Our memories shape our personalities continually day in day out. 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 dogs side to memory images and details stored camera become distorted. One of the things that we havent learned about memory is it doesnt work like a video tape recording its more like a with the p. T. A play 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 order 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 unreliable 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. At them from a nuclear. Force midway in your life. Or what i do. Of course we dont do that. 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 world of false memories. To find out more about how reliable our memories can be we visit the university of california irvine near los angeles. This cow looks like something out of a hollywood film bought it 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 being added have a sense they believe that all memories are suspect particularly those from childhood. If youre especially fond of those recollections you may find her comments distressing. When i look at this one i can see that i am with my baby brother and he was born that so maybe i was two years older 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 but i dont know if a 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 new nation 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. 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. 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 had 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 on them or 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 the final year here you even read a little rushes through. The whole text is false but it is definitely not a disney character 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 seat 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. Walk 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 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 works brain of course is an enormously complex organ. Scientists are only now starting to learn how the brain functions every sensory experience is stored there. 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. All 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 come drop folks memories. 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. Of the university have 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 them. Calls this the hamas a fisherman syndrome. Or quality showing. 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 republicans see he knows the difference between the reality and the exaggeration bruce like twenty centimeters goes into his long term memory model damn it was one of them something that. Going some improves only money if someone asks him a week later about a sketch he recalls twenty centimeters equal and since hes from i say he now says thirty centimeters implicitly he stores that in his long term memory to the fullest so his account develops over time and looks good at the business hes sick of in evolution. Pulled this you every time the memory is 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 if 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 you tell us who are who so that when information comes into the brain its consolidated into a memory of unease and in two thousand we discover 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 on the walk it was reviewed and so there is a point in time at which memories can be altered this new but that when we hear. This process takes place some consciously 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 they are telling the truth about faulty witness accounts of 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. What a love fest 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 the halls and hear the witness who called the ambulance to the saudis no youll be interviewed by the police guess it was all told by the saudis the police Michele Macneill took a bottle id like you to give me a description of the perpetrator the man who shot the woman. One of them. Wont do it in the heart of it he had short brown hair. I admit i didnt pay any attention to what he was wearing. And he had an all of complection. And thats how many gunshots did you see or hear. Do you have someone who came in and fight. Ok was there a break between the shots well you know it was like this bang bang. Moment patrick count 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 texts like black jacket jeans that said to me. That janes i 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. That tells you what out 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 makes memories with stereotypes and prejudices do you know its full. Color suspect. Upset if the suspect has a gun and is aiming it at the victim we focus on the weapon the little stream lets focus on thats what gets our attention so the witness ignores the other sensory information such as what the suspect looks like a suspect. And then was. In effect on the brain doesnt have time to save everything when were processing data our consciousness and our experiences. Prejudices intervened quickly yes and 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 wrongs than human brains do the research is are trying to find out how fruit flies do more with less brainpower. 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 mode trying to motorola 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 life. You can call it this is like a fly school say for example this room test flight memory and you can call it the examination room of the sox 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 idea so many different students that for example this one very important this is the flight where we create an artificial. Professional leads his wing students through a comprehensive program of course work and. This is the teaching machine and he has to fly so i flights and collect ice and bring them into the choice of training to which is here. Now i blow the. Training to. Fly ok now all flights receive an ordeal. And then the shock. Flies are receiving an auto with electric shock at the same time so this becomes life may form a memory. That. I take up to flights like this. And bring them into the choice test tube. So the flies are here and then i bring the flies into the choice point by moving this machine. The right chamber has an odor thats associated with an electric shock. The left chamber does not. Know all flies and making choices and if they remember which is punished with electric shock they should avoid this ordeal consequently you can find more flies in the other arm of the maze. The flies make the connection between the odor and the shock and then avoid that chamber. The experience of the electric shock can be stored in a flys memory for a week or more. Its memory capacity is rudimentary to be sure but its robust and easy to measure. For. Scientists who 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 twenty 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. What is 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 moto 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. So 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 this node tries to get away from a. Professor turn him otoh 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 a basic mechanism and a mechanism that drives associative memory and we humans for example. Use this isolation to marry there very often so this is a very important component of the brain function in all brains. And all thats why we think that this simple neck and its and we have fall and maybe a couple on t. V. And comparable on the. When researches hacked directly into the mural and so test animals in the now they are working with one of the fundamental principles of the memory process association. 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. Caterine 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 Leonardo Dicaprio plays a professional thief who has the ability to infiltrate a person subconscious mind to steal information. But look at the signal it could be the cell were looking for. There are some discharges thats the right place. If there was a lot identified a place selling cause its me ok lets simulate it ok. But its not easy to plant an idea in someones brain before bench anon and his team can hack into this mouse his 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 that specialize in spatial memory functions a sort of internal Navigation System the research is called these neurons play cells. They use this device to follow the neurons activity. Here we can follow the mouses movements in real time is the sound you hear is neuron activity we know that theres a neuron discharge when the mouse is at a specific location. The place cells taken together create a kind of cognitive map in the brain phone with the mouse arrived at a particular location certain neurons discharge. It takes five to ten minutes to create a play cell map. Then it serves as a memory image of the mouse around it looks at the phone the. Police will. You know only if we believe that a neuron discharges when the mouse is at a certain place or thinks he has a particular high peak with weve also found that the same neuron 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. Telling. 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 mass is dreaming about the place that contains the orange block on the left. Then they place a second electrode in the root would center of the masses brain and the mass dreams about th