Subliminal

words they both had and had not heard. They were asked to identify which were which. For each word they remembered hearing, they were also asked whether it had been uttered by the male or the female speaker. The subjects were pretty accurate in recalling whether the man or woman had said the words they’d actually heard. But to the researchers’ surprise, the subjects almost always also expressed confidence in identifying whether it was the man or the woman who had spoken the words they were wrong about having heard. That is, even when the subjects were remembering a word that had not actually been uttered, their memory of its utterance was vivid and specific. In fact, when told in a postexperiment debriefing that they hadn’t really heard a word they thought they had heard, the subjects frequently refused to believe it. In many cases the experimenters had to replay the videotape of the session to convince them, and even then, some of the subjects, like Jennifer Thompson in Ronald Cotton’s second trial, refused to accept the evidence that they were mistaken—they accused the researchers of switching the tape.

The idea that we can remember events that never happened was a key plot element of the famous Philip K. Dick story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” which begins with a man approaching a company to have the memory of an exciting visit to Mars implanted in his brain. As it turns out, planting simple false memories is not that hard, and requires no high-tech solution like the one Dick envisioned. Memories of events that supposedly happened long ago are particularly easy to implant. You might not be able to convince anyone that they have been to Mars, but if your child’s fantasy is a ride in a hot air balloon, research has shown that it is possible to supply that memory with none of the expense or bother of arranging the actual experience.³¹

In one study scientists recruited twenty subjects who had never been in a hot air balloon, as well as one accompanying family member. Each family member secretly provided the researchers with three photos depicting the subject in the midst of some moderately significant event that occurred when the subject was between four and eight years old. They also provided other shots, which the researchers used to create a bogus photo of the subject in a hot air balloon. The photos, both real and faked, were then presented to the subjects, who were not aware of the ruse. The subjects were asked to recall everything they could about the scene depicted by each photo and were given a few minutes to think about it, if needed. If nothing came to them, they were asked to close their eyes and try to picture themselves as they appeared in the photo. The process was repeated two more times, at intervals of three to seven days. When it was over, half the subjects recalled memories of the balloon trip. Some recounted sensory details of the ride. Said one subject after being told the photo was a phony, “I still feel in my head that I actually was there; I can sort of see images of it….”

False memories and misinformation are so easy to plant that they have been induced in three-month-old infants, gorillas, and even pigeons and rats.³² As humans, we are so prone to false memories that you can sometimes induce one simply by casually telling a person about an incident that didn’t really happen. Over time, that person may “remember” the incident but forget the source of that memory. As a result, he or she will confuse the imagined event with his or her actual past. When psychologists employ this procedure, they are typically successful with between 15 and 50 percent of their subjects. For example, in a recent study, subjects who had actually been to Disneyland were asked to repeatedly read and think about a fake print advertisement for the amusement park.³³ The copy in the fake ad invited the reader to “imagine how you felt when you first saw Bugs Bunny with your own eyes up close…. Your mother pushing you in his direction so you would shake his hand, waiting to capture the moment with a picture. You needed no urging, but somehow the closer you got, the bigger he got…. He doesn’t look that big on TV, you thought…. And it hits you hard. Bugs, the character you idolized on TV, is only several feet away…. Your heart stops but that doesn’t stop your hands from sweating. You wipe them off just before reaching up to grab his hand….” Later, when asked in a questionnaire about their personal memories of Disneyland, more than a quarter of the subjects reported having met Bugs Bunny there. Of those, 62 percent remembered shaking his hand, 46 percent recalled hugging him, and one recalled that he was holding a carrot. It was not possible that such encounters really occurred, because Bugs Bunny is a Warner Brothers property, and Disney inviting Bugs to roam Disneyland is something like the king of Saudi Arabia hosting a Passover Seder.

In other studies people have been led to believe that they had once gotten lost in a shopping mall, been rescued by a lifeguard, survived a vicious animal attack, and been uncomfortably licked on the ear by Pluto.³⁴ They have been made to believe that they once had a finger caught in a mousetrap,³⁵ spilled a punch bowl at a wedding reception,³⁶ and were hospitalized overnight for a high fever.³⁷ But even when memories are entirely fabricated, they are usually based on something true. Kids might be induced into believing they took a ride on a hot air balloon—but the details the child fills in to explain the bogus balloon ride photo percolate from the child’s unconscious, from a body of stored sensory and psychological experiences and the expectations and beliefs that stem from those experiences.

THINK BACK ON your life. What do you remember? When I do that, I find that it is not enough. Of my father, for example, who died more than twenty years ago, my memory holds but meager scraps. Walking with him after his stroke, as he leans for the first time on a cane. Or his glittering eyes and warm smile at one of my then- infrequent visits home. Of my earlier years I recall even less. I remember his younger self beaming with joy at a new Chevrolet and erupting with anger when I threw away his cigarettes. And if I go back still further, trying to remember the earliest days of childhood, I have yet fewer, ever more out-of-focus snapshots: of my father hugging me sometimes, or my mother singing to me while she held me and stroked my hair.

I know, when I shower my children with my usual excess of hugs and kisses, that most of those scenes will not stay with them. They will forget, and for good reason. I would not wish upon them the unforgetting life of a Shereshevsky. But my hugs and kisses do not vanish without a trace. They remain, at least in aggregate, as fond feelings and emotional bonds. I know that my memory of my parents would overflow any tiny vessel formed from merely the concrete episodes that my consciousness recalls, and I hope that the same will be true of my children. Moments in time may be forever forgotten, or viewed through a hazy or distorting lens, yet something of them nonetheless survives within us, permeating our unconscious. From there, they impart to us a rich array of feelings that bubble up when we think about those who were dearest to our hearts—or when we think of others whom we’ve only met, or the exotic and ordinary places we’ve lived in and visited, or the events that shaped us. Though imperfectly, our brains still manage to communicate a coherent picture of our life experience.

In the last chapter we saw how our unconscious takes the incomplete data provided by our senses, fills in what’s missing, and passes the perception to our conscious minds. When we look at a scene we think we are seeing a sharp, well-defined picture, like a photograph, but we really see only a small part of the picture clearly, and our subliminal brains paint in the rest. Our brains use the same trick in memory. If you were designing the system for human memory, you probably would not choose a process that tosses out data wholesale and then, when asked to retrieve it, makes things up. But for the vast majority of us, the method works well, most of the time. Our species would not have survived if that weren’t so. Through evolution, perfection may be abandoned, but sufficiency must be achieved. The lesson that teaches me is to be both humble and grateful. Humble, because any great confidence I feel in any particular memory could well be misplaced; but grateful, both for the memories I retain and the ability to not retain all of them. Conscious memory and perception accomplish their miracles with a heavy reliance on the unconscious. In the chapter that follows, we’ll see that this same two-tier system affects what is most important to us: the way we function in our complex human societies.

CHAPTER 4 The Importance of Being Social The fundamental role of human social character … why Tylenol can mend a broken heart

Strange is our situation here on earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of others.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN