The Rhetoric of False Memories
How are collective false memories created and what does that mean for our future?
August 14, 1947. One historic night, infinite realities. And with it, infinitely different memories. Jaspreet, travelling on a blood-strewn train from his birthplace to a far-off land he will call home for the rest of his life remembers it as the day he got separated from his family. Sultana remembers it as the day her community got a nation to call their own. Hema reading copious amounts of women’s stories from the partition remembers it as the dark day when horrendous rapes were committed in the name of communal riots. Satwanti and Mir remember it as the day nationwide mob violence, slaughter and communal massacre broke out. Gandhian supporters remember it as the day communal tension got the better out of the Hindustani population.
There are multiple realities that reside in each passing moment and our personal, social, cultural, communal identities and experiences continue to shape them indefinitely. When reality itself doesn’t grant us the luxury of a single cohesive narrative, how can memory? Our ever-so-fascinating brain makes a choice every time it chooses to remember something the way it does. While some of these are conscious choices, some unconscious.
How are memories created?
Humans store memories in three basic steps, encoding, storing and retrieving. First, the stimuli is processed with the help of something called sensory memory, this information typically stays in the brain for less than a second. Next, the information is transferred to the short-term memory or working memory, which allows someone to mull things over and hold key information in their mind. An individual memory — a network of neurons in the brain — is stored in a physical location called an ‘engram’ or ‘memory trace’. Finally, memories of past events and patterns are consolidated in the long-term memory, also known as episodic or semantic memory. At the time of consolidation, the memory trace is transferred from temporary sites such as the hippocampus to permanent storage sites in the prefrontal cortex.
Which is why, even when there are countless living realities we experience each day, we are able to retain only some of them. Think about those embarrassing childhood memories that you remember very distinctly. You remember the expression on your face, the expression on their face. The things you said, the things you did and the things they said or did. Funny thing is you can’t remember what you had for lunch last Tuesday. This is because something as trivial as our daily meals only makes it to our short-term memory and is never consolidated into the long-term cortex. But some events, typically associated with extreme emotions, are encrypted to remain with us for a long, long time.
Contrary to popular images of memory storage as a hallway of neatly compartmentalised boxes, our memory is stored in a web-like format, like a labyrinth of profoundly interconnected networks. A framework known as ‘schema’ is responsible for storing similar memories in nearby locations.
For example, recent studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (measuring brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow) have shown that the memory traces of similar words lie in close proximity to each other.
Memories are malleable, not reliable.
While it may seem like ‘recalling’ a memory strengthens it, the truth is when we remember something, we don’t wind our minds back to a moment in time and relive that exact moment. We re-construct it. We piece it back together to a narrative by connecting the disparate bits of information that exist in our brain. The neurons composing the memory trace are re-activated leading to new connections being formed between different neurons, adding in all the information we have learned since the event took place. Once this new circuitry becomes normal, the memory is re-consolidated in our brain (Aeon).
In simpler words, memories are often morphed by time and our own experiences to replace the initial interpretation of events. Ergo, memories aren’t as reliable as we perceive them to be. Haven’t you ever been in a situation where you are 100% positive that a certain thing happened even though it didn’t?
People don’t generally like it when you start challenging the accuracy of their memories but our brains are wired in a way that it tries its best to fill in the gaps as we remember something, even with fabricated facts and experiences — something known as confabulation. And that’s precisely how false memories are created.
Collective false memories are a thing.
What is even more fascinating is that a study also confirms that shared memory traces are consolidated in similar patterns from one individual to the next. In simpler words, our brains might be taking in and storing information from a stimuli in a similar pattern.
This could possibly explain the collective misremembering phenomenon. Known as the “Mandela Effect,” the theory was named after the odd phenomenon of people swearing they remember Nelson Mandela died in the 1980s in the prison whereas in reality, they died in 2013.
There have been various instances which prove the existence of the Mandela effect. Let’s take the case of the Shazaam mystery. Various Redditors remember watching this 90s children’s film called Shazaam, starring comedian Sinbad as a genie with great detail even though this film categorically never existed. Sinbad himself confirmed that he never did a movie called Shazaam but there are hundreds of people online who remember watching it. The only genie film that released that year was called Kazaam and it starred Shaquille O’Neil.
How are collective false memories created?
Psychological researchers suggest various reasons for the creation of this collective false memory, as pointed out by Aeon. For starters, let’s look at the uncanny amount of co-incidences here — twin films with similar concepts releasing at around the same time was common in the 90s; Sinbad released a movie called First Kid that year and his previous movie Houseguest’s poster had an image of his head coming out of a mailbox, resembling a genie coming out of a lamp?; Sinbad’s bald head and goatee oddly resemble a genie’s get-up and lastly, probably the most decisive one, Sinbad also dressed up like a genie for a movie marathon he hosted in the 90s. Remember memories related to similar words/events are stored close to each other? While similar associations lay the groundwork for the creation of a false memory, consider factors like confabulation and the fact that we often store information in a similar pattern. Lo and behold, collective false memory created!
However, a Vox article points out how the presence of a forum like Reddit where people can discuss (read: confirm) their versions of false memories also makes people believe in the memory. Citing research from Elizabeth Loftus (a pioneer in research of false memory creation), Vox says that powerful visual representation makes it much harder for people to drive false memories out of their mind. In a quiz doctored by William Saletan that presented readers with a mix of photos from real events and fabricated images of public events that never happened, 50% of participants remembered the event depicted in the false photo. What’s more is that, further research proved that people were more likely to remember a faked photo that favoured their political worldview.
Now let’s apply what we just learnt to the present day and time. To the world of social media.
It will be interesting here to note how memory and false memory can be used as a rhetorical tool in a number of ways. It can be a visual cue like Trump using the background of the Oval Office in his latest speech on the immigration issue. An Oval Office address has been used for gravely important announcements in the past like Bush’s reaction on the 9/11 attacks or Nixon’s resignation. Trump using the same backdrop not only projects a position of power but also creates a much more lasting impact on the audience’s mind without them realising it. And this is the first Oval Office address by Trump, so it is less likely to be ignored by the American audience.
It can also be false claims playing on suggestibility like the one about Nehru having Muslim ancestry. This Sourabh Dwivedi video shows how women at a BJP electoral rally in Madhya Pradesh said that they know, for a fact, that Nehru’s father was originally named Moinuddin and he changed it to Motilal later. What is the source of their information, you ask? Webpages like Wikipedia and Quora, which can easily be edited/manipulated by users to propagate any kind of claims. Let’s understand what exactly happened here.
In the month of July 2015, certain edits were made to Nehru’s Wikipedia page from an IP address that belonged to the state-run National Informatics Centre (NIC), as reported by Hindustan Times. The edits claimed that Nehru’s grandfather Gangadhar Nehru was a Muslim. Even though these edits were removed within minutes, what followed was a huge barrage of Rediff and Quora entries claiming all kinds of distorted facts about Nehru. Even websites like “The Truth of Nehru Family” and “Jawaharlal Nehru: The Playboy” which came up as top hits for searching ‘Nehru’ on Google.
Even on March 11, 2019, a Google search for ‘Nehru Muslim’ shows the top entry to be such:
It is important to understand here that our memory of how history took its place comes from reading and consuming a lot of literature/cinema/reportage on any important event. And when a false fact is repeated over and over again, from different sources, with vivid details, it becomes a part of that same semantic memory which stores the rest of the facts. They become things that we just know, things we just remember, things for which we don’t need to justify our sources.
And the problems we face in the recent future are even more complex. With artificial intelligence-based human image synthesis techniques like deepfake (Combining and superimposing existing images and videos onto source images or videos) consistently reaching new heights, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between a digitally doctored video and a real one. Consider this Obama video.
Now imagine if somebody doctors a false video of Sinbad actually starring in a genie movie called Shazaam. The Shazaam truthers won’t even take a second to believe its credibility. And in a world where our political leaders lash out false, misleading and dubious pieces of information every other day — since assuming office, Trump has made more than 9000 false claims since he joined office, that makes 15 lies every day — the creation of collective false memories seems like a definite reality.
For example, here’s Trump’s outrageous statement over the 9/11 attacks:
There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations. They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down. I know it might be not politically correct for you to talk about it, but there were people cheering as that building came down — as those buildings came down.
There isn’t one bit of truth to this statement. But what if Trump supplants this with a fake video where the Muslim population is cheering the WTC collapse. There is a huge possibility that a person who watches the video and listens to Trump’s speech without putting much brain into it, remembers it later as something that happened. And the chances for an Islamophobic person to believe this are exponentially more! Dystopian much?
The collapse of objective reality
With the abundance of engineered evidence, reportage that confirms our biases, propaganda and hyperbolic news continuously tampering with our memories, what really can we believe in? What can we trust? And this is hardly the end. What about things like Virtual Reality whose main objective is to create a comprehensive illusion of being in another place and another time? Completely transporting you into another world, VR makes us see what we would have seen and feel what we would have felt. Studies are already showing that customers’ choices can easily be manipulated after they come back to the physical world from a VR experience.
As The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer put it,
We’ll shortly live in a world where our eyes routinely deceive us. Put differently, we’re not so far from the collapse of reality.
While research is still on, what we can only hope for is a better future where enough awareness is spread about the creation of false memories and false realities that humans begin to spot such differences. Maybe a separate industry will set up which develops algorithms to distinguish false realities from real ones. Maybe the media will do its original job of reporting what is true and providing its audience of information that is credible. Who knows? Is that even possible? Or maybe we will end up in an Information Apocalypse disbelieving everything.
Bibliography
Aamodt, Caitlin. On shared false memories: what lies behind the Mandela effect. Aeon, Knowing Neurons, February 15, 2017.
Buzzfeed, You won’t believe what Obama says in this video. Twitter, April 17, 2018.
Chen, Janice, et al. Shared Memories Reveal Shared Structure in Neural Activity across Individuals, Nature Neuroscicence, 2017.
Franklin Foer. The Era of Fake Video Begins. The Atlantic, May, 2018.
Glenday, James. Donald Trump’s prime-time TV speech had a different tone but the same overarching message. ABC Net, January 9, 2019
How Memory Works, Psychology Today https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/memory
Huth, Alexander G, et al. Natural speech reveals the semantic maps that tile human cerebral cortex, Nature, 2016.
In 773 days, President Trump has made 9,014 false or misleading claims, The Washington Post, March 3, 2019.
Jasinski, James. Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Studies. Sage Publications, Print, 2001.
Official PeeingHuman, Nehru & Fake News ft. BJP. Perf. Saurabh Dwivedi. YouTube. N.p., 17 Nov. 2018. Web.
Resnick, Brian. False memories can form very easily. This Sinbad movie saga proves it. Vox, December 26, 2016.
Resnick, Brian. We’re underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video. Vox, July 24, 2018.
Saha, Abhishek. Truth about Nehru: Why conspiracy theorists are wrong about him. Hindustan Times, July 9, 2015.
Serial gaffes put Modi on back foot. Hindustan Times, November 11, 2013.
Warzel, Charlie. He Predicted The 2016 Fake News Crisis. Now He’s Worried About An Information Apocalypse. Buzzfeed News, February 11, 2018.
