What is your first memory? A vacation at the beach, a mishap with a little friend or brother, a story your mother told you at night? Well, be suspicious, because a new study, whose conclusions have been published in the journal Psychological Science, suggests that there are serious possibilities that it is false.
First of all, we must determine when we begin to store long-term experiences in our brain, and on this there is considerable agreement among experts: before three or three and a half years we are not mature, neurologically, for it.
Well, British researchers from the Universities of the City of London, Bradford and Nottingham Trent have asked 6,641 people what was their oldest memory and at what point in their life it happened and they have obtained this amazing result: 38.6% of the interviewees assured that it went back to when they were two years old or earlier. 893 of these volunteers even said that they were able to remember experiences they had when they were months old or had just turned one, something totally impossible.
They have also found that the phenomenon of fictitious memories occurs more frequently among middle-aged or elderly people.
The experts made it clear that the memory had to be genuine, that they could not be based on photographs or family stories, so the responses, in principle, were sincere. If they are not lying, why is this happening?
The issue of false memories has been extensively investigated by psychologists such as Elisabeth Loftus, from the University of California at Irvine, who has shown through various experiments that they can be seeded with the proper techniques of suggestion. Loftus and his team, for example, managed to make the volunteers believe that they had been lost as children in a shopping center. And it is also known that each time we recover an experience, it is modified based on our current experiences. There are no “virginal” memories.
The invented stroller
In the present case, the British researchers conjecture, individuals who believe they recall experiences from when they were babies mix fragments of early experiences with the data they have obtained through photos or family conversations.
“Details can be unconsciously inferred or added. For example, the person was wearing diapers and had stood up in the crib. These mental representations, similar to episodic memory, can be perceived as authentic and taken simply as memories , a phenomenon particularly linked to childhood ”, explains Shazia Akhtar, researcher at the University of Bradford and first author of the study.
A typical example, indicate those responsible for the work, are memories related to a baby carriage. Someone surely said to the person experiencing it: “your mother had a green stroller.” So this guy imagines what he looks like. Later, the fragments are converted into memory, to which details are added, such as that the cart had a rattle hanging on it.
The false memory is served.
More information: “Fictional first memories”. Shazia Akhtar, Lucy V. Justice, Catriona M. Morrison, Martin A. Conway. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618778831.
