Category: Memory

Stress affects memory negatively through the action of cortisol, the stress hormone.

A link between the stress hormone cortisol and short-term memory problems has been found by research.

Although cortisol is a natural hormone that spikes when we are stressed to help us deal with challenging situations, over time its long-term effects may be detrimental to short-term memory.

This is the first study to link long-term exposure to cortisol with short-term memory problems.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Iowa and published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that high levels of cortisol were associated with a loss of synapses in the prefrontal cortex, a structure that’s important for short-term memory (Anderson et al., 2014).

Study of how stress affects memory

The findings are based on a study of rats which were 21 months old — this meant their brains were roughly equivalent to that of a 65-year-old human.

In the study, rats’ corticosterone levels were measured.

They were then given a T-shaped maze to run through which required them to remember which direction the treats were.

Some of the rats forgot which direction to turn after a short delay — just as human short-term memory decays over a few minutes — but those with higher levels of corticosterone were more likely to forget.

Rats with low levels of corticosterone got the direction right 80% of the time, while those with high levels of corticosterone only got it right 58 percent of the time.

When their brains were examined, it turned out that the stressed and forgetful rats had 20 percent fewer synapses in their prefrontal cortex, suggesting this was the cause of the short-term memory loss.

When the older rats were compared with younger ones, the older ones with low levels of the stress hormone performed just as well as the younger ones.

The same could not be said of those with higher levels of the stress hormone.

This study may help to explain why some people’s memory declines so dramatically with age, while others remains relatively unaffected.

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Eyewitness to a crime remembered twice as many details using this technique that can jog your memory.

Closing your eyes really can help jog the memory, a study finds.

The results should be useful for helping eyewitnesses to crimes remember more details when questioned by police.

The study, published in the journal Legal and Criminological Psychology, had participants watching an electrician entering a property, doing some work and stealing various items (Nash et al., 2015).

Afterwards, some were asked questions with their eyes open and others with their eyes closed.

The psychologists were also interested to see if building rapport before asking the questions made any difference.

Memory jogged

The results revealed that closing the eyes gave the biggest boost to recall, but establishing some rapport before questioning was also beneficial.

People who had their eyes open and did not have some rapport with questioner only got 41 percent of the questions right.

People with their eyes closed and who had some rapport got 75 percent of the questions right.

Dr Robert Nash, who led the study, said:

“It is clear from our research that closing the eyes and building rapport help with witness recall.

Although closing your eyes to remember seems to work whether or not rapport has been built beforehand, our results show that building rapport makes witnesses more at ease with closing their eyes.

That in itself is vital if we are to encourage witnesses to use this helpful technique during interviews.”

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Improve your memory, concentration, power and retention by using these 14 science-backed techniques to increase cognitive function.

Many of the usual methods for how to improve memory are well-known, such as using imagery, chunking and the forbidding sounding ‘brain training’.

The problem with most of these methods is they involve a fair amount of mental effort.

So, here are 14 mostly easy ways to improve memory that are backed up by psychological research, many requiring relatively little effort.

Few of these methods for how to improve memory require you to train hard, spend any money or take illegal drugs.

All free, all pretty easy, all natural!

1. A good mood improves memory

Something as simple as getting a bag of candy is enough to improve memory and concentration, research finds.

In fact, anything that quickly puts you in a good mood can improve memory and decision-making.

Professor Ellen Peters, who co-authored the study, said:

“There has been lots of research showing that younger adults are more creative and cognitively flexible when they are in a good mood.

But because of the cognitive declines that come with aging, we weren’t sure that a good mood would be able to help older adults.

So these results are good news.”

2. 40 seconds rehearsal boosts memory

Rehearsing a memory for just 40 seconds could be the key to permanent recall, a study finds.

When rehearsing a memory, the same area of the brain is activated as when laying it down, psychologists found.

Dr Chris Bird, who led the research, said:

“We know that recent memories are susceptible to being lost until a period of consolidation has elapsed.

In this study we have shown that a brief period of rehearsal has a huge effect on our ability to remember complex, lifelike events over periods of 1-2 weeks.

3. Associations improve memory

‘Reminders by association’ are a great tool to help improve memory for something in the future, research demonstrates.

Here are a few examples of ‘reminders by association’:

• A picture of your family by your desk reminds you to call them and tell them you will be late home.
• A piece of litter on the floor reminds you to put the bins out.

Little environmental cues like this were enough to double the number of people who remembered to perform some future action.

4. The aroma of rosemary improves memory

The aroma of rosemary essential oil can improve memory, concentration and the ability to remember future events, research finds.

For the study 66 people took various memory tests either in a room that was scented with rosemary or without.

Those breathing the scent of rosemary performed better.

5. How to improve memory: write about your problems

To do complex tasks we rely on our ‘working memory’.

This is our ability to shuttle information in and out of consciousness and manipulate it.

A more efficient working memory contributes to better learning, planning, reasoning and concentration.

One way to improve working memory capacity indirectly is through expressive writing.

You sit down for 20 minutes a few times a month and write about something traumatic that has happened to you.

Yogo and Fujihara (2008) found that it improved working memory after 5 weeks.

Psychologists aren’t exactly sure why this works, but it does have a measurable effect.

6. Vegetables linked to better memory

Eating vegetables — but not fruit — helps improve memory, research finds.

The study of 3,718 people over 65 living in Chicago asked how often people ate particular foods and administered cognitive tests.

Professor Martha Clare Morris, who led the study, explained the results:

“Compared to people who consumed less than one serving of vegetables a day, people who ate at least 2.8 servings of vegetables a day saw their rate of cognitive change slow by roughly 40 percent.

This decrease is equivalent to about 5 years of younger age.”

Green leafy vegetables showed the strongest association with an improved memory — they are also likely to help concentration.

Older people in the study got the greatest benefit from eating more vegetables.

7. Natural scenes improve memory

Nature has a magical effect on us.

It’s something we’ve always known, but psychologists are only just getting around to measuring it.

One of nature’s beneficial effects an easy way for how to improve memory and concentration.

In one study people who walked around an arboretum did 20 percent better on a memory test than those who went for a walk around busy streets.

In fact you don’t even need to leave the house.

Although the effects aren’t as powerful, you can just look at pictures of nature and that also has a beneficial effect (I describe this study in detail here).

8. Say words aloud to improve memory

This is surely the easiest of all method for how to improve memory: if you want to remember something in particular from a load of other things, just say it out loud.

A study (described here) found memory improvements of 10 percent for words said out loud, or even just mouthed: a relatively small gain, but at a tiny cost.

9. Drink hot chocolate

Two cups of hot chocolate a day could help keep the brain healthy, a study finds.

The research involved 60 people whose average age was 73.

They were given tests of memory, concentration, thinking skills and the blood flow in their brains was measured.

People who had impaired blood flow in the brain improved after drinking the flavanol-rich cocoa.

10. Meditation improves memory and concentration

Meditation has been consistently found to improve cognitive functioning, including memory.

But meditation takes time doesn’t it?

Long, hard hours of practice?

Well, maybe not.

In one recent study, participants who meditated for 4 sessions of only 20 minutes, once a day, were able to improve memory, concentration and brain function (the study is described here, also see my beginner’s guide to mindfulness meditation).

11. Exercise improves memory

Long-term memory is improved by exercise four hours after learning, a study finds.

Exercising directly after learning, though, does not improve memory at all.

In addition, brain scans revealed that exercise lead to more precise representations of memories in the hippocampus.

The scientists are not sure yet why exercise after learning improves memory.

However, they write:

“Considering that the exercise intervention took place after learning, delayed exercise most likely affected memory retention through an impact on memory consolidation.”

12. Predict your memory performance

Simply asking ourselves whether or not we’ll remember something is an unusual method for how to improve memory.

This works for both recalling things that have happened in the past and trying to remember to do things in the future.

When Meier et al., (2011) tested people’s prospective memory (remembering to do something in the future), they found that trying to predict performance improves memory.

On some tasks people’s performance increased by almost 50 percent.

13. Use your body to improve memory encoding

We don’t just think with our minds, we also use our bodies.

For example, research has shown that we understand language better if it’s accompanied by gestures.

We can also use gestures to encode memories.

Researchers trying to teach Japanese verbs to English speakers found that gesturing while learning helped improve memory (Kelly et al., 2009).

Participants who used hand gestures which suggested the word were able to recall almost twice as many Japanese words a week later.

14. Use your body to improve memory recall

Since our bodies are important in encoding a memory, they can also help improve memory recall.

Psychologists have found that we recall past episodes better when we are in the same mood or our body is in the same position (Dijkstra et al., 2007).

This works to a remarkably abstract degree.

In one study by Cassasanto and Dijkstra (2010), participants were better able to retrieve positive memories when they moved marbles upwards and negative memories when they moved marbles downwards.

This seems to be because we associate up with happy and down with sad.

Exercise and memory training

If all these methods seem a bit lazy, then you can always put in a bit more effort.

Probably the best way of improving your overall cognitive health is exercise.

Studies regularly find that increasing aerobic fitness is particularly good for executive function and working memory (check out this previous article on which cognitive enhancers work).

Conversely, stay in bed all the time and your working memory gets worse (Lipnicki et al., 2009).

Take your memory training to the limit and an incredible study by Ericsson et al. (1980) shows what can be achieved.

Our typical short-term memory span is about 7 things.

In other words we can hold around seven things in mind at the same time.

These researchers, though, increased one person’s memory span to 79 digits after 230 hours of practice, mostly using mnemonic systems.

Shows what you can do if you put in the hours.

That said, I’ll be sticking to a nice walk around the park.

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Suggestibility of memory in psychology is a major contributor to wrongful convictions, through biased eyewitness testimony.

Suggestibility in psychology refers to the tendency to fill in gaps in memory with information from others that may well be incorrect.

When people are experiencing intense emotions, they show more suggestibility.

In addition, some people display more suggestibility than others, such as those with low self-esteem or who are less assertive.

Suggestibility involves false memory

Suggestibility, one of Daniel Schacter’s sins of memory, is a close cousin of misattribution.

Like misattribution, suggestibility involves the creation of a false memory.

But, while a misattribution is of our own making, a suggestion comes from someone else who is, whether intentionally or not, influencing us.

Human suggestibility has many implications, but some of its most devastating consequences have been played out in the criminal justice system.

Criminal justice systems around the world have treated human memory with undeserved reverence for a long time, while ignoring our inherent suggestibility.

Dubious eyewitness testimony has frequently secured convictions for the most serious of crimes.

Even more incredibly for students of scientific psychology, repressed memories rising to the surface decades after the original event have been accepted by courts as the basis to lock a man away for the rest of his life.

Given the right circumstances people will finger the wrong suspect in a line-up, manufacture false memories and even change their beliefs after having their dreams interpreted.

Example of suggestibility in eyewitness testimony

Faulty eyewitness testimony is one of the leading causes of wrongful convictions in the US.

On the basis of mounting evidence, psychologists have argued that a major contributing factor to these wrongful convictions is suggestibility (Schacter, 1999).

Dramatic evidence for how easily eyewitnesses are swayed through suggestibility comes from a study carried out by Gary Wells and Amy Bradfield at Iowa State University (Wells & Bradfield, 1998).

Like many of the best studies it is deceptively simple, but its implications for the criminal justice system are profound.

Spot the gunman

Participants were asked to watch 8 seconds of grainy security camera footage showing a man walking into a store.

The footage was slowed down so that participants could get as much information as possible.

The quality of the video, however, was not that good.

After watching the video, participants were told that the man is a murderer.

Just after the footage cuts away, the man shot and killed the store’s security guard.

This information is not misleading – the CCTV footage is real – as is the subsequent murder of the security guard.

Participants were then told that their job is to identify the killer from a five-person photospread.

This photospread was identical to the one used in the real case except – and here’s the twist – the real gunman has been removed.

Having been told, though, that the gunman is in the photospread, all the participants identify one of the men.

This is where the experimenters got clever.

They then introduced three different experimental manipulations:

• One group of participants were given no feedback on their choice of suspect.
• The second were told they had made the wrong choice from the photospread and that the answer was one of the other men.
• The third group, though, were congratulated: “Good, you identified the actual suspect.” Although, of course, they hadn’t – no one had.

After this, participants were asked about many aspects of their identification including how certain they were, how good their view of the gunman was and their ability to make out the details of his face.

That’s him, I’m sure!

The results showed that simply congratulating participants on choosing the right suspect had a huge effect on their reports when compared to those told nothing and those told they were wrong.

Those given positive feedback were suddenly much more sure they were right, thought the identification was easier, had a better view, thought their judgement was more trustworthy and would be more willing to testify.

Those given positive feedback even placed more confidence in their own ability to identify the gunman.

Remember that everyone is providing these reports based on exactly the same piece of store camera footage.

Also, remember that everyone is wrong because the real gunman has been removed from the photospread!

Confidence boosted through suggestibility

The surprising thing about this experiment is what a massive effect a simple statement had on such a wide variety of factors.

Giving positive (although incorrect) feedback to participants catapulted their confidence in their identifications much higher than they would have been otherwise.

On a 7-point scale only 15 percent of the eyewitnesses who were given negative feedback rated their confidence in their identification at either a 6 or a 7.

Compare this with the eyewitnesses given positive feedback – 50 percent rated their confidence at either a 6 or a 7.

Participants given positive feedback even thought the security camera footage was clearer.

47 percent rated it at a 6 or 7 out of 7, compared with none of the eyewitnesses given negative feedback.

In a second part of the study, the authors wanted to see whether people have any idea that the feedback they receive affects their confidence in identifying the gunman.

Despite the fact that it did have a substantial measurable effect, people denied the feedback had any influence whatsoever.

Feedback to eyewitnesses is still routine

Given the huge effect that feedback can have on confidence, given human suggestibility, clearly eyewitnesses should not be told whether they have identified the suspect or not.

Wells and Bradfield (1998) point out that even when witnesses are not given verbal feedback, it is virtually impossible for police officers to avoid information leaking out through body language.

The solution suggested by Wells and Bradfield (1998) is that those administering the photospreads to eyewitnesses should be blind to the real suspect.

A statement should then be taken before eyewitnesses discover whether they have picked the suspect, and their judgement is affected.

Although they may subsequently inflate their claim, at least this can be compared with their original statement.

Incredibly, ten years later, it is still routine practice in the US and UK for many police forces to provide positive feedback to witnesses.

This is perhaps unsurprising given the police’s interest in securing convictions.

Positive feedback will almost certainly bolster witnesses’ confidence because of their suggestibility, thereby improving the impression they make in court.

Moves to reform police procedures in the US have foundered despite the repeated confirmation of this study’s findings.

Similar moves are afoot in the UK, but changes have only so far been made in some police forces.

→ This post is part of a series on the seven sins of memory:

1. Short-Term Memory vs. Long-Term Memory: Definition And Examples
2. Absent-Mindedness: 2 Factors That Cause Forgetfulness
3. Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon Or Lethologica
4. Misattribution: How Memories are Distorted and Invented
5. Suggestibility: How Memory Is Biased By Suggestions
   • False Memory: Dramatic Examples Of Fake Memories
6. Commitment and Consistency Bias: How It Warps Memory
7. Long-Term Memory: When Persistence Is A Curse

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The commitment and self-consistency bias refers to the idea that people assume less change in their attitudes and beliefs than really occurs.

The consistency bias, also known as the commitment bias, is believing one’s past and present attitudes are similar.

In other words, the consistency bias means we tend to think our attitudes and beliefs have changed less than they really have.

However, in reality, our attitudes, beliefs and behaviours change more than we guess.

Examples of the commitment and consistency bias

What were your political views a decade ago?

How good was your relationship last year?

Studies show we often assume things haven’t changed, when in fact they have.

New experiences don’t fall on a blank slate; we don’t merely record the things we see around us ‘as they are’ (if such a thing exists).

Everything we do, have done to us, think or experience, is affected by past thoughts and things that have already happened to us.

As a result we can’t help but put our own personal spin on our memories.

The self-consistency bias is a sin of memory

It’s this ‘spin’ that is the sixth of Daniel L. Schacter’s seven sins of memory: bias (Schacter, 1999).

The consistency bias is one of the most fascinating biases acting on our memories.

The finding is not that dissimilar to cognitive dissonance, that we will often reconstruct the past to make it more compatible with our current worldview.

Studies have shown the bias operating in both our personal relationships and our political attitudes.

Political self-consistency bias

Is it possible that we might re-write our attitudinal autobiographies so they fit more closely with our current position?

Do we effectively lead ourselves to believe that what we think today about, say, our country’s foreign policy, is what we’ve always thought?

How have your politics changed over the last decade?

Chances are that you underestimate how much your attitudes have evolved.

So says a study into people’s political beliefs carried out by Greg Markus from the University of Michigan (Markus, 1986).

Markus used data collected about political opinions from two generations, at two points in time, once in 1973 and then again in 1982.

Eight-hundred and ninety-eight parents, along with 1,135 of their offspring provided data on their attitudes towards issues like gender equality, rights of the accused and the legalisation of marijuana.

The results showed that overall, as is often noted, both parents and their children became more conservative as they got older.

But all the fun started when people were asked to think back to the beliefs they had reported almost ten years ago.

On average, only about a third of people correctly recalled their political positions from 1973, nine years later.

The same proportion of people recalled their position incorrectly by 3 or more points on a 7 point scale.

The rest were somewhere in between.

So people weren’t that good.

But maybe this isn’t surprising: people often have considerable difficulty dredging up their current political beliefs, let along those from 9 years ago.

But if people had just forgotten their previous beliefs, then it seems unlikely that their guesses should be systematic in any way, and yet they were.

Much more often than not, people guessed their remembered attitudes as closer to their current attitudes.

Effectively, people who supported the legalisation of marijuana in 1973, but had actually changed their minds by 1982, were then more likely to say their attitude in 1973 was more anti-legalisation than it actually had been.

This might help explain why people think their politics hasn’t changed much over the years, when in fact the exact reverse is often true.

Markus also found that one exception to the consistency bias was when people’s political opinions were more available to memory, e.g. when their feelings were strong on a particular issue.

Then those opinions were more likely to be correctly recalled.

This consistency bias isn’t just seen for political beliefs, though, it can also strike closer to home.

Commitment bias in relationships

Elaine Scharfe and Kim Bartholomew from Trent University and Simon Fraser University used a similar approach to the political study, but this time focussing on people’s romantic relationships (Scharfe & Bartholomew, 1998).

They asked people to rate the stability of their relationships at two points, 8 months apart.

Then, at the second time-point they were also asked to rate how they remembered their relationships 8 months ago.

Compared to the political study, people did better with their romantic partners.

The majority of people were reasonably accurate at remembering the state of their relationships from 8 months ago.

This might be expected because of the shorter gap in time and because of the more personal nature of the questions.

Despite this, those who were relatively inaccurate still displayed a consistency bias.

This meant that, for example, if their relationships had improved in the intervening 8 months then they tended to assume it had always been that way.

It’s interesting that although the consistency bias is weaker here, it’s not gone altogether.

The change bias

While the consistency bias is important, sometimes our memory biases work in the exact opposite direction, and we assume more change has occurred than really has, especially if that’s what we’re expecting.

A common example is when we’re trying to learn a new skill.

If we put loads of effort in to learning that new skill, we often think our improvement is much greater than it really is.

Michael Conway and Michael Ross at the University of Waterloo in Canada examined just this phenomenon in research into people’s study skills (Conway & Ross, 1984).

Their study relied on the fact that so-called ‘study skills’ courses seem to have little impact on people’s academic achievement.

In their experiment all the participants were first asked to evaluate their own study skills, then one group took a study skills course while the other group was assigned to a waitlist.

After three weeks both groups were asked to evaluate their study skills before the course.

The group who had taken the course were more likely to evaluate themselves as worse before the course, while the waitlist control group showed no systematic biases.

Sure enough at the end of term, the study skills group did no better than the control group in the exam.

Despite this, when the study skills groups were asked about their performance 6 months later, they thought they had done better than they had.

Again, no systematic biases were seen in the control group.

Although this effect is often referred to as a change bias, it’s really just another form of consistency bias.

People are again extrapolating backwards using the changes they think ought to have (or not) occurred over that period.

It just so happens that instead of assuming their political beliefs or relationship will be the same, this time they’re assuming their study skills must have been worse before they started the course.

Once again, people are fighting for consistency.

One bias among many

The consistency bias is only one of the many types of biases that our memories demonstrate.

Here are a few more examples:

• Beneffectance: we tend to believe the past glories were the result of our actions, while past disgraces were someone else’s fault.
• Reminiscence bump: the fascinating finding that we remember more events from our adolescence and early adulthood than from other periods of our lives.
• Hindsight bias: that we tend to think that we could easily have predicted past events when in fact we can’t.
• Rose-tinted specs: remember how wonderful things were in the olden days? It wasn’t that good, trust me, nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.

And this is just a few of them, a full list would probably need several books.

Why memory biases are useful

Like the other so-called ‘sins’ of memory, the biases displayed by memory are often by-products of their central purpose.

Building up cognitive maps of what we expect from the world helps us navigate through it successfully.

If you’ve found from past experience that going to a bar and knocking people’s drinks out of their hands tends to correlate with visits to the emergency room, you can learn something.

The fact that these ‘maps’ also impinge on our recollections of past events is a small price to pay for the advantages we gain.

Some memory biases might even be directly useful to us.

To take the two examples discussed here, believing that we are more consistent than we really are in our political beliefs and our relationship choices might help to boost confidence in ourselves.

Similarly, believing that putting in effort leads to improved performance helps motivate us to put in effort next time as well.

Factors such as these may all contribute towards our overall satisfaction with life.

So, maybe while we should be suspicious of our biases, we should ultimately be thankful for our inconsistencies.

→ This post is part of a series on the seven sins of memory:

1. Short-Term Memory vs. Long-Term Memory: Definition And Examples
2. Absent-Mindedness: 2 Factors That Cause Forgetfulness
3. Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon Or Lethologica
4. Misattribution: How Memories are Distorted and Invented
5. Suggestibility: How Memory Is Biased By Suggestions
   • False Memory: Dramatic Examples Of Fake Memories
6. Commitment and Consistency Bias: How It Warps Memory
7. Long-Term Memory: When Persistence Is A Curse

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Doodling is more than just a pleasant waste of time and paper — it boosts focus, memory, concentration and blood flow to the brain.

All sorts of claims have been made for the power of doodling: from it being an entertaining or relaxing activity, right through to it aiding creativity, or even that you can read people’s personalities in their doodles.

The idea that doodling provides a window to the soul is probably wrong.

These ideas about doodling can seem intuitively attractive but it falls into the same category as graphology: it’s a pseudoscience (psychologists have found no connection between personality and handwriting).

Benefits of doodling

Although it’s probably a waste of time trying to interpret a doodle, could the act of doodling itself still be a beneficial habit for attention and memory in certain circumstances?

To test this out Professor Jackie Andrade at the University of Plymouth had forty participants listen to a mock answerphone message which was purportedly about an upcoming party (Andrade, 2009).

People were asked to listen to the message and write down the names of all the people who could come to the party, while ignoring the people who couldn’t come.

Crucially, these participants were pretty bored.

They’d just finished another boring study, were sitting in a boring room and the person’s voice in the message was monotone.

The question is: even though the task is pretty simple, would they be able to concentrate long enough to note down the right names?

Here’s the experimental manipulation.

Half the participants were told to fill in the little squares and circles on a piece of paper while writing down the names — this is the simplest form of doodling.

The rest just listened to the message, only writing down the names.

Memory boosted by 30%

Looking at the results, the beneficial effects of doodling are right there.

Non-doodlers wrote down an average of seven of the eight target names.

But people doodling wrote down an average of almost all eight names.

It wasn’t just their attention that was enhanced, though, doodling also benefited memory.

Afterwards, participants were given a surprise memory test, after being specifically told they didn’t have to remember anything.

Once again people doodling performed better, in fact almost 30 percent better.

So perhaps if you’re stuck in a boring meeting or someone is droning on at you about something incredibly uninteresting, doodling can help you maintain enough focus to pull out the salient facts.

Doodling boosts brain blood flow

Making art activates the brain’s reward pathways, research finds (Kaimal et al., 2017).

Doodling in particular boosts the blood flow through the prefrontal cortex.

The prefrontal cortex (above the eyes) is the area of the brain linked to regulating our higher functions like our thoughts, feelings and actions.

The study had both artists and non-artists either doodling, free drawing or colouring between the lines.

For artists, doodling was linked to slightly higher levels of brain activity.

Dr Girija Kaimal, who led the study, said:

“This shows that there might be inherent pleasure in doing art activities independent of the end results.

Sometimes, we tend to be very critical of what we do because we have internalized, societal judgements of what is good or bad art and, therefore, who is skilled and who is not.

We might be reducing or neglecting a simple potential source of rewards perceived by the brain.

And this biological proof could potentially challenge some of our assumptions about ourselves.”

Why doodling is beneficial

But why does it work?

We can’t tell from this study but Andrade speculates that doodling helps people concentrate because it stops their minds wandering but doesn’t (in this case) interfere with the primary task of listening.

When people are bored or doing a simple task, their minds naturally wander.

We might think about our weekend plans, that embarrassing slip in the street earlier or what’s for supper.

Perhaps doodling, then, keeps us sufficiently engaged with the moment to pay attention to simple pieces of information.

It’s like keeping the car idling rather than turning it off.

On idle we’re still paying some attention to our surroundings rather than totally zoning out.

Obviously doodling is not a task you want to indulge in while concentrating on a complicated task, but it may help you maintain just enough focus during a relatively simple, boring task, that you can actually get it done better.

Research on doodling might sound a little trivial but it’s fascinating because it speaks to us about many facets of human psychology, including mind wandering, zoning out, attention and the nature of boredom.

Plus it’s a really nice idea that doodling has a higher purpose, other than just wasting time and paper.

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Misattribution of a memory in psychology is when some original true aspect of a memory becomes distorted through time, space or circumstances.

Misattribution of memory is a psychological phenomenon that involves the creation of memories that are false in some way.

Sometimes known as source misattribution, misattribution of memory sometimes involves false memories, sometimes when forgotten memories return (cryptomnesia) and also when confusing the source of memories.

However, it is best explained with a true story…

Example of misattribution

One evening in 1975 an unsuspecting Australian psychologist, Donald M. Thomson, walked into a television studio to discuss the psychology of eyewitness testimony.

Little did he know that at the very moment he was discussing how people can best remember the faces of criminals, there was someone encoding his own face as a rapist.

The day after the television broadcast Thomson was picked up by local police.

He was told that last night a woman was raped and left unconscious in her apartment. She had named Thomson as her attacker.

Thomson was shocked, but had a watertight alibi. He had been on television at the time of the attack and in the presence of the assistant commissioner of police.

It seemed that the victim had been watching Thomson on television just prior to being attacked.

She had then confused his face with that of her attacker.

That a psychologist talking about identifying the faces of criminals should be the subject of just such a gross memory failure – and at the very moment he was publicly explaining it – is an irony hard to ignore.

Donald Thompson was completely exonerated but many others have not been so lucky.

Gary Wells at Iowa State University and colleagues have identified 40 different US miscarriages of justice that have relied on eye-witness testimony (Wells et al., 1998).

Many of these falsely convicted people served many years in prison, some even facing death sentences.

Donald Thomson’s ordeal, though, is a perfect example of Harvard psychologist Daniel L. Schacter’s fourth sin of memory (Schacter, 1999).

Unlike the first three sins, which all involve being unable to access memories, this is the first sin that involves the creation of memories that are false in some way.

When a memory is ‘misattributed’ some original true aspect of a memory becomes distorted through time, space or circumstances.

Daily misattribution

While misattributions can have disastrous consequences, most are not so dramatic in everyday circumstances.

Like the other sins of memory, misattributions are probably a daily occurrence for most people.

Some examples that have been studied in the lab are:

• Misattributing the source of memories. People regularly say they read something in the newspaper, when actually a friend told them or they saw it in an advert. In one study participants with ‘normal’ memories regularly made the mistake of thinking they had acquired a trivial fact from a newspaper, when actually the experimenters had supplied it (Schacter, Harbluk, & McLachlan, 1984).
• Misattributing a face to the wrong context. This is exactly what happened to Donald Thomson. Studies have shown that memories can become blended together, so that faces and circumstances are merged.
• Misattributing an imagined event to reality. A neat experiment by Goff and Roediger (1998) demonstrates how easily our memory can transform fantasy into reality. Participants were asked either to imagine performing an action or actually asked to perform it, e.g. breaking a toothpick. Sometime later they went through the same process again. Then, later still they were asked whether they had performed that action or just imagined it. Those who imagined the actions more frequently the second time were more likely to think they’d actually performed the actions the first time.

Unintentional plagiarism

So far we’ve seen how easily people move around the events, faces and sources of their memories.

Each of these are situations where people are retrieving a real memory, but mistaking one or more of its aspects.

Schacter (1999), however, points to another common type of misattribution: when we attribute an idea or memory to ourselves that really belongs to someone else.

Unintentional plagiarism has been examined in a number of studies.

In one straightforward early study people were asked to generate examples of particular categories of items, like species of birds.

It was found that people, without realising, plagiarised each other about 4% of the time (Brown & Murphy, 1989).

Subsequent studies using more naturalistic procedures have found much higher rates using different types of tasks – sometimes as much as 27%.

That’s a very high rate and probably helps to explain why we see so much unintentional repetition across many different areas of human culture.

Musicians, writers and artists of all stripes have to work extremely hard to avoid unintentionally plagiarising each other.

If a song that has been unintentionally plagiarised becomes a hit, it can easily end up making the lawyers a lot of money.

When George Harrison was sued for (unintentionally) plagiarising a Chiffons’ hit “He’s So Fine”, a claim that started in 1971 dragged on until the 1990s!

All made up

Although memories often have some basis in reality, whether we’ve mixed up some details or even the memory’s source, sometimes they are just completely false.

During the 1960s and 70s psychologists discovered a way of reproducing this false memory effect in the lab.

In the classic study conducted by James Deese at Johns Hopkins University, participants are given lists of semantically related words (Deese, 1959).

For example: red, green, brown and blue.

Later they have to try and recall them, at which point they often recall related words that were not actually presented, like purple or black.

Later studies have replicated this finding using more complicated procedures that help to counteract some of the problems with this early study.

Nevertheless there is still the question of whether these laboratory-based tasks really do tell us anything about how we behave in the real world.

Are we really this prone to completely false memories in real life?

New evidence suggests we may well be.

Brown and Marsh (2008) found that some people could be induced to think they had visited an unfamiliar place simply by being shown photos of that location.

Misattribution of memory and the self

These sorts of studies on the misattributions of memories can be existentially disturbing.

This is because each of us is effectively the accumulation of our experiences, our memories. Who we are is – at least partly – what has happened to us.

Discovering the scientific evidence for how easily memories become confused, distorted or just plain break through from fantasy to reality is like discovering that part of ourselves is fabricated, false in some way.

As psychologist William James points out in the opening quote, memories can be carved from both reality and our dreams.

Away from the existential crisis and back to practicalities, Daniel Schacter suggests that misattributions may actually be useful to us (Schacter, 1999).

The ability to extract, abstract and generalise our experience enables us to apply lessons we’ve learnt in one domain to another.

And, a lot of the time, we simply don’t need to know the exact details of an experience: we may not remember the exact score, but we know our team won.

We get the gist.

Similarly, when we actually do need to know the details, we can take steps to encode the memory securely so we don’t make misattributions.

But there’s no doubting that in some circumstances misattributions can have frightening consequences – just ask anyone falsely convicted by eyewitness testimony.

Just ask Donald Thomson.

→ This post is part of a series on the seven sins of memory:

1. Short-Term Memory vs. Long-Term Memory: Definition And Examples
2. Absent-Mindedness: 2 Factors That Cause Forgetfulness
3. Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon Or Lethologica
4. Misattribution: How Memories are Distorted and Invented
5. Suggestibility: How Memory Is Biased By Suggestions
   • False Memory: Dramatic Examples Of Fake Memories
6. Commitment and Consistency Bias: How It Warps Memory
7. Long-Term Memory: When Persistence Is A Curse

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