slate, 5/26/10, http://www.slate.com/id/2251882/pagenum/all.
"The power of this technique relies on the well-known capability of social pressure to modify memory." M. B. Reysen, The effects of social pressure on false memories, Memory & Cognition, 2007, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 59-65.
"to accept a false reality as truth...is the very essence of madness." R. Frederickson, Repressed Memories, Simon & Schuster, 1992, p. 160.
"relatives confirmed that her aunt ...had found the body." W. Saletan, Leading the Witness, Slate, 5/26/10, http://www.slate.com/id/2251882/pagenum/all.
"We Can Remember it for You Wholesale," P. K. Dick, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1966, and many subsequent collections.
"Will psychotherapists do it for our own good, for example implanting memories of getting sick from ice cream to improve our nutrition and reduce obesity, as proved possible by Loftus?" D. M. Bernstein, C. Laney, E. K. Morris and E. F. Loftus, False beliefs about fattening foods can have healthy consequences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Sept. 27, 2005, vol. 102, No. 39, pp. 13724-13731, http://www.pnas.org/content/102/39/13724.full.pdf.
"Over the next 50 years we will further master the ability to create false memories. [...] The most potent recipes may involve pharmaceuiticals that we are on the brink of discovering." Elizabeth Loftus forecasts the future, NewScientist, Nov. 18, 2006, issue 2578, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19225780.112.
"A concerted set of messages aimed at influencing the opinions of behavior of large numbers of people." en.wiktionary.org/wiki/propaganda.
"To help guard and protect memory, the 'insidious' mechanisms and methods of memory modification should be taught...": K. A. Braun and E. F. Loftus, Advertising's misinformation effect, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 1998, vol. 12, pp. 569-591. https://webfiles.uci.edu/eloftus/BraunLoftusAdvertisingMisinfoACP98.pdf.
"For example, people should know that memories from adolescence are the best targets for beer merchants, and so on." K. A. Braun, R. Ellis and E. F. Loftus, Make my memory: how advertising can change our memories of the past, Psychology & Marketing, Jan. 2002, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 1-23. http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/BraunPsychMarket02.pdf.
"People should also know that memory revisionists 'want the consumer to be involved enough [to] process the false information,' yet not enough to 'notice the discrepancy between the advertising information and their own experience.'" K. A. Braun-LaTour, M. S. LaTour, J. E. Pickrell and E. F. Loftus, How and when advertising can influence memory for consumer experience, Journal of Advertising, Winter 2004, vol. 33, no. 4, pp. 7-25. https://webfiles.uci.edu/eloftus/BraunLaTourPickLoftusJofAd04.pdf.
"And people should know that 'imagining a childhood event inflates confidence that it occurred.'" M. Garry, C. G. Manning and E. F. Loftus, Imagining inflation: imagining a childhood event inflates confidence that it occurred, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1996, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 208-214.
"This imagining technique can be used to "recall" memories even from before birth - even as a sperm or egg cell!" (1) J. Sadgar, Preliminary study of the psychic life of the fetus and the primary germ, Psychoanalytic Review, July 1941, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 333-. (2) L. R. Hubbard, Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health, 1950.
"And if that is not early enough, the same method suffices to recall 'memories' from past lives." (1) International Association of Past Life Therapists, http://www.pastlives.net. (2) I. Stevenson, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, second edition, University of Virginia Press, 1974.
"Memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing." E. F. Loftus and W. H. Calvin, Memory's future, Psychology Today, March-April 2001, vol. 34, no. 2, pp. 55-.