The Loftus Theory

I have to choose 1 out of 6 topics to do my assignments on in PSY 111: Introduction to Psychology part 1

And one of the questions were:

Loftus Theory of False Memories : Is it really possible for someone to remember an event that never really happened at all?

Sounds intriguing?

So I googled it. 

Omg, it's so interesting!

This theory was basically formulated by Elizabeth Loftus, a PhD holder in cognitive psychology.

She believes that you can implant a false memory into the brain of a person.

What she does in short is gather a group of teenagers mostly around the age of 14- 20 and she tells them that they are a part of an experiment to determine if they can remember their childhood memories.

She has a family member of the teenagers to participate in this experiment as well.

What the family member has to do is write down 3 real events which happened during the teenagers' childhood and a false event.

The false event is often about losing the way in the shopping mall at the age of 5 and being found by an elderly person.

The teenagers will have to read and write down these 4 events for 5 consecutive days.

They will be called for an interview to describe the 4 events and rate them on a scale of 1 to 10 on how well they can remember these events.

A week or two later, they will be called back again and the same processes are repeated.

What is so shocking is that most of them say that they can remember the false event pretty vividly and rated it pretty high. Whereas a true event was rated pretty low.

Finally, the teenagers were told that the false event never really occur in their childhood. Most of them found that hard to believe.

Read about it here! Loftus Theory

But it became so disturbing for me when I read about this teenage girl in the States who accused her father of killing and raping her best friend.

In reality, the event didn't happen and it was said that when her former best friend passed away, the teen implanted a false memory because of sadness and hatred towards her father.

Omg just read about the Loftus Theory. 

It's damn interesting.

Makes me wonder now whether whatever happened in Inception can actually happen in real life

:/

Leonardo DiCarpio <3