How do you alter memories

How can they fight back against an invisible enemy who can alter memories? [closed]

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The USA government is at war with some wizards in a broken masquerade scenario.

The wizards live among the population, but use magic to make the dwellings invisible. The same magic alters memories of any people around so that they forget any thing supernatural they see.

How can the USA military fight against a foe when they can’t hit them at home?

6 Answers 6

Hire wizards

/The usa government is at war with some wizard/

/The wizards live among the population but use magic to make the dwellings invisible./

Wizards plural.

These wizards in general must have some tricks so they can find the doors of their own houses, not fall down the stairs etc. Plus the ones who want to be left alone are probably pretty peeved at the one who is at war with the US, giving wizards a bad name.

Hire those other wizards. Give them extra pointy hats, moustache wax, whatever they need to make their wizardliness as extra wizardful as it can be. Your hired wizards will get that rogue wizard, shave his beard, take his staff, dress him in a prison jumpsuit and let him think things over in Guantanomo.

And I had better not read that it was a simple typo in the question because this is a sweet answer, especially the moustache wax part.

In Doctor Who, there is an enemy with a similar ability. The Doctor comes up with a really great way to fight them. The trick is that the wizards alter memories, not perception.

When you see a wizard, that visual information is going from your eyes to your brain, where it is processed in the usual way. When you look away from the wizard, this information is moved into your memory through a separate process*. As long as you are currently looking at the wizard, the memory storage process of your brain is not involved. Therefore, the wizard’s powers to interfere with this process are irrelevant.

The bottom line is that as long as you are actively looking at a wizard, you can take any action you wish. This includes actions that record information. For example, you could always carry around a microphone and only turn it on when you spot a wizard. This lets you send information to your future self, who can than store that information in your memory without any problems.

*There is some complicated neuroscience involved that I’m not going to get into, but you may want to read up on if you want to flesh things out more.

Recordings

Use surveillance cameras to identify the wizards. Follow them home with surveillance drones. Blow them up with a drone.

Cross References

Are the wizard’s houses on the electrical grid? Are they at all connected to the outside world? If so, they can be tracked. Also, you can just track well-dressed people who doesn’t seem to have an address.

Computers

Invisibility is impressive, but will leave traces that are visible. Water mains and electricity terminating at nothing, holes in the ground and the like. The areas are weird. Even if the Invisibility is foolproof, there’s still people going in and out of the buildings. Each can be detected by electronics. Electronics cannot be altered by the mind altering magic.

With this simple fact, we can start following potential wizards with drones and sattelites, if not with normal cameras and the like. When the computers have calculated enough of the magic residents in an area, you send in destructive drones. These can be ground based or via the air and via electronics even people can see as much as possible. You can simply bomb the hell out of an area and the wizards wouldn’t see it coming.

The difficulties are when the wizards are in urban areas. Although they’ll be easier to track with cameras and such withing the cities, you can’t always bomb in such areas. You might evacuate the area and bomb it, or use large ground based gatling guns to light up the area with more precision, but it’ll be more difficult.

But your question is fight them when not at home. This is much easier. When you identified them, all you need is to kill/incapacitate/capture them like any regular person. You follow them and then ambush them. They might be potentially more dangerous, but they are at base value just humans.

False Memories: Can You Trust Your Memory?

We often don’t think about the accuracy of our memories. We just assume that they’re exact and precise, because it’s something that we experienced. But the reality is, our memories are very susceptible to change. Research is showing that our memories can be manipulated by introducing new or different information. This can be from an authority figure, or simply just by talking to your peers. Although this can be helpful at times, false memories actually poses a problem for our justice system.

False memories: What are they?

Why do false memories occur?

Imagine you pass by someone when you’re walking down the streets of Times Square. You only see them for a split second, but you see them wearing a green t-shirt, black sneakers, and a blue hat. Now just hold on to that thought- we’ll come back to it later.

We’d like to think that our memory is like a video recorder, accurately recording our experiences. But our memories are actually very prone to suggestion. Here’s why: every time we recall a memory, it gets changed based on our mood, goals, or environment. If we don’t remember something that happened to us or that we saw, our brain fills in the missing information. This seems like, and sometimes is, a helpful tool, but sometimes it can have serious consequences. We all know “that” person who tells the same story just a little bit differently every time. The fish was THIS big, kind of thing. A false memory is a misguided recollection of an event or experience.

False memories can happen in a lot of ways. Introduction of new or different information is one way the perception of events can change. This can be in the form of a question, or discussion with a peer. Knowledge you already have and other related memories can also change your perception. For example, if you were to recall your fifth birthday party, the memories of your friend’s birthday party might influence how you remember your own. And of course, over time your memories begin to change. Misinformation can become a part of your memory, and that version can actually grow stronger and more vivid.

How do we know that memory can be altered?

Remember the person you walked past on the street? Now answer this question (without scrolling up): The person was wearing a green hat, but what color were their sandals?

If you were to scroll back up, you will find that their hat was blue, instead of the green stated in the question. Also, you might notice that the person was wearing black sneakers, not sandals. How did you do? If you fell for the tricks, then you can see how easily our memories can be altered. By wording the question with a new or different fact from the original scenario, your memory changed to fit the question. This is how researchers study false memory, by introducing new or different information to something you may have experienced.

Another way our perception of events can change is just by talking to the people around us. Take the video below, for example. In this study, participants viewed a video of a store robbery, and then discussed what they saw with each other. After a few minutes of discussion, each of the participants were asked to recall what they remembered seeing in the video. What they found was that most people were actually talking about things they didn’t actually see themselves. They were given information by their peers, which led them to be misguided not long after an experience.

Are false memories a good or bad thing?

False memories can be as harmless as you thinking you saw your phone in the glove compartment, when it was really in the back seat of the car. But many times, these false memories can have serious consequences.

The idea of false memories arose in the late 1980’s when psychologists started using memory recovery techniques. Soon after, parents started reporting instances where their children wrongly accused them of childhood sexual abuse. The problem was that these accusations were typically coming from an adult daughter in her 20s and 30s, soon after she started therapy. Therapists justified the Freudian idea of repressed memories– saying that they didn’t remember the events because it was too traumatic for them. But many experts say that the idea of repressed memories has been proven false, which sparked a lot of controversy and debate.

Psychotherapists believed that they could recover repressed memories by inducing hypnotic states with sodium amytal. This is what happened to 19-year-old Holly Ramona, who accused her father of sexual abuse shortly after beginning her therapy for bulimia. Holly recalled that she had vague flashbacks of a man forcing her to perform sexual acts when she began therapy. But according to other therapists, Holly didn’t know it was her father until the doctors had told her about it after she was in the hypnotic state. Expert psychologists who study memory say that “repressed memories” are in no way supported, especially for sexual abuse. Holly’s father eventually came to sue the therapists that worked with his daughter and won the lawsuit, but not before losing his entire family.

False memories can also be a problem when it comes to eyewitness testimony. Since DNA testing became available, The Innocence Project has worked to exonerate wrongfully convicted prisoners. In 75% of the DNA exoneration cases, faulty witness testimony was found to be the cause of wrongful conviction. But it’s not that these witnesses lied under oath with a secret vendetta, it’s because they were misinformed. Misleading information they may have been exposed to, like a misleading question, could have changed their perception of events. The witness, unaware of the change, can easily recount the wrong information as their own experience, sending many innocent people to prison.

False memories can also do some good, by helping those who have had traumatic experiences. Researchers are working on methods to replace traumatic memories with less anxiety provoking ones, to allow the person to cope with their experiences better. This is similar to narrative exposure therapy, which is a type of talk therapy designed to help people learning how to live with PTSD.

False Memories and How They Form

Kendra Cherry, MS, is an author and educational consultant focused on helping students learn about psychology.

Most of us like to believe that we have a reasonably good memory. Sure, we might forget where we left our car keys once in a while and of course, we have all forgotten someone’s name, an important phone number, or maybe even the date of our wedding anniversary. But when it comes to remembering the important things, like a cherished childhood event, our memories are accurate and trustworthy, right?

Overview

While we might liken our memories to a camera, preserving every moment in perfect detail exactly as it happened, the sad fact is that our memories are more like a collage, pieced together sometimes crudely with the occasional embellishment or even outright fabrication.

Recent research has helped demonstrate just how fragile human memory can be. We are frighteningly susceptible to errors, and subtle suggestions can trigger false memories.

Surprisingly, people with exceptional memories are still susceptible to making things up without even realizing it.

Research

In one famous experiment carried out in 1995, memory expert Elizabeth Loftus was able to get 25% of her participants to believe a false memory that they were once lost in a shopping mall as a child.   Another 2002 study revealed that half of participants could be led to wrongly believe that they had once taken a hot air balloon ride as a child simply by showing them manipulated photo «evidence.» 

Most of the time, these false memories are centered on things that are fairly mundane or inconsequential. Simple, everyday events that have few real consequences.

But sometimes these false memories can have serious or even devastating consequences. A false memory relayed during criminal testimony might lead to an innocent person being convicted of a crime. Clearly, false memory has the potential to be a serious problem, but why exactly do these incorrect memories form?

Inaccurate Perception

Human perception isn’t perfect. Sometimes we see things that aren’t there and miss obvious things that are right in front of us. In many cases, false memories form because the information is not encoded correctly in the first place.   For example, a person might witness an accident but not have a clear view of everything that happened.

Recounting the events that occurred can be difficult or even impossible since they did not actually witness all of the details. A person’s mind might fill in the «gaps» by forming memories that did not actually occur.

Inference

In other cases, old memories and experiences compete with newer information.   Sometimes it is old memories that interfere or alter our new memories, and in other instances, new information can make it difficult to remember previously stored information. As we are piecing old information back together, there are sometimes holes or gaps in our memory.

Our minds try to fill in the missing spaces, often using current knowledge as well as beliefs or expectations.

For example, you can probably distinctly remember where you were and what you were doing during the terrorist attacks of 9/11. While you probably feel like your memories of the event are pretty accurate, there is a very strong chance that your recollections have been influenced by subsequent news coverage and stories about the attacks.

This newer information might compete with your existing memories of the event or fill in missing bits of information.

Emotions

If you’ve ever tried to recall the details of an emotionally-charged event (e.g., an argument, an accident, a medical emergency), you probably realize that emotions can wreak havoc on your memory. Sometimes strong emotions can make an experience more memorable, but they can sometimes lead to mistaken or untrustworthy memories.

Researchers have found that people tend to be more likely to remember events connected to strong emotions, but that the details of such memories are often suspect. Retelling important events can also lead to a false belief in the accuracy of the memory.

One 2008 study found that negative emotions, in particular, were more likely to lead to the formation of false memories.   Other studies have suggested that this false memory effect has less to do with negative emotions and more to do with arousal levels.

A 2007 study found that false memories were significantly more frequent during periods of high arousal than during periods of low arousal, regardless of whether the mood was positive, negative, or neutral. 

Misinformation

Sometimes accurate information gets mixed with incorrect information, which then distorts our memories for events. Loftus has been studying false memories since the 1970s and her work has revealed the serious consequences that misinformation can have on memory. In her studies, participants were shown images of a traffic accident. 

When questioned about the event after seeing the images, the interviewers included leading questions or misleading information. When the participants were later tested on their memory of the accident, those who had been fed misleading information were more likely to have false memories of the event.

The serious potential impact of this misinformation effect can be easily seen in the area of criminal justice, where mistakes can literally mean the difference between life and death. Brainerd and Reyna (2005) suggest that false recollections during the interrogation process are the leading cause of false convictions. 

Misattribution

Have you ever mixed up the details of one story with the details of another? For example, while telling a friend about your last vacation you might mistakenly relate an incident that happened on a vacation you took several years ago.

This is an example of how misattribution can form false memories. This might involve combining elements of different events into one cohesive story, misremembering where you obtained a particular piece of information, or even recalling imagined events from your childhood and believing that they are real.

Fuzzy Tracing

When forming a memory, we don’t always focus on the nitty-gritty details and instead remember an overall impression of what happened. Fuzzy trace theory suggests that we sometimes make verbatim traces of events and other times make only gist traces. Verbatim traces are based on the real events as they actually happened, while gist traces are centered on our interpretations of events.

How does this explain false memories? Sometimes how we interpret information does not accurately reflect what really happened. These biased interpretations of events can lead to false memories of the original events.

Final Thoughts

While researchers are still learning more about the mechanisms behind how false memories form, it is clear that false memory is something that can happen to virtually anyone. These memories can range from the trivial to the life-altering, from the mundane to the potentially fatal.

«Nearly two decades of research on memory distortion leaves no doubt that memory can be altered via suggestion,» wrote Loftus and Pickerell in a seminal 1995 article. 

«People can be led to remember their past in different ways, and they even can be led to remember entire events that never actually happened to them. When these sorts of distortions occur, people are sometimes confident in their distorted or false memories, and often go on to describe the pseudomemories in substantial detail. These findings shed light on cases in which false memories are fervently held—as in when people remember things that are biologically or geographically impossible.»

Should it be Illegal to alter Someones Memories? [closed]

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This is the next part of my Direct Neural Link tech series (Original question here The legality of Direct Neural Link Technology) the previous question was about how to prevent someone from hijacking someone’s cybernetic implants to commit murder. This time the question is about something deeper and darker. Memory alteration.

We see this all the time in speculative fiction, deleting short-term memories, implanting fake memories, copying and storing memories, wipe memories clean even complete personality re-writes.

Now the benefits this tech provides, such as helping those with PTSD, or reforming criminals are barely talked about and I think that is because this application of DNL tech has the most potential for abuse. After all, memory is arguably what makes us who we are, we need our memories in order to make decisions in our daily lives, we make mistakes and learn from them. So if the technology exists where memories could be altered or even outright erased, what safeguards can put in place? If the government-controlled it what’s to stop them from using it as a punishment for criminals? What’s to stop some street gangs from getting their hands on the tech and using it to make willing slaves? What if instead of just killing a witness to a crime, you just erase the memory of it ever happening? Or make it so they can’t go to the police because the witness was implanted with the memory of them commuting the murder?

This tech may lead to a world where the classical assurance, “I think therefore I am,” is answered with the disturbing question, “how are you so sure they’re your thoughts?” And I think I am not alone in the fears of this application of the tech because a video game was made showing that this tech is nothing short of dangerous, which ironically given its name and subject matter, was forgotten (check this trailer out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk_rsCZxgyM) Personally I think that while DNL tech might be welcomed, this application is better off theoretical and maybe even illegal.

So here is the question: Would the threats of Memory alteration be enough to outlaw the tech that would make it possible?

5 Answers 5

This is a very difficult question to answer. Personally, I’m of the belief that the whole field of ‘mind magic’ inherently aligns itself with «evil», especially since its most powerful applications can easily manipulate someone’s free will, ability to consent, and identity even as a side-effect.

It’s widely accepted that memories make us who we are and steer decision-making. Let me give a hypothetical example:

I want to remove my memories of a war experience where I killed multiple enemy combatants with a knife. Occasionally, I wake up with cold sweats from the nightmares of that moment. Sometimes, when I’m washing my hands it feels like the blood just won’t wash off. I figure, my life would be better off if I didn’t remember that terrible day, and all the nightmares it’s spawned since.

I consult with some doctors, talk it over with my friends and family, and finally go to the psychosurgeon. There, we review the memories I’d like to get rid of, and after being witnessed and recorded I sign notarized papers. Then the memories are removed.

After the procedure, I feel different. I feel great. I look back, and wonder what was so terrible that it was keeping me down all the time. This gets me curious. What did I miss? I know it was apparently terrible enough for me to get it removed, but how bad could it be? I’ve watched plenty of graphic movies, I’m not scared of gore. I watch the video I made for myself before I went into the procedure, and I’m confused. I say I killed multiple people with a knife. Who is this person? I don’t recognize them, even though they’re apparently me.

Months, maybe years pass, and all the while this nagging part of my brain won’t shut up. I know that there’s a part of me; a part of my experience that I gave up. What was it? Am I still the same person? If I had the memories back, would I do it again?

In this example, the person is different than they were before. Removing the memory, even though it was terrible and they wanted it gone, changed the personality, identity, and worldview.

All that said, to actually answer your question, memory manipulation is too useful a technology to pass up. People developed the atomic bomb among all sorts of potentially horrendous technologies, despite extreme push back. History has shown time and time again that fighting technological progress is futile in the long run.

Human memory: How we make, remember, and forget memories

Human memory happens in many parts of the brain at once, and some types of memories stick around longer than others.

From the moment we are born, our brains are bombarded by an immense amount of information about ourselves and the world around us. So, how do we hold on to everything we’ve learned and experienced? Memories.

Humans retain different types of memories for different lengths of time. Short-term memories last seconds to hours, while long-term memories last for years. We also have a working memory, which lets us keep something in our minds for a limited time by repeating it. Whenever you say a phone number to yourself over and over to remember it, you’re using your working memory.

Another way to categorize memories is by the subject of the memory itself, and whether you are consciously aware of it. Declarative memory, also called explicit memory, consists of the sorts of memories you experience consciously. Some of these memories are facts or “common knowledge”: things like the capital of Portugal (Lisbon), or the number of cards in a standard deck of playing cards (52). Others consist of past events you’ve experienced, such as a childhood birthday.

Nondeclarative memory, also called implicit memory, unconsciously builds up. These include procedural memories, which your body uses to remember the skills you’ve learned. Do you play an instrument or ride a bicycle? Those are your procedural memories at work. Nondeclarative memories also can shape your body’s unthinking responses, like salivating at the sight of your favorite food or tensing up when you see something you fear.

Your Memory Under Stress

In general, declarative memories are easier to form than nondeclarative memories. It takes less time to memorize a country’s capital than it does to learn how to play the violin. But nondeclarative memories stick around more easily. Once you’ve learned to ride a bicycle, you’re not likely to forget.

The types of amnesia

To understand how we remember things, it’s incredibly helpful to study how we forget—which is why neuroscientists study amnesia, the loss of memories or the ability to learn. Amnesia is usually the result of some kind of trauma to the brain, such as a head injury, a stroke, a brain tumor, or chronic alcoholism.

There are two main types of amnesia. The first, retrograde amnesia, occurs where you forget things you knew before the brain trauma. Anterograde amnesia is when brain trauma curtails or stops someone’s ability to form new memories.

The most famous case study of anterograde amnesia is Henry Molaison, who in 1953 had parts of his brain removed as a last-ditch treatment for severe seizures. While Molaison—known when he was alive as H.M.—remembered much of his childhood, he was unable to form new declarative memories. People who worked with him for decades had to re-introduce themselves with every visit.

By studying people such as H.M., as well as animals with different types of brain damage, scientists can trace where and how different kinds of memories form in the brain. It seems that short-term and long-term memories don’t form in exactly the same way, nor do declarative and procedural memories.

There’s no one place within the brain that holds all of your memories; different areas of the brain form and store different kinds of memories, and different processes may be at play for each. For instance, emotional responses such as fear reside in a brain region called the amygdala. Memories of the skills you’ve learned are associated with a different region called the striatum. A region called the hippocampus is crucial for forming, retaining, and recalling declarative memories. The temporal lobes, the brain regions that H.M. was partially missing, play a crucial role in forming and recalling memories.

How memories are formed, stored, and recalled

Since the 1940s scientists have surmised that memories are held within groups of neurons, or nerve cells, called cell assemblies. Those interconnected cells fire as a group in response to a specific stimulus, whether it’s your friend’s face or the smell of freshly baked bread. The more the neurons fire together, the more the cells’ interconnections strengthen. That way, when a future stimulus triggers the cells, it’s more likely that the whole assembly fires. The nerves’ collective activity transcribes what we experience as a memory. Scientists are still working through the details of how it works.

For a short-term memory to become a long-term memory, it must be strengthened for long-term storage, a process called memory consolidation. Consolidation is thought to take place by several processes. One, called long-term potentiation, consists of individual nerves modifying themselves to grow and talk to their neighboring nerves differently. That remodeling alters the nerves’ connections in the long term, which stabilizes the memory. All animals that have long-term memories use this same basic cellular machinery; scientists worked out the details of long-term potentiation by studying California sea slugs. However, not all long-term memories necessarily have to start as short-term memories.