Our minds don't capture and record reality, but rather blend experience with fantasy—a process that often results in convincing, yet completely false, memories.
Question: How do we produce false
memories?
Ottavio
Arancio: It happens in most
likely you were storing things in the brain and you are confusing from
maybe
your fantasy with the reality and... or, one possibility. The
other possibility, like you had the
wrong perception of what you saw, so you're storing this in a way
because you
are convinced that it's that way, but it was not that way.
Let's say I make two good
examples. I mean you're convinced
that maybe you were not... did not
pay that much attention and you're convinced that person was dressed in
red
instead it was pink or a color close to red then you store the thing
that
way. Obviously with time the
memory will become more faraway, certain aspects could disappear and we
could
fill them with other aspects just to fill the gap, so we make up for the
memory
and we build up the memory in the time of recalling the memory we are
recalling
stuff that occurred in other circumstances because when it's a memory
it's not...
Our brain is not a recorder like passive recorder. It's more active
processes,
so being an active process there could be ways of you know changing it
because
actively we can change it. That's
something which is important. It's
not our brain is like a tape recorder or a TV or a VCR. I
mean it's not. It's more active than that and
there
are several steps in the process of memory and recalling a memory which
there
are many, many steps, several steps and each one of them as a memory
could be
labile and could be you know changed into something else, substituted by
something else.
Question: Can you explain this process?
Ottavio
Arancio: Yeah. You
have to look at memory as a process
in which there are several steps which they apply some interference
from. It's not the right word, processing of
our brain of this information and this is just purely active and it's
just
changed. It's like when you change
something from analogue to digital just to make one of those things, the
video
from the computer and in the process of changing from analogue to
digital you
can change something and it would not be the same you know. What if you change a chip or something
and you change the yellow into a green, so whatever was yellow will be
green
and... or A, when I say an A you can even artificially change into a B if
want
because if you tell the computer to change all the A into a B then
everything
will be a B or sometimes during this process some A will change into a B
then
it will change. There is some
activity, something that is there occurring and it changes.
