The article "Creating False Memories" by Elizabeth F. Loftus is a very interesting article. Within it, it explains the different in which one can influence the long term memory of the brain. The article portrays many different instances in which people started to believe that they were the victims of traumatic events, although they actually weren't. False memories were actually implanted into many of the subjects" heads, and some of them were influenced so much that they were actually lead to believe that these events happened. Many different experiments were conducted to investigate this phenomenon. The first experiment tried to implant a scenario in which the subjects were made to believe that they were once lost in a mall at an early age, crying, and were comforted by an elderly woman, then eventually reunited with their parents. The second experiment tried to show how experiences that were shared between a child and their parents could also be modified. A third experiment executed a three-stage procedure, they first questioned the subjects about events and asked them to rate on a scale whether an event "definitely did not happen" to whether an event "definitely did happen." The second stage involved asking the subjects two weeks later to imagine different events, where different subjects were asked to imagine different events. Later, the participants were asked to respond to the original list of childhood events, indicating how likely it was that these events actually happened to them. The last experiment to investigate this subject included hypnotizing the participants, and also age-regress them to their day of birth and to ask what they remembered. .
The basic result of these experiments all showed the same idea. All of the experiments conducted were able to manipulate the minds of a significant amount of the participants. Basically, the theory here is that the implantation of false or untrue events are created by combining actual memories with suggestions received from others.
