When Dr. Julia Shaw talks about hacking memory - she’s not talking about stealing our information. In fact, the scientist, psychologist and senior lecturer at London South Bank University is referring to how we can change memories, or at least make sure no-one else changes our own while boosting what we remember.
“It's the idea that someone could go into your memory - or you yourself could go into your own memory - and manipulate it.”
At WIRED Next Generation, Shaw explained that a memory is "a network in the brain. When you look for a memory you send a little probe into your brain to find the memory, spreading activation."
An easy way to think about this is by imaging the brain as a galaxy and the memory network is made up of stars that are constantly moving.
The connection between stars can easily be distorted and broken, which is what happens when we forget something. "Maybe you forget a detail, or you add in a detail when someone mentions it to you. These connections change all the time," explained Shaw.
When we think of memories, it's usually in reference to our personal experiences, but the quality of memories can have implications in politics and even criminal cases. When it comes to manipulating people’s memories, changing what people remember can have real-life implications. “The biggest way to hack someone’s memory is to get someone to confuse their memory so to get them to repeatedly picture something happening that didn’t. If you do that, you can make people think they did things that never happened.”
So how do you stop someone corrupting your memory? “If you can understand how to manipulate it you can also harness it.”
Make a big memory trace: Try to think of what it feels like to be there, what it looks like to be there, what it smells like to be there. What are you feeling right now? Get a multisensory experience that you can put down in the brain that’s as large as possible.
Write things down: Realise how fallible memory is, and that you’re going to overestimate remembering things in the future, and make notes as quickly as possible and without anyone else, so your memories haven’t been corrupted by other people’s stories.
Make it weird: Try to make associations between things that aren’t normal. Make the memory weird and exceptional. Your memory is better at remembering exceptional things because you’re engaging with the information for longer.
Memory manipulation is happening everyday and it’s been happening for a while - particularly when it comes to selling products. “Advertising’s purpose is to create associations that aren’t actually there,” continued Shaw.
“It’s linking Coca-Cola to happiness; it’s linking a product to something with an emotion that isn’t normally linked with that product. That, subsequently, influences your consumer decision making.”
In fact, we’re seeing it today in modern politics, and it’s not something to take lightly. “Trump is currently doing this: it’s called nostalgia when he says things like ‘Remember the good old days!’
“What [politicans] are harnessing is this notion that they know you’re not going to remember anything. They know it’s easy to get people to misremember, and to only focus on what it is they want you to focus on.
“There’s certainly real implications of distorting people’s memories and their processes. This can have implications for political decision making; implications for war - usually in the form of propaganda. Showcasing all the ‘great’ things that happened in the past as opposed to showcasing the past as it really was.”
Shaw works with police officers and the military to educate them on how not to accidentally convince people that they did things that never happened.
"Just by asking leading questions or suggesting you know what happens, it can get people to incriminate themselves," said Shaw. "This means we need to be careful about memories and the flexible process they are used within the criminal justice system."
It may sound scary that police officers can 'hack' our memories and change the way we remember things, but memory scientists like Shaw are looking for the positive ways this can be used.
"Hopefully we can soon delete and replace memories," Shaw explained, for people who have experienced trauma. "It's not just implanting memories, but also taking stuff away and changing it for the better."
Experiments such as this have been successfully carried out in mice and poses an interesting future for memory hacking.
Be cautious: If it is important to specifically remember something, think about where did this come from?
Be curious: Other people get things wrong about their memories, so ask them where they came from.
Be kind: Just because someone says something that isn't true, doesn't mean they're lying. They could simply have a false memory.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
