How false beliefs become fixed in people’s minds

Source Amnesia diagram
Source: Wikipedia

As we remember things, we also forget where we heard them or who told us about them. As a result, we easily forget whether a supposed fact is true or was originally merely a rumor.

Even when we are told something with a good many caveats attached, when it comes back into the mind, the disclaimers have probably been detached somehow, so we recall it as factual.

That’s the claim of this article in The International Herald Tribune (“Your brain lies to you”). The authors, Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, explain how information is moved around and processed in the brain before being stored in memory. It is this processing and re-processing that strips the supposed fact from the context in which it was originally received as data.

“This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.

With time, this misremembering gets worse. A false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength.”

Findings like this make it clear how essential it is that we continually challenge and re-evaluate what we believe and what we assume to be true. Since our minds are also programed to fix first on what seems to fit with best present beliefs and knowledge — and mold the rest to accord with the same outlook, having ‘facts’ in our minds that aren’t true warps future understanding as well as the present.

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