Thread:GreyStark/@comment-28288412-20170506220152/@comment-25936766-20170507162441

GreyStark wrote: Aye. I do, but before you dismiss something, You might consider reading it And after reading it, we can dismiss it? Okay. Dismissed.

MiniDaggers wrote: 2. Considering how many of the accounts are known to be inconsistent with each other..............As it is though, some could be lying, some could've been hallucinating, some saw jackshit, others could have whatever else cause it for them, etc.

There's another possibility.........memory can be easily influenced. So easily, in fact, it's the reason witnesses are not considered as "decisive" as before during trials.

If there's a hole in your memory, you won't remember everything clearly. "I don't remember well" is the most honest answer.....But, if someone tells you multiple times something that fills that hole, you will "remember" that "missing detail". Even if it's not what happened at all.

Let's say there's a robbery in a bakery and Grey is accused of doing it. You interrogate a witness and ask them if they saw Grey there, with a pic of his face. They might not remember well and say that. Then you start telling them "Yes, he was there when the robbery happened". You keep telling them that, and suddenly they will remember that he was.

Yet he later turns out to have been on the other side of the city back then. The witness simply "remembered" he was there, because their memory was reshaped through forceful suggestion.

The human memory is faulty, and prone to filling gaps with whatever it gets. Or covering memories in others when sufficiently convinced. What I mentioned above is just one example, there are other issues related to fake memories.

For example, the process of refutation: If you receive information in any way, you can refute it with pre-existing information. But when you don't have enough pre-existing info, you cannot refute it with certainty. Which leads to second guessing, and "remembering" something that never happened.

For example, there was a riot. A friend of yours says he saw you there. You say you weren't, but you don't remember well enough. As you second-guess yourself, you start to "remember" you were actually there. Even if in reality, you were not.

I feel part of the reason there's so much inconsistency goes along these lines. Some don't remember if they saw anything or not, and if they did they don't remember clearly what, but are influenced by the accounts of other people to "remembering" they did see something.

As for how can people be so easily influenced and prone to confabulations? Well, the easiest answer is that we are like that by nature, but there are a few factors. For example, the brain does not register sensory input per se, unlike people think: It registers impressions. As such, it's easy for holes in one's memory to form; because one can't recall memories that never existed.

As the years go by and more research is done, it's been discovered that memory is about as malleable as freaking sand. 1) Make someone remember something. 2) Rewrite the memory through forceful suggestion. 3) They remember the new memory, believing it to have happened. It even works with PTSD, though not "just like that".

Overall...I think it's just a massive fail of the collective memory.