This is the first article I've read about false memories. I thought I read other articles on the subject, but after reading this one, I remembered the truth.
Wait a minute...
I hope the dependence on witness testimony in court cases is an artifact of the movies and not a practice in real-life. Sure, I'm aware that memory can be manipulated and fallible, but I don't live my life constantly questioning their accuracy or wondering if the few memories I have from childhood are true. I doubt anyone does. Life has enough doubt as it is. But (read this guardedly) most of us can remember a time when we or a friend of ours was positive this happened that way, or we definitely parked here, but it actually happened the other way, or we parked over there.
But occasionally I'll hear of a person wrongly imprisoned, usually based on the testimony of one or two people whose certainty in their false memories swayed a jury, and I wonder how often it happens. Is eyewitness testimony sufficiently doubted in today's judicial system? Should it be trusted at all?
There's no way I'm ending on such a pretentious note. This is one of the quotes from the article:
"In one study published last year, 50% of volunteers were persuaded they had taken a ride in a hot-air balloon when they had not. But when Kathy Pezdek of the Claremont Graduate University, California, tried to make people believe they had received a rectal enema, she met with almost universal resistance."
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