Getting lost on walk down memory lane

I clearly recall falling off a horse when I was about five or six. I remember that I was slightly concussed and I made a complete recovery, although the experience gave me a fear of horse riding forever -- probably no bad thing in light of the dangers of riding accidents.

Hang on a minute though! This never happened because my sister told me it didn't and my mother, cousin and aunt also confirmed that this was fanciful.

Memories for events that have happened during our lives are known as autobiographical memories. These are crucial in giving us a sense of identity, a sense of who we are and of the history that has helped shape our personalities and made us the people we now are.

The general public has always believed that memory is akin to a cine camera -- events are replayed exactly as they occurred and are immune to distortion except in unusual circumstances (such as when a person has dementia, is intoxicated or deliberately distorts it for some gain).

The passage of time, it is also accepted, can alter memories.

Controversy

In the early 1990s a phenomenon known as false memory syndrome (FMS) was identified. It was based on stories of individuals credibly describing events that never in fact happened. This created a huge controversy at the time since the events described mainly related to hitherto forgotten memories of child sexual abuse being recovered during therapy.

The public feared that those who had been sexually abused would not be believed and people guilty of heinous crimes would walk free. Many found it difficult to accept that people could make up such accusations and insisted that suggestions of false memories were a plot to discredit helpless victims.

Although FMS didn't have an explicit name before that, it had been recognised for some considerable time that memory was unreliable.

A study published two weeks ago in the journal 'Psychological Sciences', authored by cognitive psychologist Giuliana Mazzoni and colleagues from the University of Hull, has yet again confirmed that memories can unknowingly be fabricated and recalled with certainty until their falsehood is confirmed by others.

Called Nonbelieved Memories, the study involved interviewing 1,600 university students. The researchers asked if they could recall memories for events that they now knew never happened and one-fifth answered positively.

The events reportedly occurred between the ages of four to eight. They only realised the truth when they were disabused of these by trusted others or simply realised that they were completely implausible, as did one person who previously recalled flying unaided.

Santa Claus

Other examples include a boy recalling he was a hockey player even though his parents said he never played the game, while another claimed to have seen Santa Claus descending the chimney. The investigators in this study point out that had these 'memories' not been challenged they would still be part of that person's biographical experience.

Instances of false memory are not new. Most famously, Jean Piaget, the world-renowned developmental psychologist, claimed to remember being kidnapped at the age of two when he was in the park with his nurse. He even recalled the scratch marks on her face as she fought off the attackers. Some 13 years later she admitted fabricating the story and he recounted that even after he knew the story to be untrue he still experienced images of the event.

A researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, Professor Gisili Gujjonson, has drawn attention to the danger of implanting memories of having committed crimes during the police interrogation process. He describes this as "memory distrust syndrome", where the individual is unsure if he truly recalls an event as having taken place or whether he has been told so frequently that he believes the story is true.

Mazzoni herself has conducted previous studies, in 2004, in which memories for events that never took place were implanted in the minds of individuals with a success rate of 25pc.

What are the implications of such findings? Clearly, identifying a memory as false, when it has been part of the personal narrative for many years, must surely be frightening and likely to prompt questions such as who am I really? Or what is fact and what is fiction in my life?

When allegations are made about events, the veracity of which is challenged by others, there are serious legal implications. The possibility of false confessions, based on memory distrust, is another source of concern. Sometimes there may be no way of distinguishing truth from fabrication and lives may be forever damaged.

What Mazzoni's recent study shows is that we need to be more vigilant than ever when life-changing events are recalled without external collaboration. False memories might be more common than we hitherto realised.

- Patricia Casey