Memory

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Acknowledgments

I owe a great debt to the Stanford University Center for Advanced Studies
in the Behavioral Sciences, where in the summer of 1979 I wrote the first
draft of this book. Financial support from the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation and the National Science Foundation to the Center is gratefully
acknowledged. The National Science Foundation also generously provided
a portion of my salary during that time. Dr. James Fries, who really
suggested that I write this book, deserves a great deal of thanks. Many other
Fellows at the Center similarly inspired my idea. My husband and close
friend, Geoffrey Loftus, stood by me through the thick and thin of revising.
And finally, I thank the people at Addison-Wesley, especially Warren Stone,
Doe Coover, Ann Dilworth, Brian Crockett, and Tess Palmer, for all the
work they did to make this a better book.
Also by Elizabeth Loftus

Cognitive Processes
(with Lyle Bourne and
Roger Dominowski)

Eyewitness Testimony

Human Memory
(with Geoffrey Loftus)

Learning
(with Sarnoff Mednick and
Howard Pollio)
Contents

Introduction: The Memory Doctor

1
The Power of Memory

2
How Memory Works

3
How Memory Doesn’t Work

4
What Causes Forgetting: The Imperfect Mechanism

5
Mind and Matter: Influences on Memory

6
Memory in Older People
7
The Consequences of Imperfect Memory

8
The Power of Suggestion

9
Computerizing Memory

Notes

Index
Introduction: The Memory Doctor

Memory is something we usually take for granted, but stop for a moment
and imagine life without it. Every day we would have to learn everything
all over again. We would wake up in the morning, discover the kitchen, find
the coffee pot, then the shower. We would have to figure out anew how to
get dressed, cook scrambled eggs and toast, drive a car. Life would be a
never-ending discovery, exhausting us before we had lasted a single week.
Do memories last forever? Many people believe that everything we
learn is permanently stored in the mind, even though particular details may
not be immediately accessible. With hypnosis or other special techniques,
these inaccessible details could eventually be recovered. As we shall see,
this belief is now being seriously challenged. New studies suggest that our
memories are continually being altered, transformed, and distorted. After
nearly a century of experimental research, psychologists are beginning to
discover a great deal about this and other aspects of mental life. The work
advances at a snail’s pace, however, for the scientist who attempts to study
the human mind resembles a burglar attempting to open the vault of one of
the world’s major banks with a toothpick.
What are the consequences of the malleability of memory? One way to
answer this question is to assume hypothetically that people have the
potential for total mind malleability. Imagine a world in which people could
go to a special kind of psychologist or psychiatrist — a memory doctor —
and have their memories modified. Imagine clinics that specialize in
memory modification treatment. One might go there once a week or once a
month to have some particularly difficult memory altered. What therapeutic
uses would this treatment have? How would our perceptions of the world
change?
One could be treated for depression or feelings of worthlessness; the
memory doctor would simply modify the memories leading to these
feelings. One could have treatments to eliminate social prejudices; to the
extent that these are based on a few incidents involving a unique group of
people, the memory doctor could wipe out or alter memory of these
incidents. One might also have treatments to increase happiness. If people
feel bad because they are worse off than they once were, the memory doctor
could eliminate the basis for comparison. And for improving marital
relations, the memory doctor could enhance pleasant memories of past
events involving the spouse. These memory modification specialists would
be omnipotent. They would hold the key to total mind control.
This idea may seem far fetched since we obviously cannot now modify
on command. But memory can be modified partially. Every day, we do this
to ourselves and others. Each of the above extremes has its own milder
parallel today. Our memories of past events change in helpful ways, leading
us to be happier than we might otherwise be. It also changes, however, in
harmful ways, and can occasionally cause us serious trouble.
About thirty years ago, in his 1984, George Orwell wrote these words:

The control of the past depends above all on the training of

memory . . . [It is] necessary to remember that events happened in the
desired manner. And if it is necessary to rearrange one’s memories or
to tamper with written records, then it is necessary to forget that one
has done so. The trick of doing this can be learned like any other
mental techniques . . .

Elizabeth Loftus
University of Washington
1
The Power of Memory

My father died five years ago, after he had engaged unwillingly in a

several-year battle with melanoma—“the deadliest of all the cancers,” he
called it. As a physician, he knew only too well. Whenever I thought about
him the first few years after his death, I could not escape the unpleasant
images of his illness. I remembered him in a hospital wheelchair waiting for
X-rays; I remembered him leaving the breakfast table unable to eat; I
remembered him in bed straining to move. I seemed to remember only the
sadness of the last year of his life. I tried not to, but it appeared beyond my
control. I wondered whether I was to go through life thinking about my
father in only this way.
Then, gradually, my thoughts of him began to include some happier
images. I saw him standing in the yard, holding a scrawny cat. I saw him in
the living room surrounded by smiling family. I even thought about him
holding me on his lap when I was no older than four. As nice as it was to
have my unpleasant memories of my father replaced by happier images, I
couldn’t help but feel that there was something very curious about these
“memories.” And then I discovered that I have photographs of all of them.
Pictures of our family when I was four are featured prominently in some old
scrapbooks. A photo of him holding the cat has been in my wallet for years.
Was I remembering my father or only the photographs of him?

The human mind, holder of vast memories, is intricately constructed.

As Cicero said in De Oratore, “Memory is the treasury and guardian of all
things.” Without memory, life would consist of momentary experiences that
have little relation to each other. Without memory we could not
communicate with one another — we would be incapable of remembering
the thoughts we wished to express. Without memory, a person would not
have the sense of continuity even to know who he or she was. Without a
doubt, memory is central to being human.
Most people don’t stop to think about the pervasiveness of human
memory, or about the many and varied ways in which memory — or the
lack of it — has altered people’s lives. Memory is a powerful force, even if
it isn’t always accurate. And it isn’t. But before we can explore the
physiological and psychological bases for memory’s inaccuracy, it is
important to look at displays of memory’s power, such as total recall, and
displays of its lack of power, as in amnesia. We should also consider the
human ability to suppress unwanted memories and to dredge up those that
are supposedly hidden or irretrievable.
Perhaps the person with total recall is the most familiar to us. We all
remember someone brighter than the rest of us in school, someone who
simply had a “head for facts” and could score perfectly on test after test.
That person, we were often told, had total recall, a photographic memory
that stored any piece of information, no matter how small.
Michael Barone is an information junkie who has a photographic
memory. He collects facts about America. In college, he memorized the
boundaries of every congressional district in the United States. He knew the
results of just about every presidential election that took place in this
century. He could also rattle off the populations of most major cities, and he
could do this for different years. “What was the population of St. Louis in
1960?” someone once quizzed him. His reply: “750,026.” He claims to do it
by instinct. While honeymooning in Africa, he and his wife traveled over
two thousand miles on roads too bumpy to allow them to read. He
entertained her instead with facts. One day she learned all the winners of
the vice-presidency; the next day she received a complete list of the losers.
When asked how long he’d been able to remember such minutiae so
completely, Michael answered: “I was always interested in political
numbers. I don’t know why. I think I started working on census data when I
was about eight or nine. I remember getting this map of the 1940 decennial
census and being fascinated.” He went on to say, grinning, “I think it’s a
neurotic disorder.”
How astonishing is this ability? In 1968, Alexander Luria studied the
unusual memory of a Russian newspaper reporter whom Luria referred to as
S, which was the first letter of his name. Luria studied this man carefully
over a span of many years. In the course of the investigation, it became
clear that S could remember an incredible amount of information on a
variety of topics after a brief and seemingly effortless examination. He
could remember long lists of digits dictated to him and long lists of objects
shown to him; he could store this material for any length of time and recall
it at will. To accomplish this fantastic feat, S relied heavily on mental
imagery. To remember a long grocery list, for example, he would imagine
himself walking from Pushkin Square down Gorky Street and visualize
each item at some specific point along his imaginary walk. He might “see”
the eggs by a streetlamp or the bacon lying in a patch of grass. Later, when
he wanted to remember the items, he simply repeated his imaginary walk to
take a look at the objects where he had placed them.
In the early 1930s, S was asked to remember a formula that was
complex but totally nonsensical:

He studied it for seven minutes and then reported how he memorized it. A
portion of his response is typical of the kinds of stories he made up to help
him remember things:

Neiman [N] came out and jabbed at the ground with his cane [.]. He
looked up at a tall tree which resembled the square-root sign [√], and
thought to himself: “No wonder the tree has withered and begun to
expose its roots. After all, it was here when I built these two houses”
[d2]. Once again he poked with his cane [.]. Then he said: “The houses
are old, I’ll have to get rid of them [×]; the sale will bring in far more
money.” He had originally invested 85,000 in them [85]. . . .

The complete story was four times as long, but it must have been very
powerful. Fifteen years later, with no advance warning, S could recall the
formula perfectly.
People who are extremely good at remembering a large amount of
material, like S and Michael Barone, are fairly unusual, although
psychologists have shown that with sufficient practice many individuals can
approximate the same level of performance. But the perfect-memory coin
has a dark side. S often wished he could lose his perfect memory. His heavy
reliance on mental imagery caused him difficulty: Past images continually
intruded into his consciousness and interfered with his recall of later
images; he occasionally became confused and found remembering very
stressful; he had trouble holding down jobs because whenever anyone said
anything to him, he would conjure up a long chain of thoughts, which made
it difficult for him to understand what was being said to him. To earn a
living he eventually became a professional theatrical memory man.
In contrast to Michael Barone and the newspaperman S, twenty-four-
year-old Steven Kubacki underwent an ordeal more terrifying than one
could possibly imagine — a total loss of memory. What Steven last
remembers before the unusual chain of events is walking on the ice on Lake
Michigan one Saturday in February 1978. He had planned to go
crosscountry skiing. At the edge of the lake, he took off his skis and
dropped his backpack; it was a splendid place for solitude and thought.
Then he began to get cold and decided to turn back, but in minutes he
realized he was lost. He felt more and more numb, and he was getting tired.
He next remembers waking up in a field and realizing it was spring. As he
looked himself over, he recognized neither the backpack lying beside him
nor any of his clothing. He thought to himself, “What the hell’s going on
here?” Later he said it felt like “the Twilight Zone or science fiction where
all of a sudden people are misplaced in a strange land.”
Steven started hiking to the nearest town. A stranger told him he was in
Pittsfield, Massachusetts. A newspaper said it was May 5, 1979 — over
fourteen months had passed since he left to go skiing. He managed to find
his way to an aunt’s home and knocked on her door: “She saw me,” he
relates. “She turned her head away. Then, she looked back and screamed,
‘Steven!’ ”
Relatives came from all over to share in the happiness of his return.
They naturally wanted to know where he had been for over a year, but he
could tell them nothing. His backpack contained running shoes, swimming
goggles, even a pair of glasses, but nothing he had ever owned before. He,
more than anyone, has continued to be disturbed about those missing
months.
How does someone remember everything? And how can a person’s
entire memory be wiped out for over a year? Do the memories exist in our
mind’s recesses, awaiting the right cue? Is approaching death one of those
cues? Why is it that so many people who have almost died and then revived
say that in those crucial moments their whole life passed before them?
In his memoir, Jacques Sandulescu recalls the winter of 1945 when,
barely sixteen, he was arrested by Russian soldiers on his way to school in
Brasov, Romania. All who seemed capable of work were packed into cattle
cars and sent eastward into the Ukraine. The coal mines where he worked
were treacherous. One day, weakened by cold, hunger, and illness, a
daydreaming Jacques failed to jump out of the mine during a cave-in. He
was buried alive. He couldn’t move, not even to wiggle a toe. As sweat ran
down his face, he cried and screamed but only succeeded in filling his
mouth with choking coal dust. Fear overwhelmed him. His memoir
recounts this moment:

My childhood really did parade past me. I remembered finding some

wild strawberries in the forest miles away from home. I had brought
them to my mother inside a large green leaf; I knew how she loved
them. As I gave them to her, she looked at them, the first strawberries
of the season, and then gazed at me a long time. That look in her eyes
was the most beautiful and tender thing I had known in my life.1

This “life review” is a mental process brought about by the realization,

in the face of impending death, that immortality is a myth. Some
individuals, like Sandulescu, have been rescued at precisely this moment
and have thus lived to tell us about the experience. Typically, life review
occurs spontaneously and rather unselectively, occurring in young people as
well as old. People claim to have recalled certain life events with
remarkable clarity, saying something like “I felt as though it happened only
yesterday.” Emotions at this time range from mildly pleasant nostalgia to
feverish discomfort.
That such life review experiences occur so often prompts one to
question the extent to which deeply buried memories are true. Did the
young Romanian prisoner really find wild strawberries and give them to his
mother in a large green leaf? Did she look at him tenderly? Since the
Romanian’s mother died long ago, we may never know.
Another way memories can be recalled into consciousness is through
hypnosis. Although we normally associate hypnosis with the psychoanalytic
process, psychiatrists aren’t the only ones to use this device. In recent years,
as crime-solving methods have grown more sophisticated, hypnosis has
been used to help uncover missing pieces of evidence. One of the most
highly publicized cases of this sort stunned the country in July of 1976,
when a busload of twenty-six children mysteriously disappeared from the
small California farming town of Chowchilla. Three masked men
brandishing pistols had kidnapped the driver and driven them to a gravel
quarry about a hundred miles away. All were forced into an abandoned
trailer truck buried deeply underground; eventually, after more than sixteen
hours had passed, they dug themselves out and were rescued.
The FBI moved in quickly to begin their investigation. One clue was
the van that had been used by the suspects, but the school bus driver was
unable to recall anything specific about it. To help crack the case, the
Bureau called on an authority in hypnosis, who successfully made the
driver recall all but one digit of the license plate on the kidnappers’ white
van. This was all that was needed to allow the Bureau to track down
suspects and solve the case.
A police psychologist who was interviewed about the case marveled at
the startling and fascinating results that law enforcement officials have
achieved with hypnosis. He explained that hypnosis is a state of
“heightened suggestibility” that “enhances certain aspects of human
functioning, including memory.” He further argued that “everything that
ever happened to us or we perceive is registered in the
brain. . . . Theoretically [using hypnotism], we can go back as far as we
exist.”
These beliefs are not new. Sigmund Freud encountered them in Europe
nearly one hundred years ago. In the mid-1880s, Freud went to Paris to
study with a noted French professor of anatomy, Jean Charcot, an
experience that marked a turning point in his life. There was widespread
belief that hypnosis could be used to cure psychological problems by
getting people to relive certain early unhappy experiences. When Freud
returned to Vienna the following year, he worked a great deal with
hypnosis, but found it didn’t always work very well. He renounced
hypnosis as a useless therapeutic tool and instead developed the technique
of “free association.” By merely encouraging people to think about past
episodes in their lives, Freud found they could dig up long-forgotten but
important memories from their childhood. By analyzing these crucial life
experiences, people often gained insight into their psychological problems.
Partially because of Freud’s rejection of it, hypnosis was for quite
some time deemed unfit for study in scientific laboratories. It wasn’t until
the early 1930s that hypnosis was again taken seriously by American
behavioral psychologists. Yet now, after nearly fifty years of intensive
study, it isn’t really certain whether this mysterious process can be used to
dig up actual memories. Is it true that everything that happens to us is
registered in the brain — that with a bit of help from hypnosis or free
association techniques we can remember it all? How did Freud know that
his troubled patients were remembering the truth? Did he ever consider that
his patients’ versions of events in their past might be twisted or merely
fabricated? As we shall see in Chapter 3, new insights in the field of human
memory leave no doubt that people can have “memories” for things that
never happened. And yet there are still even more perplexing cases of
people who remember something they should never have heard, people who
recall conversations after they have been anesthetized during an operation.
It is hypnosis, in fact, that has been notably used to examine whether it is
possible for a patient, while in an unconscious, anesthetized state, to be
conscious, in some sense, of his or her surroundings. Can the seemingly
unconscious patient register information?
California anesthesiologist William Miofsky was accused of several
criminal counts of lewd and lascivious conduct for allegedly committing
sodomy on female patients during surgery at a Sacramento hospital. Many
civil suits were filed against him as well by women who generally could not
remember anything about the surgery but feared they had been victims.
Miofsky denied the allegations.
Some of the female patients involved in the Miofsky case were
hypnotized to “unlock” their unconscious memories of what occurred
during surgery. One patient who initially remembered nothing after surgery
claimed later, under hypnosis, that she remembered a penis entering her
mouth. When pressed for details, she provided them. Interestingly, though,
she couldn’t remember the knife cutting through her stomach. In response
to this incident, one physician interviewed by a reporter for the Sacramento
Union said that there is evidence anesthetized patients can recall minute
details after surgery. This physician, seventy-six-year-old Dr. Milton H.
Erickson, who seems to have devoted much of his life to hypnosis research,
said that some patients can later remember entire conversations and
physical actions of operating room personnel, even though they were in a
deep state of unconsciousness.
Other examples also suggest that anesthetized people can hear and
remember much more than surgeons believed possible. In one case, a
female patient who had liked her surgeon before the surgery refused to go
back to him. Under hypnosis she recalled hearing him utter these words
during the operation: “Well, that will take care of this old bag!” In another
study, patients were played tape recorded messages, some of which
contained music, and some of which contained suggestions for comfort,
good appetite, and rapid healing. Those who received the suggestions for
quick recovery needed less medication and went home from the hospital
earlier than those who had heard music.
One of the more carefully controlled studies was actually carried out in
an operating room.2 The physician who conducted the study was prompted
to do it by an unusual experience. One of his patients was a young woman
who had been in an accident, sustaining numerous facial injuries that
required plastic surgery. During her operation, the doctor planned to remove
a small lump from the inner surface of her lower lip. When the anesthetist
was satisfied that the patient was deeply asleep, the surgeon put his finger in
the patient’s mouth and felt the lump. He said, “Good gracious. It may not
be a cyst at all, it may be cancer!” Fortunately, the lump turned out to be
benign.
In the ward a day later, the patient remembered entering the operating
room and getting the injection, but nothing more. She complained of feeling
very depressed and weepy. Three weeks later she was still depressed; she
had lost her appetite and couldn’t sleep. The doctor decided to hypnotize
her and regress her to the time of the operation. In a flood of tears, she
remembered everything. She even recalled the opening remark “Good
gracious.” She quoted the surgeon’s statement, changing only the word
cancer to malignant. Her doctor was amazed. He tried to reassure her, and
then went on to design a more controlled study to explore this unusual
phenomenon.
The doctor’s study involved ten new patients. Anesthesia was induced
by a combination of drugs, while the patients’ EEG brain waves were
monitored. At a specified point in time, when each patient’s brain wave
pattern indicated deep anesthetization, the anesthetist said something like: