Video of Elizabeth Loftus is found here
This is her "bio" presented by TED (See Below)
For the record, this is our comment in response to having spent 17 minutes listening to her.
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- Should you go back to a place or stick with the memory?
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Ann Garvey
1 hour ago: I don't believe in Elizabeth Loftus or her presentation as constructive. She seems to have targeted in her studies people who have been victimized, particularly sexually by caring a "blank card" stating the victim could not have remembered accurately. She gives in this talk a representation of this kind of "false remembering." She then goes on to talk about studying the phenomena of planting false memories in people, and then shows surprise when the subject falsely remembers. If Elizabeth Loftus was correct, not only her targeted group of abuse survivors and therapists, but each human being would be unable to justify his or her experience, because of the odds of someone misleading them in their past, including as Elizabeth states, your parents (as inferred by Santa Clause "suggestion.") She seems to corrode the entire process of having a past, because no one is safe from the memory of the positive or negative experiences in their past. She sets a scenario where only things that can be verified, certainly not religion, for example, could be considered truthful. She destructs ideals of faith, belief, trust, and most important sense of self by "hocus pocus truths" demonstrated in her mock "experiments." She tells the subject of these experiences, the color is blue, when the color is green, and then she says, "AHA!" when the subject says the color is blue. How would we be able to trust from this set of logic that our professors, teachers, ministers, judges, doctors, and many more are telling us "truths" we can believe in. What happens to our whole structure of knowledge. All civilization ideas passed down from the very earliest time? How do we know for sure these weren't just "stories." Or, more currently, the stories your Aunt Em, Grandma, and Uncle Joe told about you when you were five are actually true? Couldn't they be motivated to tell you something that made them more of a hero in your life? Couldn't they also have reconstructed memory? Bad agenda!
Memory-manipulation expert Elizabeth Loftus explains how our memories might not be what they seem -- and how implanted memories can have real-life repercussions.
Why you should listen to her:
Elizabeth Loftus altered the co
urse of legal history by revealing that memory is not only unreliable, but also mutable. Since the 1970s, Loftus has created an impressive body of scholarly work and has appeared as an
expert witness in hundreds of courtrooms, bolstering the cases of defendants facing criminal charges based on eyewitness testimony, and debunking “recovered memory” theories popular at the time, as in her book
The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse (with Katherine Ketcham).Since then, Loftus has dedicated herself to discovering how false memories can affect our daily lives, leading her to surprising therapeutic applications for memory modification -- including controlling obesity by implanting patients with preferences for healthy foods.Read more about Elizabeth Loftus on the TED Blog
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