A TED Talk Review

Elizabeth Loftus | How Reliable Is Your Memory?

In Elizabeth Loftus’ TED Talk: “How Reliable Is Your Memory?” that uploaded in June 2013, she mentiones about false memories and the difficulty of distinguishing them from true memories.

Elizabeth Loftus begins her speech with Steve Titus, who was accused of rape despite having nothing to do with the incident. Steve Titus is a 31-year-old restaurant manager and his life changes when the police stop them on his way back from dinner with his fiancée. When the raped woman sees Titus, she thinks he looks like a rapist, but on the day of the court, the woman states that she is sure that Titus is a rapist, and Titus is sent to prison. Titus then reaches the local newspaper and finds an investigative journalist. As a result of his investigations, the journalist finds the real criminal who previously had a criminal record for raping 50 people. After a year in prison, Titus is acquitted and returns to his life. However, his life has changed. Titus has lost his fiancée, job and savings and decided to file lawsuit against those who caused this situation. A few days before the day of the trial, Titus died one morning at the age of 35 due to a stress-induced heart attack. Loftus also states that hundreds of innocent people, such as Steve Titus, were accused and sent to prison.

False memory refers to memories that people recall incorrectly or that are remembered differently from what actually happened. Elizabeth Loftus is a memory-manupilation expert working on false memory. Loftus states that memory is reconstructive and that both you and others can change your memory. She started research in this area in the 1970s and achieved the results she expected. The main conclusion that Loftus reached is that misinformations conveyed to people on a subject they may have experienced can distort, contaminate or change their memories. She also emphasizes that “Misinformation is everywhere”.

In the 1990’s, Loftus began to investigate whether some special psychotherapy methods such as imagination, dream interpretatiton, hypnosis and exposure to false information create unexpected memories. For this, Loftus tried to impose false memories on people by using the suggestion, which is a method of psychotherapy. She tried to plant some false memories such as being lost and terrified at the mall as a child, or the lifeguard saving themselves when they were about to drown. While Loftus argues that she could achieve success in her studies by presenting statistics, she also mentions the criticisms against her studies and the psychotherapists’ threats against her.

Loftus began to investigate whether these memories that can be planted in people’s minds affect people’s thoughts and behaviors. She emphasizes that as a result of her work, false memories can be planted and these memories can influence behavior. In addition, she notes that false memories are not always bad or negative.

At the end of her talk, Loftus mentiones about the difficulty of distinguishing true memories from false memories reliably. Just because someone is so confident in telling you something, adding a lot of details while telling you, or adding his/her feelings to it, doesn’t mean that it really happened.

“We should all keep in mind that memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing.”