German Researchers Implant and Erase False Memories
Yesterday, you might recall, I blogged an article where gamma wave patterns on electroencephalographs record peculiar patterns when false memories are recalled, and about the potential implications of this research both for the “metaphysics of the mind” so to speak, but also for the possibility of remotely influencing or even remotely causing memory creation or alteration.
Along those lines, K.S. shared another article from RT about similar research being conducted in Germany:
There’s quite a few things that caught my eye in this article, and they’re the subject of today’s high octane speculation. It is to be noted that unlike the research referred to in yesterday’s blog, the techniques involved here do not include any hard technologies, but rather are based entirely on “soft” techniques. Consider the following statements which form the core of today’s speculations:
A team of researchers in Germany has completed successful experiments in which they showcased how false memories can easily be planted and, more importantly, erased, with potentially serious implications for the justice system.
The team, from the University of Hagen, Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien, Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, and the University of Portsmouth conducted a series of memory experiments on volunteers over the course of several sessions.
They wanted to both confirm that it is possible to implant (or incept, if you will) false memories in the mind of a subject using certain psychological techniques and tricks that rely heavily on the power of suggestion through repetition, while also discovering to what extent these memories can be erased.
The researchers then reinforced these false memories in the minds of the participants by asking the volunteers’ parents to play along and claim things happened exactly as described, including the additional, fictional elements.
This process was repeated over the course of multiple sessions to such a degree that many of the participants became convinced the accounts were, in fact, true and thus, a false memory was born.
Now all that remained was to extricate these false memories from the minds of the volunteers, which turned out to be almost as easy as implanting them had been.
They merely asked the volunteers to identify the source of the memory while highlighting the fact that false memories can be created through a process of repeated, elicited recall that itself can become a form of conditioning. (Boldface emphases added)
Note the following implications: (1) repetition, (2) reinforcement of the memory by creation of a false context that include supposedly confirmatory elements or testimonies, and (3) the ability to remove such memories by focusing the victim’s intelligence on the source of the false memories. All of this implies something else, namely (4) the ability to erase real memories using all of the same techniques.
Some people may recognize echoes of the strategies and tactics of Gnosticism that I outlined in my four volume work God, History, and Dialectic (available on Lulu), specifically with respect to the second of the elements mentioned: the creation of false contexts or testimonies giving confirmatory elements.
But what I want to focus upon here for the sake of our high octane speculation are precisely those first two elements, and their fusion with two other elements: mass media, and neuro-linguistic programming. For those familiar with the latter, it is possible to implant behavior patterns or memories by clever manipulation of what we’ll call, for the sake of this speculation, a “deep text”, that is to say, words occurring in a “surface text” that are weighted by reinforcement by some other means, such as a touch or other physical stimulation like a specific sound or tone, and so on.
Thus weighted, these words become part of a “deep text” having little connection to the surface textual context in which they occur, and bearing an entirely different meaning. The ultimate expression of such a technique’s success is to get the victim of the process to start using the same language.
Coupled with the use of such techniques in mass media, it would be possible to create false memories or to erase real ones or otherwise manipulate the mood of individuals. To draw an analogy, it’s like removing an inconvenient picture from the Soviet encyclopedia, not by actually removing the offending picture in the work itself, but rather, in the mind of the reader.
Which brings me to a final implication of this article, namely, the way to counter such manipulation is simply to make the victim aware of the process, and to drive the process back to sources themselves.
Can you say Mandela Effect?
See you on the flip side…
See more here: gizadeathstar.com
Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method
PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company 
incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.
Trackback from your site.
That’s Y
| #
I forgot what I was gonna say.
Reply
Saighdear
| #
May have forgotten what I was going to say, too: but it’s come back! but WHY is research being done on such a topic, anyone ?
Reply
Doug Harrison
| #
I don’t think that this is even very new information. Stalin used exactly these methods to keep his diverse populations quiescent. You might think that he didn’t have the technology of today but what he had he used with great effect. In the 1930s on every street corner of every town and in every work place in the USSR there were loudspeakers endlessly blasting government propaganda. I’m not sure whether they went all night but they were certainly going for every waking hour and they worked for the most part. (You will always get a few sceptics like me who take every thing a government says with a grain or two of salt)
Reply
Boris Badenov
| #
Well, it’s obvious they did that on Barry Obama, they convinced him he wasn’t a pile of steaming dung.
Reply