After reading the story, about a third of the participants said they remembered meeting or shaking hands with Bugs Bunny when they had visited Disneyland. In another experiment by Elizabeth Loftus, one of the pioneer researchers in the field of altered memories, researchers showed people advertising material for Disneyland that described one visitor shaking hands with Bugs Bunny. After seeing those images, 50% of subjects recalled some part of that hot air balloon ride – though the event was entirely made up. Along with real images, researchers snuck in doctored photographs of the subject taking a hot-air balloon ride with his or her family. In one study, subjects were showed images from their childhood. Old memories seem to be the easiest to manipulate. The problem is there’s virtually nothing we can do to stop it.
These fake memories don't just distort how we see our past, they affect our current and future behaviour too – from what we eat, to how we protest and vote. In a world where we can witness news and world events as they unfold, fake images surround us, and our minds accept these pictures as real, and remember them later.
#BOOTLEG PHOTOSHOP TYPE BACKWARDS SOFTWARE#
Combine this susceptibility with modern image-editing software at our fingertips like Photoshop, and it's a recipe for disaster. Not only is memory fickle when we access it, but it's also quite easily subverted and rewritten. But human memory is far more like a desert mirage than a transcript – as we recall the past we are really just making meaning out of the flickering patterns of sights, smells and sounds we think we remember.įor decades, researchers have been exploring just how unreliable our own memories are. People tend to think of their memories as a transcript, a rough history of events from some early age until the very moment they are experiencing. It would be fine if we could dismiss these images as a fleeting joke, an amusing but harmless tidbit shared among our friends and followers, if it weren’t for the fact that our minds appear to have a curious but fundamental glitch. The year was a memorable one – looking back at the unforgettable images over the past 12 months, you might think of apocalyptic-looking clouds over Manhattan during Hurricane Sandy, or Mitt Romney’s children mistakenly standing in a line spelling out the word “ MONEY”, or even the winning US Powerball lottery ticket that became the most shared picture on Facebook.
0 kommentar(er)
