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TOP TIPS TO BOOST
YOUR MEMORY Can I trust my
memories?
Get active Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus exposed false memories
Exercising after learning will help facts
stick. For best results, wait several in historic sex abuse cases. Now there are fresh reasons
hours before working out. not to believe your own memories, she tells Clare Wilson
Quiz yourself
When it comes to revision, reviewing O ONE has done more than Elizabeth Loftus true events from their childhood, and a
the material isn’t enough. You need to to expose the fallibility of human memory. completely made-up experience about how
test yourself repeatedly too. N In the 1990s, amid growing panic over they got lost in a shopping mall, frightened,
claims of satanic child sex abuse rings, the crying, and were ultimately rescued by an
Take a break psychologist showed how easy it is for people elderly person and reunited with the family.
After they’d had about three interviews, we
to develop false memories of events that never
You’ll remember more if you take regular happened. All it took was repeatedly being found that about a quarter of these adults fell
breathers from learning. For best results, asked to imagine them. At the time, this was a prey to the suggestion and developed a partial
do something totally different and common psychotherapy technique to recover or complete memory of being lost.
absorbing. supposedly repressed memories.
Over the past three decades, Loftus, from Why was that discovery important?
Timing matters the University of California, Irvine, has At the time, people were going into therapy with
become well known for her work as an expert
depression or an eating disorder and coming
Teenagers remember better if they witness in legal cases. Her ongoing research on out with an even bigger problem, namely
learn in the afternoon or evening, while the fallibility of eyewitness testimony has memories of traumatic experiences that they
older adults tend to have morning brains. taken on fresh importance in an era of fake thought they had repressed.
news, the Me Too movement and digital image Their therapists weren’t deliberately
Try interval training manipulation. planting false memories. They believed that
child abuse was the most likely explanation
There’s a “sweet spot” for when you Why did you first start looking into false for their client’s problems, and they needed
should revise. Revisit material at a point memories? to recover the memory to get better. Innocent
10 or 20 per cent of the way between I had already been looking at how reliable people were getting accused and families were
the time of learning and of taking a test eyewitness testimony was, to see if people’s being destroyed.
to improve your memory by at least memories of the details of an event could be
10 per cent. distorted. Like if the guy running away had What was the reaction?
curly hair, not straight hair. But in t he 1990s, I started getting hate mail and death threats.
Sleep on it when there was an explosion of highly There was a letter-writing campaign to try to
improbable satanic child abuse claims, it
get me fired from my university position.
Snoozing shortly after learning new looked like people were developing whole I also got sued for exposing an egregious case
facts or skills helps the brain reinforce memories for things that didn’t happen. of wrongful accusation. I spent many years
its memory traces – especially if you We came up with the idea of trying to make fighting off that litigation. These days things
have a test the next day. people remember an event that never have calmed down quite a bit but there’s still
happened – being lost in a shopping mall some hostility.
Chew gum when they were young. The Me Too movement has led to a surge
It can help with recall during a test. How did you do it? in historic claims of sexual assaults. Do you
However, the effects are short-lived, We told people we were doing studies of think some of these could be based on false
so save your chewing for when you childhood memory, and we talked to their memories?
need it most. parents to get some stories. Then we would It is possible. We have to accept that when
Kate Douglas interview adults and present them with three there are two people whose versions of an
36 | NewScientist | 27 October 2018
