Scientists have succeeded in creating false memories in lab mice, though it’s not at all true they created memories from scratch. Rather did they expose the mice to a bad experience in one location and then manipulated activity levels of brain-cells so that the mice associated that bad experience with another location where they’d not had any such experience. It was a substantial achievement and could lead to some very good treatments for various problems as well as having already improved the understanding of memory formation. I’ll write a little about the possible good a little later in this essay. The work done by the scientists who were working at MIT is discussed in the article: Neuroscientists plant false memories in the brain.
But, as they note, our heads are already filled with false memories:
In many court cases, defendants have been found guilty based on testimony from witnesses and victims who were sure of their recollections, but DNA evidence later overturned the conviction.
One example the article doesn’t give is more germane to what the MIT scientists actually did: cognitive psychologists discovered over the past couple decades or so that some phobias, including some which are crippling, seem to have come about as the result of a gratuitously arising physical state corresponding to fear at a time when the victim happened to be in an open space or in an airplane or near a certain sort of animal. Other phobias seem to be at least partially built-in, such as fear of snakes or spiders and a fear of large animals when we’re young which can last to the end of our lives for one reason or another. There is no one-size fits all explanation for phobias but it would be good to be able to deal with those which do involve false memories.
Being able to scan a brain of someone afraid of flying as they’re in a plane might allow a psychologist to remove or replace the false memory which connects the plane to fear. Clearly, this technology could be misused, but nearly all powerful technologies can, by definition, do great harm. Even simpler technologies have that property. For example, my attitude toward herbal medicines has always been, to simplify a bit, that they either don’t work or, if they do, they can cause harm by way of side-effects or wrong doses in the same way as any medicine coming out of a chemical plant. This isn’t an argument for or against herbal medicine or any other human technology, only a reminder that a hammer can drive in nails or bash skulls, or at least thumbs even in a nonviolent society.
We should remember that we’re the product of evolutionary processes which work, first of all, to select successful reproducers. Accurate memories aren’t as valuable as the sorts of memories, whatever they are, which lead to successful reproduction. We can think about the human bias toward optimistically remembering the past and anticipating the future. Nature is prolific and it’s likely that she’s ready to throw away a lot of optimists so long as she gets, so to speak, the optimists who produce children and continue to do so even after a painful childbirth or dealing with a misbehaving 16 year-old. A mother might remember the child clearly and the painful childbirth somewhat dimly. As father watches a son graduating with a degree in engineering, the father’s brain might weaken the memories of the rebellious son who was brought home by policemen after a street-race, and again and again; the father is ready to be optimistic and encourage son and daughter-in-law to produce a goodly number of grandchildren. The main point is that our memories aren’t oriented to accurate recording of events but rather to recording of events in a way that aids reproduction. This may or may not involve accuracy but likely doesn’t when it comes to those aspects of memory which affect our general attitude toward the world and its dangers.
At that, it’s remarkable how good our memories can be, especially if well-trained—I’m one of those who thinks that one of the biggest of many mistakes made by modern educators was the strange decision to stop the training of memories by way of memorizing speeches or political documents or whatever. Abraham Lincoln, whom I admire as a speaker and consider interesting as a thinker though disastrous as a political leader, drove powerful rhythms of speech into his brain by memorizing parts of the Bible and parts of Shakespearean works—I think Hamlet was a particular favorite. The Gettysburg Address worked not because it was coherent morally or politically but rather because it was rode on the waves generated by rhythms borrowed from Jeremiah and Isaiah. Young human beings tend to like memorizing and having words on hand, but our schools no longer require the students to memorize, say, the preamble to the American Constitution and those students devote their mental energy to memorizing strange and sometimes outright despicable song lyrics.
Our memories are, as often noted, more powerful and sometimes more accurate if we learn to use rhythms and also if we tie memories to concrete places or things. They are clearly more powerful if exercised, as is true of the arms we use to swing a baseball bat or tennis racket or framing hammer.
Let me quote from the article, Neuroscientists plant false memories in the brain, so that we can see what the MIT neuroscientists really did:
In last year’s study, the researchers conditioned these mice to fear a particular chamber by delivering a mild electric shock. As this memory was formed, the c-fos gene was turned on, along with the engineered channelrhodopsin gene. This way, cells encoding the memory trace were “labeled” with light-sensitive proteins.
The next day, when the mice were put in a different chamber they had never seen before, they behaved normally. However, when the researchers delivered a pulse of light to the hippocampus, stimulating the memory cells labeled with channelrhodopsin, the mice froze in fear as the previous day’s memory was reactivated.
“Compared to most studies that treat the brain as a black box while trying to access it from the outside in, this is like we are trying to study the brain from the inside out,” Liu says. “The technology we developed for this study allows us to fine-dissect and even potentially tinker with the memory process by directly controlling the brain cells.”
In other words, they didn’t really create memories directly. They worked with a remembered fear response learned in a chamber where the mice had been shocked and tied that memory to another chamber where the mice had never been. This is similar to the hypothetical development of some phobias by way of a legitimate fear response being tied to a situation or place or entity for which that fear response wasn’t legitimately attached, though there might well be real underlying reasons for fear.
In still other words, the MIT neuroscientists tied an existing memory to a newly experienced place. That sort of phenomenon occurs often to me and probably to others. Some cases of deja vu are likely the result of a memory suddenly becoming active in a situation or place or entity not really connected to the events underlying that memory.
I wouldn’t worry that we’re days away from the Matrix, or whatever, and we have to see that memory manipulation technologies might well have some good and moral uses such as helping those with false memories or with memories formed by wrongful combination of real or imagined events or by way of attaching emotional responses illegitimately to a plane or a big, friendly dog. And we also have to remember that all powerful technologies and `deep’ scientific discoveries, along with insightful histories or novels, are potentially dangerous and that danger is far more likely to be realized in a morally disordered age.
Before moving on, I’ll emphasize the implication I intended that novels and historical works, even when they provide only a plausible ordering to known events, can also create memories in us or tie emotional responses to existing memories of, say, the chaos of the 1960s. Unaltered memories of events tied together in a new narrative can be a more powerful manipulation of memories than the creation of artificial memories of events that didn’t really happen or maybe happened in a different setting or involved different entities or whatever.
False association of a memory with a different situation or place or entity and other manipulations of memory can be seen by an objective outsider or by a self-aware re-memberer if he contemplates the matter properly. It’s usually very hard to change a shared, communal narrative. Most human beings seem to have not the capability, or at least not the willingness, to reevaluate their internalized story of, for example, the United States or other nation. More importantly, few Christians or Jews or other peoples of faith seem capable of reevaluating their communal memories of their spiritual ancestors.
This problem of the distortions which come when our greater narratives, conscious or unconscious, are inappropriate are of greater interest to me than the implantation or manipulation of individual memories. I’d already explored the issue by the way of the implantation of false memories by commercial advertisements in an essay I published back in 2011, Your World is a Narrative—Don’t Let it Be Written for You. I wrote:
False memories can be implanted in your minds so that you can’t even remember truly where you’ve been, even so mundane a false memory as that of holding a glass bottle of Coca-cola in a stadium which bans glass containers: Ads Implant False Memories. This is a frightening possibility in a world where governments and corporations and other powerful entities have plenty of reasons for you to accept their false histories of important historical events and of the very ways in which wealth is distributed and power is structured. They have reasons for you to live a life profitable to them.
There are a variety of studies in which the scientists `read’ minds in one way or another, for example, to predict which songs will be popular with teenagers by scanning the brains of test subjects as they hear new, unreleased music. There are others which are showing an ability to predict our actions in the near-term future by scanning brains. The scanning of brains is a powerful technology and a dangerous technology. It can help us a lot and lead to medical miracles, but it can most certainly be misused. In general, the more powerful a technology is, the greater the harm it can cause. And we should remember that prediction can lead to causal or correlative models that can then lead to control mechanisms. As it is, sophisticated marketers, such as those at Coca-cola, have found weak but effective steering mechanisms.
The philosopher Ian Hacking wrote an important book, Rewriting the Soul in which he concludes that the multiple personality syndrome was the result of the creation of barriers between different blocks of memories, some of which were false memories and some of those may have been implanted by therapists who were trying to help troubled human beings. Some of the so-called “recovered memories” which tore apart families and tortured human beings who needed help were implanted by incompetent therapists. Some of the spectacular claims of child-abuse in institutional settings turned out to be the result of memories implanted by incompetent investigators. I remember reading of a case of alleged large-scale child-abuse where competent investigators came in later and said they thought something bad had occurred but they couldn’t get at the truth because of the false memories in the minds of some of the children. By that time, they were group memories. The children were remembering together what had never happened.
If you can control someone’s memory, you can control, or at least influence, many of the thoughts and actions of that human being. Stalin knew that but wasn’t so good at rewriting memories as the American politicians, marketers, and entertainers.
After discussing some political implications of memory manipulation, and also questioning if memory manipulation explained our complacency in the face of huge transfers of wealth and other evidence that our leaders are working for their own good and often directly against the good of the average citizen, I concluded:
A true human person is a human animal who tries to shape himself by intelligent responses over time to external reality. Those intelligent responses begin when we’re young with firm guidance from parents and other adults with a concrete relationship to us. As we mature, those intelligent responses should increasingly be the result of our own understandings and voluntary actions towards a state of human being we’d like to occupy.
A human animal which allows itself to be shaped by whatever external forces grab hold of him is nothing like a moral person.
Let me close by quickly discussing a major problem which I’ve dealt with only tangentially in the past. Most human beings have not shown the inclination or ability to understand these issues in such a way as to anticipate problems before they’ve overwhelmed their society. The inclination might be present in highly intelligent men and women, though we can see many such human beings who seem to loyally support the mainstream narratives even when they break down in the minds of those who, for example, simply pay attention to soldiers returning with stories of being systematically put in a position, say by Harvard and Ford Company trained operations research guys, to kill in self-defense though they are killing civilians defending their homes. Some who seem less intellectually talented might well see through the various sorts of false memories planted in our heads by politicians who have more ambition than moral character, by generals and their political and industrial allies who are more dedicated to certain modes and technologies of waging war than they are to defending their countries, by corporate executives wishing to glorify the consumer life-style, by no-talent artists and novelists who wish their bland puddings to be treated as if the spicy stew of a a young Picasso or a grizzled war-veteran and ex-slave named Cervantes, of scientists or technologists who wish to pursue what they can pursue without any moral quibbles, of various thinkers who feverishly imagine their ideologies can produce paradise without even seeing that a true understanding needs to support the great mass of our modern civilizations. Generally, false memories are created for their own minds and the minds of others by barbarian children who don’t understand the complex civilization they inherited, don’t know what it’s true nature is, can’t clearly recognize what has gone wrong—lack of progress in understanding God’s story, and wouldn’t have a clue how to start moving toward a better situation if someone were to tell them what had gone wrong.
Some members of the Body of Christ have the duty and responsibility, the privilege and God-given calling, to explore God’s story in such a way as to make some sense of it. This means that the story must always be updated, accounting for new knowledge—even knowledge of newly discovered forms of being. The well-established parts of the story must be restated according to the words and concepts of the current age. Those members of the Body of Christ haven’t done their job in at least a couple of centuries, during what is surely the most dynamic phase of the human portion of God’s story.
To a Christian, the greatest danger with the manipulation of memories has already been partially realized, largely because of our own lack of faith and courage, our sheer moral irresponsibility. Perhaps I should restrict the moral responsibility to Christian thinkers and authors and artists and ecclesiastical leaders. In any case, we’ve left an earlier understanding of God’s story behind and haven’t shaped a newer understanding. This has produced that most dangerous form of false memories, memories false to any plausible understanding of God’s world.