Marit Sloin, Haaretz, Walla News
A tense silence prevailed in the auditorium of the University of Haifa, when Prof. Elizabeth Loftus, an expert on human memory, explained with tearful eyes the doubts she had when she was asked to testify in the Damianiuk case. "Mark O'Connor, Demjanjuk's defense attorney, called me and told me: 'You are the world's greatest expert in memory based on eyewitness testimony, and without your testimony an innocent man will be sentenced to death.' I felt like I was being torn apart. On the one hand, I was psychology professor Elizabeth Loftus, an expert in evidence analysis, who analyzed hundreds of cases presented in courts. I wanted to say 'yes of course I will take the case'. I knew the lawsuit was based on 35-year-old memories. If these memories are to be believed, John Demjanjuk will be found guilty and sentenced to death. But within me still lived Bat Loftus, who was born Bat Fishman, the granddaughter of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Romania, who at the age of five broke down in tears when the neighbor boy mocked her last name. Bat Fishman, as a teenager I was told that my boyfriend broke up with me because I was Jewish. I sent him a letter and wrote: 'I am only half Jewish.' This lie makes me feel terrible to this day. Which of my parents did I deny at such a low price?
"I have testified in hundreds of cases where eyewitness testimony was essential, but when I imagined myself giving such testimony in the Ivan the Terrible case, I felt terrible. It looks like an attack on all those who miraculously survived Treblinka and now hope they will be believed." Loftus refused to testify at Demjanjuk's trial. She flew to Israel and was present at part of the trial. Now, 17 years later, she received an honorary doctorate from Haifa University.
Prof. Loftus is one of the most important researchers in the world in the field of human memory, especially on the subject of the validity of legal evidence based on memory. She published 20 books and more than 400 articles, which became part of the classics of psychology. Her research shows that human memory can be biased by influences such as questions from an interviewer or lawyer and by planting experiences that did not happen. Her research on repressed memories, false memories and the reliability of reconstructed eyewitness accounts had a great impact on the admissibility of evidence in the legal system. She was an expert witness and consultant in many trials, participated in public and governmental committees in the fields of psychology, law and society in the United States and Canada, and advised legal entities in other countries in America and Asia, including Israel. She was ranked 58th in the list of the 100 most important psychologists of the 20th century, and is the first woman on this list. She recently won the prestigious Gromeyer award.
Already while at the university, Loftus began conducting experiments in which she showed people simulations of crime and accidents, and asked them questions, some of which were based on false facts. "Hundreds of such experiments have shown that when people are provided with false information, especially when they are in court or in press coverage of a certain event, they can distort facts without recognizing it," she says.
"In the 90s, when I saw people reporting extraordinary memories, those who said they were raped or saw the devil, I wondered if it wasn't a suggestion planted in them by the psychotherapist, because they were all in therapy. Then I tried to implant in people foreign memories of things that happened to them in their childhood, and indeed we made them believe that. Not only did we change details, but we implanted in their knowledge various events that did not exist and were not created. In the first experiments, for example, we decided to make people believe that they were lost at the age of five in the mall and an older person rescued them."
People forget brutal things that happen to them
The method was this: the researchers went to the families of the experiment participants and received details of the person's past, and later told each of the participants details from their childhood - three real events and one fake. After three interviews, it became clear that a quarter of the participants believed that the fictitious event actually happened in their childhood. "The 'memory' was so detailed that people even 'remembered' what the person who saved them looked like," says Loftus.
Loftus was the first to challenge consciousness and personal memories as sacred and invulnerable. On the contrary: this field, which is more personal, can also be manipulated. Since then she has been trying to understand the place in the mind where facts and imagination meet, reality and its distortion, with the final product being the "truth". She challenges Freud's theory of repressed memory, according to which the mind represses the traumatic memories in the subconscious and they can be extracted from there with the techniques of psychoanalysis. "The repressed memory theory allows thousands of people to sue their parents and doctors for failed treatment," she says. According to Loftus, memory is not a reproduction of the past, but a reconstruction of an event based on the memory encoded in the brain and information acquired after the event, for example by guiding questions, or implanting events of entire memories. "Memories are stored in the brain and can deteriorate over time. It could be a memory that doesn't always come back, or a painful memory, but it's not something new that a person suddenly discovers."
Not all psychologists agree with you. In this regard, psychologists are divided into two camps, for and against. "Therapists think that repressed memories do exist without any scientific proof and this is constantly used as admissible evidence in court," says Loftus. "I believe that before putting people in prison, additional proof is needed. I fight for it in court in many cases." She appeared in hundreds of trials, including the OJ Simpson trials, in an attempt to show that eyewitness testimony can be distorted for various reasons without the subject himself being aware of it, and raised the problem of the inadmissibility of eyewitness testimony to the awareness of the legal system and society. Out of the hundreds of trials she participated in, she mentions two that were widely publicized.
In the fall of 1989, Holly Ramona, an 18-year-old girl, began studying at a university in California. She was bulimic and depressed and was looking for a therapist. At the first meeting with the therapist, Ramona and her mother were told that 80-70% of bulimia cases are caused by childhood sexual abuse. During therapy and with the therapist's encouragement, Holly began to remember repeated incidents of being sexually abused by her father. In an interview with a psychiatrist of the hospital where she was hospitalized, she repeated these events that happened to her, according to her, from the age of 5 to 16. Her father, a wealthy company manager, denied everything. Following the incident, his wife divorced him and he was fired from his job.
Loftus, with a team of assistants, enlisted to handle the case. In 1994, she convinced the jury that it was Holly's caregivers who created the memories in her and convinced her that they were indeed real. The father was acquitted and received an unprecedented right to sue his daughter's therapist, the psychiatrist who was involved in the interviews and the hospital. "People do forget brutal things that happen to them, it's normal," says Loftus, "but in Ramona's case, something too extreme happened, which will apparently be forgotten in a period of two years. The claim was that she suppressed it, which we don't think. One day we will find proof of this, but you can't put people in prison based on a theory with such limited scientific support. Thousands of families were destroyed as a result of the analysis of the process of repression with psychoanalytical methods."
Are the facts true, or are they the product of a process?
So how do you know what is right and what is wrong? "You have to listen carefully to the facts and from them you can see if they are true, or if they are the product of a process," says Loftus. "Sometimes the geographical facts do not fit, sometimes the psychological facts are wrong. For example, things that happened at the age of one - which is scientifically known to be impossible to remember. The fact that the personal story is detailed or exciting does not mean that it is true. Jurors are affected by all of these, but it is important to know how it happened. The details need to be thoroughly investigated."
"Our memories change all the time, people remember things that didn't happen to them - it's normal. One of my friends says that if you have a problem and you are looking for a solution, the solution is Abuse – A .ABC, that is, you have been abused; Bad – B, you are a bad person; Crazy – C – you are crazy. Most people say they were abused. This is an easy solution, because someone else is to blame for your problems."
Another case that received extensive media coverage was the case of Jane Dow (pseudonym). In 1984, a lawsuit was filed on behalf of six-year-old Dow against her mother, for sexual abuse. The lawsuit was filed during her parents' divorce. The mother lost custody of the girl and she passed to her father and his new wife. A psychiatrist documented the case and recorded an interview with her in which she admits she was abused. Over the years, the girl lost her memory of the abuse, as the psychiatrist documented in another interview. After 11 years I interviewed her again. Now, being 17 years old, she suddenly remembered all the details and episodes she went through. The "repressed memory" people saw this as a classic case of repression, and it was published in the scientific literature with Jane's consent, by the psychiatrist who interviewed her.
Loftus read the article and found the case dubious. It is possible, she surmised, that the father directed the girl to say what she said; that she "forgot" the abuse because it didn't actually happen and that years later she "remembered" false events with the encouragement of the expert who interviewed her. Loftus and her colleagues began looking for evidence of abuse beyond Jane's testimony. They examined documents and interviewed the key players in the case, including the biological mother and the stepmother. In the end they concluded that the abuse never happened and that the "memories" were false.
Advertisement In response, Jane Dow sued Loftus for invasion of privacy. Whereas the university that employed her confiscated the material she collected and forbade her to speak or publish about it. Loftus was forced to resign and in the summer of 2002 she published, together with her colleagues, an article about their findings in the journal "Skeptical Inquirer", under the provocative title "Who Abused Jane Dow".
Loftus continues to fight and expands her research on implanting memories. In recent studies she has shown that it is possible to manipulate food preferences by implanting false memories of foods that previously caused health problems. From here she already sails to ideas about "convincing" people to avoid fattening food with this technique.
Research: Sleep helps consolidate human memory
Wednesday, June 15, 2005, 20:18 By: Reuters, Walla system!
The researchers discovered a lot of activity in the center of the brain that is responsible for automatic actions in the participants who slept well (photo illustration). The researchers compared the ability to quickly navigate a virtual city with and without sleep. Our brains seem to be hard at work organizing information while our bodies are resting
Our bodies may be resting while we sleep, but new research points to new evidence that our brains are hard at work while we snore. According to the research, it seems that sleep helps to consolidate the memory, so that it will be available throughout the waking hours. The results of the study were reported at the Human Brain Mapping Association conference held recently in Toronto.
Dr. Pierre Orban and his colleagues from the University of Liege in Belgium made a comparison between the brain function of people who slept well and people who slept poorly. In the experiment, 22 volunteers were asked to queue up a virtual city on the computer for half an hour. After an "acquaintance tour of the city", the participants were asked to locate certain places within 30 seconds. During the quick search, the brain activity of the participants was measured using an FMRI device, which produces an image of brain activity using magnetic resonance.
Advertisement The following night, 12 of the participants were sent home to sleep normally, while the other 12 participants remained in the laboratory and were not allowed to sleep. A few days later, after all the participants had already gotten a good night's sleep in their beds, the researchers administered another quick orientation test to the participants and their brain activity was measured again.
Compared to the sleep-deprived subjects, those who slept well showed greater activity in a region of the brain known as the caudate nucleus. The researchers claim that this finding indicates that for those who sleep well, navigating the city has become a more automatic action - such as coordination or moving body parts, functions that are also controlled by the same nucleus in the brain. The study reinforces evidence that sleep helps the brain reorganize the information fed into it during the day.
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