[One Sip of a Book] Stolen Brain... 7 Types of Brain Errors

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An El Al cargo plane collided with an 11-story apartment building, killing 39 residents and 4 crew members. Ten months later, psychologists conducted psychological tests on college students. When given leading questions, 65% described the accident scene as if they had seen footage of the accident that never existed. This is a memory error. The author, a psychologist, analyzes errors such as memory decay, confusion, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence through such cases. This book explores why memory is imperfect and how these memories can lead us into trouble.

In the early 1990s, Charles Thompson, a psychologist at Kansas State University in the United States, and his colleagues conducted research on memory with college students. The students recorded special events that happened each day in a diary throughout the semester. Their forgetting did not occur rapidly, but the forgetting curve for everyday events was generally similar to the forgetting curves observed by other researchers in laboratory settings. The students Thompson studied recorded special events and tried not to forget them. Among these experiences, some were relatively more important or less important. There were few personally meaningful events, and most were everyday experiences. There were also research results related to annual events that many people attach great significance to, such as Thanksgiving dinner, which proved that personally important events are not exempt from the decay characteristic of Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve. ---From Chapter 1: Memory Decays

Although we cannot fully understand this phenomenon, this discovery allowed us to identify the most bizarre misattribution, the ‘Fregoli Syndrome.’ In 1927, French psychiatrists P. Courbon and G. Fail described a patient who believed himself to be a ‘victim of enemies.’ This patient believed that two French actresses were persecuting him. The two doctors named this syndrome after the Italian actor Leopoldo Fregoli, who entertained Parisian audiences at the time by impersonating other people. Fregoli Syndrome is characterized by a strong belief that a stranger embodies a friend, relative, or celebrity. Patients such as British photographers generally feel familiarity toward strangers, but those with Fregoli Syndrome suffer from specific false memories. Fregoli Syndrome is usually found in psychiatric patients, but recently neurologists and neuropsychologists have reported cases where it appeared after brain injury in people without psychiatric history. ---From Chapter 4: Memory Causes Misattribution

Stereotype bias has even created memories in people of having heard the names of non-existent Black criminals. Mahzarin Banaji, a psychology professor at Harvard University, and her colleagues showed college students several male names, subtly suggesting that some of these names might be familiar because they were names of criminals recently featured in the media. In reality, none of the names belonged to criminals, but the students identified typical Black names (Tyrone Washington, Darnell Jones) as criminals nearly twice as often as typical White names (Adam McCarthy, Frank Smith). This bias appeared even when participants were instructed, “Racists identify Black names more often than White names. So do not consider the race of the name when making judgments.” ---From Chapter 6: Memory Is Biased

Stolen Brain | Written by Daniel Schacter | Translated by Hong Boram | Inmulgwasa Publications | 444 pages | 23,000 KRW