![]() In one, for example, the investigators spoke with the subjects about the Sept. ![]() Ultimately, 20 subjects qualified for the HSAM group and another 38 went into the ordinary-memory category. Both groups were then tested for their ability to resist developing false memories during a series of exercises designed to implant them. “That was the day of the big stock-market crash and the cellist Jacqueline du Pré died that day.” That’s some pretty specific recall. “It was a Monday,” said one person asked about Oct. 11, 2002?” Those who excelled on that part of the screening would move to a second stage, in which they were given random, computer-generated dates and asked to say the day of the week on which it fell, and to recall both a personal experience that occurred that day and a public event that could be verified with a search engine. To screen for HSAM, the researchers had all the subjects take a quiz that asked such questions as “ did an Iraqi journalist hurl two shoes at President Bush?” or “What public event occurred on Oct. They’re the ones who can tell you the exact date on which particular events happened - whether in their own lives or in the news - as well as all manner of minute additional details surrounding the event that most people would forget the second they happened. You’ve met people like that before, and they can be downright eerie. To conduct the study, a team led by psychologist Lawrence Patihis of the University of California, Irvine, recruited a sample group of people all of approximately the same age and divided them into two subgroups: those with ordinary memory and those with what is known as highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM). ( MORE: Creating False Memories in Mice’s Brains - and Yours) False memories afflict everyone - even people with the best memories of all. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences answers both questions with a decisive no. What’s long been a puzzle to memory scientists is whether some people may be more susceptible to false memories than others - and, by extension, whether some people with exceptionally good memories may be immune to them. Innocent people have gone to jail when well-intentioned eyewitnesses testify to events that actually unfolded an entirely different way. False memories can sometimes be a mere curiosity, but other times they have real implications. The phenomenon of false memories is common to everybody - the party you’re certain you attended in high school, say, when you were actually home with the flu, but so many people have told you about it over the years that it’s made its way into your own memory cache. What’s trickier is what happens in between: when we clearly remember things that simply never happened. It’s easy to understand why we forget stuff too: there’s only so much any busy brain can handle. It’s easy enough to explain why we remember things: multiple regions of the brain - particularly the hippocampus - are devoted to the job.
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