The growing science of memory manipulation
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
In fact we don't have to imagine, I believe I've been subjected to "mass gaslighting" on multiple occasions recently on the internet : some piece of information I'm sure I saw on the internet suddenly completely disappears. Google + Facebook + "right to be forgotten" type of policy, make for a very dangerous power never experienced before by humanity.
paraphrased from "The Invisible Gorilla: and other ways our intuition deceives us" (Chabris and Simons)
At least 4 other projects I know of configured their USB-C the same exact incorrect way. Three of them absolutely swear that a Google search gave an online application note that told them to do this, but they can't find it anymore--it presumably got yanked as soon as the RPi error came to light and then dropped off the Google rankings. POOF Gone.
Alternatively, something like WebSatchel [1]. I have no experience with it, so can't tell you if it's any good, or whether there's other software that does a similar thing.
[0] https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360001513491-Save...
For example, see the research of Elizabeth Loftus:
The really interesting part is that you can create a false memory for someone even while telling them that you are doing it.
That they have the power...
>It's not a bad thing if we can change Putin or the Saudi Head Looneys memory and behavior.
LOL, if only the problem with gaslighters was just Putin or the Saudi Head Looneys...
How about your own government, mass media, big corporations, and so on?
If you’d sell memory tampering devices, are you sure that most of them would be used against someone other instead of on buyers themselves?
What if we had special devices that could sneakily push preferences or suggestions to unaware person? It would be a very dangerous tech! (Oh, nevermind, I use one of them to write this comment)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYRVMeAwVKk
"Don't fuck with your brain pal!"
Ed: oops, removed e from heroin
Since we are on a metaphorical treadmill where the vast majority of our wages are used on rivalrous goods like real estate or education the end result will be that people will work harder then alter their memories to continue beyond their breaking point. A 20 hour workday is no big deal because the company provides you with free memory alteration at the end of the work day. It doesn't matter that you slept at the office because you remember being at your nice single family home in the suburbs and sleeping for 8 hours.
Ironically, I don't remember if this was in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (which Blade Runner was loosely based on), but even if it's not, it's a very common theme in Philip K Dick's work.
A similar thing happens in Total Recall, which was also loosely based on PKD's We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, where memories of the protagonist's family and prevois life have been implanted. In this case, the protagonist does not rely on photographs, as he has a wife in the present, but (spoiler) it turns out she's not really his wife.
Oliver Sacks is also worth reading on these themes, as he tells of many real-life cases of people misremembering, misrecognizing, and disbelieving things most everyone else takes for granted, from faces to family to their own body parts to language.
Done. Memories are notoriously unreliable and you shouldn’t treat as ultimate source of truth.
The right to be forgotten is a right, as the name suggests.
It always existed, if I want to be fogotten IRL I can, why shouldn't it be possible online?
What's the difference between deleting my social timeline and burning my pictures or my diary?
One of my favourite books is "The Late Mattia Pascal" (Il fu Mattia Pascal) from Luigi Pirandello, it was written in 1904 and it's the story of a man who's unhappy and one day discovers that his wife and mother in law found a body and declared it to be his own, so he becomes officialy a dead person.
He takes advantage of the fact to escape his true identity and create a new one, settling in Rome, far from were he was born.
The story is fascinating and a masterpiece about what's really "identity", how we all wear masks and how we all are different (sometimes very) people depending on who you ask.
If I want my picture gone from the high school yearbook, nobody will help me track down every copy and mask the image.
If I want the local grocery cashier not to greet me by name, I can’t make them forget me.
You can go to another grocery store.
It's your right.
Sometimes solutions are simple.
Rest assured that in a few months nobody will remember you at the old store.
> If I want my picture gone from the high school yearbook
AFAIK right to be forgotten, at least in EU, is the right to request that search engines do not display information about an individual that is factually incorrect, obsolete.... it has nothing to do with deleting actual information.
The right to be forgotten (or to oblivion) is just the right to have your private informations deleted and the guarantee that what you delete online is really deleted and nobody can recover it.
It's not the right to be removed from other's people memory.
>The right to be forgotten (or to oblivion) is just the right to have your private informations deleted and the guarantee that what you delete online is really deleted and nobody can recover it.
You say "this" and then written something completely different to what I wrote.
As I said, AFAIK the right to be forgotten doesn't give you the right to delete any information. It just gives you the right to remove some information from appearing in search engines.
An example I remember that happened in Netherlands is of a doctor that lost her medical license. When you searched her name, the first result was an article on some news site that she lost her license.
On appeal she got it back and using the right to be forgotten she removed that news article from search results. The article is still there on that news site it just doesn't appear in search results when you search her name.
Sorry, probably lost in translation.
I never said you have the right to delete any information, just you private informations and any data you own and you ask the controller to delete.
I don't know if you are aware that in EU for EU citizens we have the GDPR legislation.
Let's cite the law, Article 17, GDPR legislation
> Art. 17 GDPR
> Right to erasure (‘right to be forgotten’)
> The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller the erasure
> of personal data concerning him or her without undue delay and the controller
> shall have the obligation to erase personal data without undue delay
https://gdpr.eu/article-17-right-to-be-forgotten/
In particular, the controller has the right to retain your personal data (including the data you posted publicly) until you consent to it, if you revoke the consent, you can ask to stop the processing (art. 18) and delete everything they have about you.
If you comment on a social network, for example, that comment identifies you, because it is linked to your username, it has metadata attached to it, it can be used to track you, it is considered personal data, you can ask for removal.
Unless there is a (very) valid reason, the controller has to comply and delete every copy of the data, including backups (and soft deleted data that's still there).
Contrast burning your photos with burning all copies of a book. On the internet, a lot of things exist in the gray area between them.
That makes it difficult to judge if the info that was is private or public.
Unless I want to delete what's mine.
I have no obligation of leaving it there for others to read.
> Contrast burning your photos with burning all copies of a book
That's a very wrong comparison.
You burn many copies of a single book
While I defend the right of deleting a single copy of the private work of a single human
Just like a painter has the right to destroy their own paintings.
it's already happened before
it is a right and it is unalienable
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/blu-destroys-bologna-stree...
For almost two decades now I believed that "Total Recall" was mostly science fiction, that almost none of it will happen in real life anytime soon. Looks like I was wrong. [1] Philip K. Dick was a genius, with Paul Verhoeven not too far behind.
My favorite line in the film was actually a clever aside, when Quaid is being solicited by one of the mutant clairvoyants with an offer to tell him his future, his sardonic rejoinder is, "how about the past?".
Stanislaw Lem, the great Polish sci-fi author of works like Solaris, called Western sci-fi "A Hopeless Case with exceptions" - one of the very very few exceptions was Philip K. Dick. There's also a nice essay on Philip K. Dick specifically. [1], [2]
[1] https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm [2] http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?253191
I consider Ubik PKD's greatest and most accessible work. It's a really quick, easy read. Do yourself a favor and pick it up now!
We've been doing it for a while with drugs. Some of them can cause a temporary loss of your short term memory.
It's a really bizarre sensation. You suddenly lose the ability to comprehend the chronology of recent events and can make no connection between real events and your own memory. There is no "now", you only have memories, and because you lost the causal link, you can't tell the difference between an authentic memory and your own imagination. I can only imagine how terrifying it would be to live like that constantly.
I'm not aware of any evidence that we can believe our own memories. Memory is much like eyesight. There is a very complex process going on to give you the illusion of a clear and consistent picture that is at odds with what the messy and biological process we rely on can actually achieve.
The basic problem is that people don't by and large scientifically assess their memories for accuracy, so they are reliant on other people alerting them to problems. The feedback process there doesn't encourage correctness, it encourages conformance.
Now the memory being inaccurate to start with does not make manipulating that already inaccurate memory "ok". There's no question about that. Though having said that, it's important to note that because memories are so malleable and inaccurate, we've actually been manipulating them for a long time. It's actually a pretty well researched area.
I mean, this is not really new.
It is also bad to ignore the evidence that memories are unreliable with or without memory manipulation.
We can acknowledge the weakness without using it as justification.
I doubt myself, but I still see the need to make decisions. Most people, faced with my caveats, allow that they can be wrong as well, and we decide things. But the problem cases are without any doubt - my caveats only prove their correctness. If presented with convincing evidence of their fault, they move on to the next thing and never learn that 100% confidence is overconfidence.
I don't know that my lack of trust in my memories makes me more vulnerable to such people or if they only react to facing others as immovable as themselves, with everyone else being indistinguishable speed bumps.
But wouldn't any practice of assessing one's own memories intermediately depend on memory faculties? I can quickly think of two dependencies:
1. Working memory (maybe this is tangential and not really on topic for long-term memory) 2. Semantic memories required to assess the legitimacy of a memory. E.g. if we were to shoot for "scientific assessments" like you said, then said assessment would rely on memories that allow for scientific assessment. I'm no scientist and don't know quite what such "scientific assessment" would look like in practice, but if you have an assessment framework you're deliberately working within, it seems like you'd have to at least have semantic memory/existing knowledge of that same framework.
Perhaps manipulation of episodic memory doesn't clearly pose such problems, but I expect that's neither here nor there.
I came across some ancient IRC logs just yesterday that let me look back at a situation I thought I remembered. Turns out I did not remember it.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-09-memory-gameeach-recal...
More powerful than personal memory, though, might be common knowledge. As they said at Epsilon Theory (using Harvey Weinstein as an example),
Even if everyone in the world believes a certain piece of private information, no one will alter their behavior. Behavior changes ONLY when we believe that everyone else believes the information.
You think mouse scent memory being tampered with is more dangerous than mass nuclear weaponry or bio-engineered pathogens?
And do you know what she says? “We’ve only ever had three.”
It’s been many months now, maybe a year, and there’s still only three, but hand to god, I’m going to find that fourth bowl.
I still can’t get a straight answer out of her why she’s so certain there were only ever three when she was just as certain there were only ever two until confronted with the physical reality of three bowls.
Now she thinks this is about being right, but I insist it isn’t. It’s the unsettling idea that my memory isn’t correct.
I may just have to let this one go... :-)
There were only three available at the fair. You would normally only buy bowls in a set of four. However, as you mention, you really like this particular style. Perhaps you liked it so much that you made an exception in this case and bought the three because that was the maximum available. But then you lost the third, and so the memories you were triangulating from were "there are two in the cupboard," "that's not the full set," and "four is a full set."
Now onto your spouse's memory. They remembered two at first, because they were triangulating between "we normally buy four," "there are fewer than four of these," and "we always buy an even number." Confronted with the existence of a third, the other memory, "there are fewer than four" remains in effect.
There once was kind of nasty piece on Laurene Jobs, with lots of authentic-seeming detail. It's been completely gone for years now. Maybe this comment too will discover where it went.
Happen to find a third pot that went missing and place it back on the stand? Next time you remember the incident with the keys, the pottery prop pulled out is the one involving 3 pots. So you clearly remember finding your keys between three plots.
Well what about the old memory? You pull up the memory of a memory, but each memory is generated with props and there is a chance you end up remembering your original memory had 3 pots as well.
The more trivial the detail, the more likely you'll only keep around the most recent prop only and thus have a false memory. There is a lot of psychological research into people watching cars driving where the psychologist then falsify memories of the vehicles (something that is never called out as being worth remembering at the start of the experiment). It works decently well in adults. It works horrifyingly well in kids.
I highly recommend the book, but that story in general. As with most of his stories, he takes a premise that seems generic on it's face and twists it in ways that you wouldn't expect.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...
That does not seem like a good way to live.
Imagine "not trusting your memory" tomorrow morning, and refusing to recognize your bedroom, your spouse, your kids, family, your house, car, coworkers etc.
Seems like one would go insane, quickly. So yeah, I guess you do need to trust your memory - but judiciously.
Really made me realize how untrustworthy even the most vivid memories are.
As I child I regularly heard the debates on various talk shows (I watched alot of TV). What was happening was that child psychologists were effectively implanting memories into these children. I found that idea fascinating.
At some point I came up with a game that I would play on the bus ride home from school. There was an undeveloped, partially wooded lot that the bus passed by every day. People would leave things there, especially kids. But the important thing is that week-to-week and even day-to-day the lot would change. Kids might build a fort; somebody might leave or take away some trash; the neighbor might cut the grass or clear some dead wood. The game consisted of 1) noticing something that had changed and 2) inventing something that changed. The next day I would try to pick, before passing the lot, which was the real change and which was the one I invented, and then confirm as I passed.
I very quickly realized how incredibly easy it was to create false memories. Even though I was the one deliberately picking the false memories, I regularly fooled myself. In fact, I got really good at fooling myself. If you visualize an imagined scene and mentally interact with it--imagine walking through it, imagine fake relationships between elements--then for all intents & purposes your memory of it will be little different than if you had been looking at and interacting with something real. Even more scary, I learned that I could consistently misremember things; that is, for a good fake memory I'd consistently pick it day-after-day, even though each prior day I would have realized it was the fake one.
Another thing I learned with my game is that memories are largely about associations, especially plausible associations. We filter particular memories by how well they fit together and how well they comport with the larger narrative. (Which is I think why visualizations are so powerful, as they make it easy to create many elements that fit well together.) If a memory doesn't fit into other memories, like you rationally know you couldn't possibly have been somewhere on some particular day, we tend to discard it. For innocuous memories (e.g. maybe some thought of doing something at the time, but which you didn't actually perform) we filter these out almost imperceptibly. OTOH, sometimes it's difficult to rule out memories, particular innocuous ones, which is why we misremember small stuff so often.
One small thing I've avoided ever since then is looking at photographs. I've found that the mere act of looking at a photograph can almost instantly replace your own memory of an event. That doesn't mean my original memory was any more truthful. But the original is often imbued with certain emotional artifacts that, in my experience, can get washed away by the visual fidelity of a photograph.
More than 30+ years of psychology research proved that the brain reconstruct any memories as it needed to. One sample amongs thhousands : https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/acp.1390
There are 83,000 more researches on the subject https://scholar.google.fr/scholar?q=memories+creation+photos... So prepare to be scare if you think you need it, as there is nothing more volatile than human memmories (including yours ;)
You mean this movie?
https://www.reddit.com/r/MandelaEffect/comments/55f5rt/the_s...
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sinbad-movie-shazaam/
https://news.avclub.com/sinbad-created-a-fake-version-of-tha...
Personally, I think it happened because Sinbad regularly wore windbreakers and parachute pants, the name Sinbad sounds stereotypically Arabic, and perhaps because of his darker skin and pan-ethnic features. When I stumbled onto the meme I never once thought I remembered such a movie, but I instantly understood why people would think that way.
As a society we frequently start with with consent as a cornerstone of whether something is ethical or not (if it's done to you against your will, it's bad). Then we decide whether there are certain lines you shouldn't cross because the result would be harmful for you or society. For instance, you can drink as much alcohol as you want but at a certain point you can't get into a car afterwards, because you might kill or maim someone else. And you can take out a loan, but there's usually a cap on how much interest the lender can charge because above a certain level you'd ruin yourself financially.
So we'll probably say you can alter your memories, but are there lines which shouldn't be crossed?
I could also see the severely mentally ill or mentally handicapped, having no personal say in what happens to them and similar to today when it comes to medication being used.
To some extent. For instance, I know of no country that allows you to drive while intoxicated (modulo varying minimums) while having enough car and population density for such driving to be a problem.
You're probably thinking of China and their laxer approach towards human genetic research. But that's arguably just having lines that shall not be crossed and staying on the good side of them; US and Europe seem to have decided instead to ban the whole field.
I know there are people out there that can benefit from this, but it’s too dangerous to exist.
We can’t wait for this technology to be abused, we need regulations and International treaties way ahead of time.
What if someone WANTED a memory implanted of raping someone, so they could get off to it? The consensual BDSM sphere is huge. Obviously pedophilic false memories would be outlawed immediately, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't exist.
What if someone wanted to self-identify as a robot, or a sex slave, or just plain simple property. Could they have elective surgery for blank-memory-removal to assist with their transition?
Say we went nope, full blanket-banning of the technology as a whole, it's just too legally messy to allow. What if someone has experienced severe emotional trauma from real-life events, and needs them dulled or removed to function in society? It instantly becomes a politically-charged pro-life/pro-choice ticket issue that gets carted out every time the government wants to make some noise.
What if someone is the victim of such a procedure (done illegally) - is it okay to have some governmental arm "anti-hack" their brain.
Also, <insert the whole plot of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind>. Also, <insert plots of various Ghost In the Shell TV series>.
If the technology ever genuinely bears fruit, then only two things are certain to happen: it will be used illegally, and it will be used by governments in secret. Sometimes both of these at once :-)
But the association with the foot shock was real to the second mouse as well.
This seems quite different from the type of memory that is described afterwards.
This is worlds apart from an adult saying, spontaneously and without any brainwashing from the police, that they were abused by a specific person.
I have a couple of my false memories myself, and these feel very real (but still false). What prevents few of metoo public-induced cases to be alike?
A few years ago a friend an I were having dinner at a restaurant. The waiter came by to serve water, and as he was filling our glasses, he would raise the pitcher up very high above the glass while saying to himself, "Easy, Franciso... Eeeasy!" It was funny.
Except that's not what happened at all. What really happened was that we were there at dinner when my friend told me the story of some other time he had a waiter that did just that. He must have described it to me in sufficient detail for me to form the mental image and merge it with our dinner that night.
A couple years later, I start telling this story as if I had been there, to a group of people that included my friend from that night. That's when I learned that it was a false memory.
It was disorienting to say the least. As soon as this was pointed out to me, I did remember the real conversation and him telling me.
That, for me, is one of the main ethical issues. No matter in which society you live, a very large part of its identity is derived from memory and/or common history. If you can manipulate that, you can manipulate society. And we already have so many subconscious levers pushing our perception of self (social media for one), we shouldn't have another one.
There is vast literature about how this identity is partially built on collective false myths and the desire to collectively forget inconvenient facts. Our public identities are largely defined by our willingless to tell white lies to each other.
"Forgetfulness, and I would even say historical error, are essential in the creation of a nation."
What I found particularly interesting is that it elicits a consideration of what is memory. Is the association of stimulus-response a 'memory'? (Where does that leave 'instinct'?)
One could argue that the experiment has created an artificial 'instinct' and not 'memory' given that there was no 'experience'. If one were to counter that the invasive (modifying) preparatory steps of the experiment are "the experience", then we have discarded the 'body' entirely and are in the realm of brains in vat conception of 'consciousness', since we are asserting that direct manipulation of brain is functionally equivalent to 'phenomena' as experienced through the mediation of the body, the sensory apparatus, and the nervous system.
At the current level of understanding, it is pretty clear that if we could send the correct signals we control on the optic nerve, we would be causing the brain to have an experience to the same extent that the retina does. I don't think we know enough yet to go further than the optic nerve and say that we could induce a signal 'after' the optic nerve and produce the exact same effect,but that is still plausible. The next level of manipulation would be to induce signals into the brain as if they are coming from the visual processing area without directly stimulating the visual processing center at all - this is far further into the future, if it is even possible.
There's a new wave of interesting work regarding inducing patterns of activity in the cortex using spatially precise two-photon excitation methods (two-photon holography). This paper does a relatively good job in controlling for the behavior of the animals in the study and shows that recalling patterns of activity can reliably reproduce a learned behavior based on the pattern of activity (and also probes at some aspects of general computations in the cortex): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6711485/
You don't remember the faces of all the people you meet on the way to work, even though they usually are the same people everyday.
Using animals in research is generally inaccurate.
For example, I know that some of my memories are not original. They are memories of me previously remembering something, which I was able to remember clearly at the time, but can’t recall as clearly now. But my memory of the experience of remembering it and the circumstances in which I did so are quite clear. So I know some of my memories are reconstructions.
It seems unlikely there are many nonhuman animals capable of making that sort of distinction.
Cetaceans are officially recognized as conscious beings.
What separates humans from animals is not a sharp edge, but something more like a smooth gradient.
>Just because an animal can't tell the difference between the real and artificial memory does not mean a human couldn't do the same.
These animals seem to uncritically follow the artificially stimulated behaviour as though it was 'real' or original to them. It seems a reasonable suggestion that, perhaps, a human would be able to distinguish it from an original memory.
Are you suggesting that is wrong? If so sure, explain why.
It seems to me these objections are merely intellectual nit-pick points scoring, devoid of any actual critical or analytical point that I can discern.
It's just so tedious.
'people are animals too'
Genius! Now how about making an actual point?
Are you suggesting that is wrong? If so sure, explain why.”””
What you describe is behaviour I observe in humans. I wonder if I demonstrate such behaviour, and how I might find out. To the extent that I am self-critical it has been by observing that other people are not.
When I was a teenager I was interested in the occult, and had several experiences which seemed totally real at the time, but which I can only explain now as self-hypnosis — while my accidental Philosophy A-level taught me not to believe everything in the New Age section of the bookstore, my mother continued to believe that Bach flower remedies could help her memory right up until she forgot what those “remedies” are because of encroaching Alzheimer’s.
My earliest childhood memories are 2/3rds dreams and I only found out by asking my relatives about things which occurred within them, not by introspection.
And then Brexit, where… well I can say with high probability that half the country believes the other half is out of touch with reality, and vice-versa, but all the online arguments seem to show each side accusing the other of uncritically parroting cliches.
Which also makes it easier to rationalize the fake memory as real!
It doesn't seem that unlikely to me. We've no way of telling if the mice in this experiment know the memory is untrustworthy, but avoid the smell anyway just in case
Well, humans have proven time and again not to be able to do the same, in other circumstances of fake memories...
In the same way, we can't tell humans can do it without testing the hypothesis first.
If animals can, probably we can, if animals can't, it's possible that we can't as well.
On the same (wrong) line of thinking we can't say humans can walk because some of them can't.
Not all birds fly as well...
besides, some animals are better than others for testing purpose.
Mice are well known for having a great memory, testing mice for memory makes sense.
Recent studies proved that mice memory cells work on experiences and not on places, just like ours.
"Oh man why does this Speak French download takes an entire 3 hours!?!?"
Why do you presume that governments are the only ones with an incentive to do so?
They stimulated an olfactory sensory nerve. That causes a real memory of an artificial sensation. They also stimulated the VTA, causing the mouse to learn that the stimuli is bad.
The mouse will not have any memory it can "look back on" of receiving a shock. It will just have a general feeling that the scent is "bad" and to be avoided.
Now that it's being called a science perhaps the layperson can get better metrics and telemetry on how it's already being performed by big actors at scale.
See more in Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_erasure
The methods of "drug-induced amnesia, selective memory suppression, destruction of neurons, interruption of memory, reconsolidation,[1] and the disruption of specific molecular mechanism" are not necessarily as great comapred to what was done in the article where optogenetics is referenced as the method of creating memories.
The current methods being used to attempt at deleting memories have resulted in consequences and typically considered extremely dangerous because of the inaccuracy of the methods. Making me skeptical if it's not just damage to the brain.
https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-01...