Our memories shape our personalities continually day and. Memories help us to develop as human beings over the course of time memory reminds us at every moment who we are by bringing the past to the surface but there is also a dark side to memory images and details stored that cam become distorted. One of the things that we have learned about memory is it doesnt work like a video tape recorder its more like a wicca p. D. Update you can go in there and you can edit. The dense labyrinth of neurons in our brain is still a mystery scientists are trying to unlock it secrets in. Ordered to modify a particular memory or church or even artificially we need two things first we need to be able to find the memory in the brain and second we need to be able to manipulate memories are often on reliable and impressionable and todays scientists are actually able to manipulate them to call us whom we can make memories pleasant or unpleasant while people sleep. Probably create a peaceful force moved in yet. Another one for sure. Of course. Should we be worried about these sorts of experiments how reliable are the memories that we value the most im why does our brain come up with these alternative versions of reality. Welcome to the womb and false memories. To find out more about how reliable our memories can beam we visit the university of california irvine near los angeles. This cow looks like something out of a hollywood film pot and belongs to a renowned memory research. Professor Elizabeth Loftus was the first to start studying the phenomena of false memory in one thousand nine hundred seventy phone she and her team of be knighted have a sense they believe that all memories are suspect particularly those from early childhood. If youre especially fond of those recollections you may find her comments distressing. When i look at this when i can see that i am with my baby brother and he was born that so maybe i was two years old or two and a half years old and i just dont have any any memory of that. And then here i can see that im with my two brothers and my cousin and i dont know if thats my earliest memory or not i. Well people. As adults do not have Reliable Concrete memories for things that occurred in the first couple of years of life there is a phenomenon called childhood amnesia and most psychologists would put the offset of childhood and newly nisha at about maybe age three or so the brain is continuing to develop and you need sufficient Brain Development to store long lasting memories and maybe that happens at about age three. But where do those images come from simple we just make them up as we look through the family photo album or hear stories from our parents and as unpleasant as it may sound even recent memories are shot through with an accuracy fabrications errors and details that were added later. Loftus decided to find out where these false memories come from by conducting a series of tests. During these tests she deliberately used false information to create false memories she calls this the bugs bunny effect. To qualify to take part in the tests the subjects have to have visited disneyland when they were children. So the first survey we have you doing is just kind of like a Quality Survey for disneyland were just interested in hearing about any of your experiences at disney so have you read through this advertisement and then when you finish reading it next button should appear down here and you can just continue. For him on. The spot but youre here or you would even drown a little russians through whom you. Think. The whole text is false bugs bunny is definitely not a disney character and based on this false information the subject responds to questions about her visit to disneyland. Ok so we can walk outside. And then you can just have a see over here. We showed you an advertisement for disney and it featured bugs bunny and then we asked you if you remembered interacting with certain characters while at disneyland you know you said that you met bugs bunny at disneyland the bugs bunny is a Warner Brothers character bugs bunny has never been at disneyland so thats just an example of how by even giving people just the smallest suggestion right just by showing them an image of bugs bunny in an advertisement we can make them remember something that were sure never happened yes its like planting false memory right right when we succeeded in getting people who said oh yeah i remember i met bugs bunny i shook his hand i touched his tail i heard him say whats up. Mark we knew they had to be remembering something that was false. The bugs bunny effect is rather common even our most personal memories can be manipulated as well now see in the balloon experiment. For photos from one family of happy occasions when the test subject was young except one picture has been manipulated it shows the test subject as a child in a hot air balloon with his father. One subject in three claimed to remember this event. Some even describe the weather on that fictional day. I mean there is a lot of fiction that sprinkled in between maybe those otherwise basically authentic memories and it it makes people uncomfortable to think to think that that they cant count on their own memories. Everyone has false memories there are no exceptions the explanation lies in the way that our brain work brain of course is an enormously complex organ. Scientists are only now starting to learn how the brain functions every sensory experience is stored that. The storage area is called the hippocampus a true warehouse of our perception the hippocampus processes information and then distributes it to the brains memory banks the research into this process has proven difficult. Data is stored in more or less interconnected neuron packets one. Well memories look like after theyve gone through a lapse where are they finally stored. Thats what the research is trying to find that. The hippocampus can also work in reverse when we recall something into activates the memory neurons and projects the memory into our consciousness. This is a very subtle process. Its also faulty it can play tricks on us and even conjure up false memories. And how is it possible that over the course of millions of years humans have not been able to develop a reliable memory mechanism after all computers can store vast quantities of data on human simply condemned to go through life with a faulty memory bank. At the university of to lose in france pascal ruling has been studying the mechanisms that cause these problems hes found out that we can alter our memories just by retrieving. A causes them os a fisherman syndrome. Or politician. Lets say a fisherman has caught a fish thats ten centimeters long as it is and he makes a mental note of the size if someone asks him about it the next day he may exaggerate a little since hes from i say so he says twenty centimeters republican says he knows the difference between the reality and the exaggeration brutha twenty centimeters goes into his long term memory model damn unpleasant of that something that. Coincident its only money if someone asks him a week later about his catch he recalls twenty centimeters equal and since hes from i say he now says thirty centimeters implicitly stores that in his long term memory to the fullest so his account develops over time looks good but there is always hes sick of an evil. Well chris you every time the memories reactivated we add a detail or two you know so that the final version of the story evolves into something quite different from the original you know the state clinton show. Every time we recall something that happened to us we may change our account slightly fifteen years ago and other research has discovered the mechanism thats responsible for that phenomena. When a memory is recalled it temporarily becomes unstable and therefore it can be changed or else uniform is here. So that when information comes into the brain its consolidated into a memory than you did in two thousand we discovered that when we recall a memory its in an unstable state and new information can be added to it and this revised memory can be consolidated and stored with just like the one it was based on i mean walk us through view and so there is a point in time at which memories can be altered this new but that one would hear. This process takes place some consciousness memories can be changed without has even realizing it. Lets consider the case of a court of law which must rely on the testimony of witnesses. I think the false memory problem in our society is a really big problem and one of the reasons that im convinced of that is in part from the cases of Wrongful Conviction that have now come to light there are hundreds and hundreds of cases of people who have d. N. A. Testing has now been done on their case material and it has proven that theyre actually innocent they they spent ten fifteen twenty years in prison for these crimes that we now know they did not do when you analyze those. Cases what lead to the Wrongful Conviction the major cause is faulty memory. Witnesses may sincerely believe that theyre telling the truth but faulty witness accounts are playing the judicial system since its inception in france theres a course at the National School for the judiciary that teaches students how to properly assess the reliability of witnesses so that they can deal with it properly when they become prosecutors or judges. Here the students play the role of witnesses to a mudda. I. Left thats the end of the film back to the classroom now please to tell the students then break up into small groups each will tell what he or she saw spoke in equals and here the witness who called the Ambulance Team wants to play that is how you know youll be interviewed by the police guess it was a police i was a police Michele Macneill took that before id like you to give me a description of the perpetrator the man who shot the woman. One of them. In the heart of the he had short brown hair. I admit i didnt pay any attention to what he was wearing. And he had an olive complexion. And thats how many gunshots did you see or hear. Do you have someone who came in and fired. Ok was there a break between the shots were you know numbers like this bang bang. Along the path account was pretty accurate but as we will see thats not the case with many of the students some couldnt remember details others embellished their account much. That we have read checks like black jacket jeans that said to me. Like chains are white or black top or gray blue or red bull people said all of skin off african. For some of the witnesses the suspect was of north african origin others said he wore a black jacket none of that corresponds to reality. So what our why did some say a black jacket we get that every year it was actually a red pattern shirt. Psychologist and memory expert romance movie is not surprised by any of this he points out that our brains continue in lead mixed memories with stereotypes and prejudices do you know its full. Color suspect. Sort of it but if the suspect has a gun and is aiming it at the victim we focus on the wet and a little stronger to this thats what gets our attention so the witness ignores the other sensory information such as what the suspect looks like a suspect. In the new wall in effect on the brain doesnt have time to save everything when were processing data our consciousness and our experiences. And prejudices intervene quickly that the us still in one video the perpetrator is a woman. But some witnesses said afterward it was a man. So people can even make mistakes about gender and skin color. The witnesses memories spontaneously replaced missing data with information that made sense to them and corresponded to their experience witness statements are always subjective yet they are a key part of the judicial system. Do we have no other choice but to accept the imperfections of our memories the parts that create errors like weve just seen and rely on prejudice and stereotypes for the time being well just have to live with it the key is to understand how normal human memory actually functions. Researches around the world have been studying even the smallest processes that take place in nerve cells. A group of scientists in sendai japan have been using fruit flies as part of their research. Fruit flies have excellent memories their brains have one hundred thousand times few a new rons than human brains do the research is a trying to find out how fruit flies do more with less brainpower. It to understand human memory its extremely complicated of course and the brain very complicated and the memory we are talking about is also very complicated so all we need a very simple system and thats where fly can contribute the. Professor hero mahtani moto has successfully managed to produce an artificial memory in the brain of a fruit fly. So it may not be that obvious but the flies in the brain and its a very efficient brain and they can form a very good memory. So this is my lab and you can call it this is like a fly school say for example this room we fly memory and you can call it the examination room of the slice i need this room so we teach the fly so its like a classroom of the flies and you can see we have to keep the flies very calm and this is the dormitory of the flies and there are many many mutants so many different students that say for example this one very important this is the flight where we create an artificial. Professional leads his students through a comprehensive program of course work and. This is the teaching machine and he has to fly so i flies and collect ice and bring them into the choice of training too which is here. Now live below the. Training to. Fly ok now flies receive an ordeal. And then do the shock so now flies are feeding. With electric shock at the same time so this becomes life may follow memory. Bad. Luck is over i take up the flies like this. And bring them into the choice test tube. And then i bring the flies into the spine by moving this machine. The right chamber has a node thats associated with an electric shock. The left chamber does not. Now or flies on making choice and if they remember which is punished with a future they should avoid this ordeal consequently you can find more flies in. The maze. The flies make the connection between the odor and the shock and then avoid that chamber. Its memory capacity is rudimentary to be sure but its robust and easy to measure. For for. Scientists to use state of the art microscopes to study how the neurons in a fruit flies brain are activated. By monitoring this display and observing the activity of the brain cells tiny moto is able to determine which of the neurons were involved in identifying the electric shock whats more hes been able to influence the neurons behavior. But its even more striking is that we can manipulate this single neuron in the freedom it behaving flies freely moving. We can block or activate. This very small subset of neurons. In short term to motor has been able to hack into the brain of a fruit fly we can recreate the activity of neurons that have been exposed to electric shock without actually doing any damage to the fly and he is able to do that through genetic manipulation. When the neurons are being externally activated because theyve been exposed to an odor the flies associate that odor with an imaginary electric shock so the yoda serves as a warning signal the odor creates an artificial and traumatic memory despite the fact that Nothing Happened to cause it the manipulation of a few neurons creates the illusion of an electric shock and the unpleasant memory associated with it. Indeed the next time that the fly is exposed to the soda it tries to get away from. Professor tannin moto believes that these artificial memories are not merely an end in themselves but are proof that it takes just a few neurons to create a memory this is the Decisive Development in researching the process of how memory is created to be precise associative memory. We have identified is the basic mechanism mechanism that drives associated memory and we human for example. Used there very often so this is a very important component of the brain function in all brains. And so all thats why we think that this simple neck and its and we have fall and maybe applicable keven comparable to. When researches hacked directly into the murals of test animals in the now theyre working with one of the fundamental principles of the memory process association or other teams of experts have used the same strategy to prove the existence of similar mechanisms in the brain. For example here of the French National center for Scientific Research in paris. Karriem bench and his team discovered that the best time to introduce an artificial memory into a human brain is when the test subject is sleeping that sounds like a scene from the twenty ten film inception of the Ennahda Dicaprio plays a professional thief who has the ability to infiltrate a persons subconscious mind to steal information. Age but look at the signal it could be the cell were looking for the ones who do you know are there some discharges thats the right place. If there was a lot identified a place out because its me ok lets simulate it ok people. But its not easy to plant an idea in someones brain before bench anon and his team can hack into this mouse is dreams they have to find out how his brain works when hes awake. So they installed tiny electrodes in a key area of the brain the hippocampus. The memory cells there specialize in spatial memory functions a sort of internal Navigation System the researches called these neurons play cells. They use this device to follow the neurons activity. Ok or we get less we want to hear we can follow the mouses movements in real time its called all the sound you hear is neuron activity we know that theres a neuron discharge when the mouse is at a specific location. For place else taken together create a kind of cognitive map in the brain and i want to mouse arrived at a particular location certain neurons discharge itself on a one dish out cornea and secondly. It dont know what it takes five or ten minutes to create a play cell map it then it serves as a memory image of the mouse the surroundings whats that got to form a. Lot of the police would. Know only so we believe that a neuron discharges when the mouse is at a certain place or thinks he is. Hyper weve also found that the same air on can discharge when the mouse is asleep and it activates a specific memory and that is when hes dreaming about a place where he was. The researches compadre daytime and nighttime electrical signals to determine how the mouse moves around in his sleep for example they can tell precisely when the mouse is dreaming about the plane the contains the orange glow on the left. Then they place a second electrode in the room would center of the mouse his brain and the mass dreams about the oran