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Comment by stevev | Hacker News Reader

IMO the test subjects are not recalling false memories; they are generating what they believe to have occurred and this is different.

The event is non-meaningful so the brain doesn’t record/file every detail about the experience; this of course would be different per individual.

Shocking the individual or tying an emotional response to the event may make it meaningful but probably won’t translate to the brain on its importance.

We are creatures of habit and instinct and if a human was to be trained on the importance of letter/pattern order recognition from an early age, they would most be more effective than a person who has ruled out the importance of such an experience or event.

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> IMO the test subjects are not recalling false memories; they are generating what they believe to have occurred and this is different.

From the paper:

“To rule out that these errors reflect a perceptual error that has directly been encoded into STM, we test whether illusory responses increase over time: If the illusions are simply the result of misperceptions, their frequency of occurrence should remain the same over the time-course of STM—since in all cases initial perceptual inference has been completed. Therefore, if the number of reported illusions increases as the retention interval increases, this is best explained by memory-related processes taking place during the retention interval, so during STM storage itself, and not in the perceptual or encoding process.”

So, it seems their memories are right more often just after seeing the stimulus than a short time later (100ms or 1s, if I scanned the paper correctly).

My guess would be that the unconscious brain discards uninteresting data very quickly even if the conscious brain attends to that data.

“Generating what they believe to have occurred” sounds like another way of saying “false memory”. What am I missing?

I'm not a neurologist but...I think it's a three (or more) step process. The basic version:

- Store it.

- Sitting in storage

- Recall it.

With each subject to imperfections. For example, recall doesn't find something in storage so it "fills in the blanks".

The mind is not a machine. It's got plenty of quirks.

it's very much a machine though, just happens to be the most complex one we know of, so far!

and considering that it's got pretty great manufacturing precision, tolerances, and MTBF :)

No clearer. Are you saying that when recall “fills in the blanks” that’s not false memories? What can “false memories” possibly mean if not that?

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