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Stories for "Elizabeth Loftus"

Think you’ve got a terrible memory? You don’t know the half of it

Think you’ve got a terrible memory? You don’t know the half of it

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Last year, MIT neuroscientists Xu Liu and Steve Ramirez manipulated the memory of a mouse. In a fascinating and mildly troubling breakthrough caused by a laser and the protein channelrhodopsin, they “activated” fear memories in a mouse. The impetus, says Ramirez, was the awful feeling of a break-up, the desire, Eternal Sunshine-style, to erase the []

Elizabeth Loftus on embedding false memories in U.S. soldiers

Elizabeth Loftus on embedding false memories in U.S. soldiers

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“We can’t reliably distinguish true memories from false memories,” declares psychologist Elizabeth Loftus in today’s talk. She’s spent the past forty years studying the memory, and has reached some mind-blowing conclusions about what we know, and what we think we know. Here, she shares more detail about her work, and suggests further reading for anyone []

Want to know more about the unreliable nature of memory? Read this

Want to know more about the unreliable nature of memory? Read this

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Elizabeth Loftus studies false memories. As she describes in her TED Talk, The fiction of memory, she has implanted erroneous memories of childhood trauma into adult study subjects as part of her work. She has pinpointed failures in eyewitness testimonies. She’s found that misinformation can reshape taste preferences. And, she’s found that people in stressful []