I'm really here to tell you a little bit
about a legal case I'd like to start
this way anyhow a case that I worked on
involving a man named Steve Titus so
Titus was a restaurant manager in the
Seattle Washington area he was engaged
to be married to Gretchen the love of
his life and one night the couple went
out for a romantic restaurant meal and
on the way home they were stopped by the
police see Titus's car sort of resembled
a car that was driven by a man who
earlier in the evening had raped a
female hitchhiker and Titus himself
sorta resembled that rapist so the
police took a photograph of Titus they
put it in a police lineup they showed it
to the rape victim and when she looked
at that photo she said well this one's
the closest the police persisted
eventually Titus is tried but by the
time the rape victim testifies she says
I'm absolutely positive that's the man
I'll never forget that face and Titus
proclaiming his innocence he's convicted
well his family started screaming at the
jury his fiance collapsed on the floor
hysterical Titus is hauled off to jail
he's saying I'm innocent what would you
do at this point
he lost complete faith in the legal
system but he did get the idea to call
up the local newspaper he got the
interest of a journalist who started
investigating and actually found the
real rapist and when this information
was shown to the judge Titus was set
free and that's where this case should
have ended it should have been a
horrible nightmare of a year the
accusation the trial but it was over it
should have ended that way but it didn't
because Titus lost his job he couldn't
get it back lost his fiancee she
couldn't put up with his persistent
anger
lost his savings his reputation and so
he decided to file a lawsuit against the
police and others whom he thought were
responsible for his suffering and that's
when I really started working on this
case trying to figure out how did that
victim go from that one's the closest to
I'm absolutely positive Titus was
consumed with his civil case and just
days before he was to have his day in
court he woke up one morning went into a
coma and died of a stress-related heart
attack at the age of 35 well I was asked
to work on Titus's case because I'm a
psychological scientist I study memory
I've been studying memory for decades
and if I meet somebody on an airplane
and I tell them they ask what do you do
I say I am a psychologist I study memory
they often want to tell me about some
problem they have they can't remember
names lately they they've got a relative
with you know Alzheimer's who keeps
forgetting and I have to stop them and
say I don't study when people forget I
study the opposite when they remember
when they remember things that didn't
happen I study false memories unhappily
Titus is not the only man or person to
be convicted of a crime he didn't do
based on faulty memory in one project in
the United States here over 300
individuals have been identified who've
been convicted of crimes they didn't do
DNA testing has been done and now
revealed they're actually innocent these
innocent convicted people spent 15 20
years in prison collectively over 4,000
years and when their cases have been
analyzed 3/4 of them are due to faulty
eyewitness memory based on somebody's
faulty memory these innocent
and their extended family suffered
greatly some of them were even freed
from death row like the jurors who
convicted these innocent people and
convicted Titus many people believe that
memory works kind of like a recording
device you record an event in the mind
and then you use that information when
you need to identify images or answer
questions you just replay it but decades
of work and psychology has shown that it
doesn't work this way memory is
something we actually recreate it works
a little bit more like a Wikipedia page
you can go in there and change it but so
can other people in my studies that look
at this malleable memory I started off
by showing people films of crimes and
accidents and then studying how they
remembered these experiences in one of
my early studies we showed people films
of accidents and afterwards asked people
about how fast the cars were going in
the accident some of our witnesses were
asked how fast were the cars going when
they hit each other others were asked
how fast were the cars going when they
smashed into each other and we found
that people's said the cars were going
faster if you use the leading question
the word smashed moreover if we came
back later on and said did you see any
broken glass we found that if we had
asked the smash question people were
more likely to tell us they saw a broken
glass when there was no broken glass at
all in another early study we showed
people a film of an accident where a car
went through a stop sign and by asking a
single leading question that insinuated
it was a yield sign we got lots of
people to believe and remember they saw
a yield sign at the intersection not a
stop sign now now you might be saying to
yourself well you know these are filmed
events they're not particularly
stressful
maybe something what different would
happen with real crimes and accidents
but in a study that we published earlier
this year we did expose people to a
really stressful experience you see what
these what was unusual about this study
is that the subjects were members of our
military who were undergoing survival
school training they were learning what
it's going to be like if they're ever
captured as prisoners of war and as part
of this survival training they
experienced a very aggressive hostile
physically abusive interrogation it
lasts for 30 minutes afterwards some of
these soldiers are exposed to suggestive
information to try to distort their
memory of the person who conducted that
awful interrogation and we found that we
could get lots and lots of these trained
soldiers to misidentify
the person who conducted that
interrogation often identifying somebody
who didn't even remotely resemble the
real perpetrator and so what these
studies are showing is that
misinformation that becomes available
after some event is over can contaminate
somebody's memory and out there in the
real world misinformation is everywhere
we pick up misinformation not only when
we are questioned in a suggestive manner
but if we talk to other people about
some event we might have both
experienced or if we are exposed to
media coverage about the event
all of these provide the opportunity for
misinformation to distort or contaminate
somebody's memory in the 1990s we began
to see an altogether more extreme form
of memory problem some people patients
were going into therapy maybe they had
one problem like anxiety or depression
and they
coming out of therapy with a different
problem horrible memories of sexual
abuse sometimes involving satanic
rituals and utterly bizarre elements one
woman remembered being forced into
satanic rituals being impregnated having
a baby cut from her belly although there
was no physical evidence or any other
evidence that would have confirmed her
story and as I began looking in these
men at these many many cases like this I
asked myself you know where do these
bizarre memories come from and one of
the things I noticed is these
individuals had often been frequently
mostly been in psychotherapy and so
maybe some of the procedures that were
going on in some therapy offices were
leading people to develop these memories
like guided imagination or sexualized
dream interpretation sometimes hypnosis
sometimes just exposing people to false
information were these leading these
patients to create these utterly bizarre
unconfirmed and often even contradicted
memories and I and other researchers
devised some experimental studies
modeled after some of the procedures
that were used in the therapy that we
were worried about to see if we could
plant these rich false memories now if
you want to do this kind of research you
do need to first appeal to a university
research ethics committee there they're
not about to let you go out there and
plant memories that Daddy
you know satanically abused you and I
wouldn't want to do anything that would
would harm these experimental volunteers
so we needed an analogue something that
would have been at least mildly
traumatic if it actually had happened to
the person when they were a child and
eventually I came up with the idea why
don't we try to get people to believe
and remember
when they were five or six years old
they were lost in a shopping mall they
were frightened crying and ultimately
rescued by an elderly person and
reunited with the family and after a few
suggestive interviews we convinced about
a quarter of our subjects to develop a
complete or partial false memory about
being lost in the mall the critics
complained about this study you know
getting lost is so common can you can't
you show that you can do this with you
know plant something that would be a
little more unusual bizarre upsetting if
it had happened well other researchers
jumped into the to make their
contributions and so in a study done in
Tennessee researchers convinced people
that when they were a kid they nearly
drowned and had to be rescued by a
lifeguard succeeding with about a third
of their subjects and in a study done in
Canada
researchers convinced their subjects
that something as awful as being
attacked by a vicious animal had
happened in their childhood succeeding
with about half of their subjects and in
a study done in Italy researchers
planted a false memory that you
witnessed demonic possession as a child
and so these studies are showing that
you can plant these very very rich false
memories in the minds of people and I
then began to publish scores of articles
to speak out forcefully about this
problem with suggestive psychotherapy
and to my surprise this produced
problems for me I started getting all
kinds of you know hostile letters people
wrote to the you know chair of my
department the governor of a state
trying to get me fired from my job but
the worst was a woman I suspected a
woman a mother was innocent of sexual
abuse that was being claimed by her now
grown daughter the daughter supposedly
you know recovered repressed memory
recovered her memory of her mother's
sexually abusing her I investigated this
case because I got suspicious about it
and it was being used to supposed proof
of the new proof of repressed memory and
when I investigated I became convinced
of the mother's innocence I published an
expose about the case I never named the
family but the daughter then filed a
lawsuit against me for defamation and
invasion of privacy and I went through
five nearly five years of fighting this
lawsuit
finally the litigation ended I then
could finally get back to my work but I
did become in the process a part of a
growing disturbing trend in the United
States where scientists are being sued
for speaking out about matters of great
public controversy well I did get back
to my work
and the question I then asked is this if
I plant a false memory in your mind does
it have repercussions does it affect
your later thoughts your later
intentions your later behaviors the
first study that we did planted a false
memory that you got sick eating a
particular food hard-boiled eggs or dill
pickles strawberry ice cream and we
found people then didn't want to eat the
foods as much at an outdoor picnic we
could also do the opposite we could plan
a warm fuzzy memory about a healthy food
we did that with asparagus and we found
people wanted to eat more asparagus and
so what these studies are showing is
that you can plant a false memory in the
minds of people and it can influence
their behavior behavior that occurs
often long after the false memory has
taken hold and with this ability to
plant false memories and control
people's behaviors obviously comes a
number of ethical dilemmas for
first and foremost when should we use
this mind technology and should we ever
ban its use therapists can't ethically
plant false memories in the minds of
their patients even when it would be for
the patient's own good would increase
health or happiness but there's nothing
to stop a parent from trying out these
techniques with their obese or
overweight teenager or older child and
when I suggested this publicly the
critics were back again screaming that
you know big bad person here now she's
advocating that parent's lie to their
children hello Santa Claus well another
way to think about this is you know
which would you rather have a kid with
obesity diabetes shortened lifespan
health problems all the things that go
with that or a kid with a little extra
bit of false memory I know what I would
choose for a kid of mine but maybe I
feel this way because my work has made
me different from other people other
people cherish their memories know that
they represent who they are their
identity where they came from where
they're going and I feel that way too
but my maybe I'm less troubled by
inserting health-promoting
therapeutic falsehoods into memory
because I know how much fiction is
already there if I've learned anything
from these decades of doing this
scientific work it's this just because
somebody tells you something with
confidence just because they tell it
with a lot of detail just because they
express it with a lot of emotion doesn't
mean that it really happened
we can't reliably discriminate true
memories from false ones we need
independent corroboration such a
discovery has made me more tolerant of
the everyday memory mistakes that my
friends and family members are
around me sometimes make such a
discovery might have saved Steve Titus
the man whose whole future was snatched
away by a false memory and in the
meantime I think that we as a society
would do well to keep in mind something
that Titus learned the hard way namely
that memory like liberty is a fragile
thing thank you thank you