Ads Implant False Memories

[n2doc]

By Jonah Lehrer May 25, 2011 | 9:28 am |


My episodic memory stinks. All my birthday parties are a blur of cake and presents. I’m notorious within my family for confusing the events of my own childhood with those of my siblings. I’m like the anti-Proust.

And yet, I have this one cinematic memory from high-school. I’m sitting at a Friday night football game (which, somewhat mysteriously, has come to resemble the Texas set of Friday Night Lights), watching the North Hollywood Huskies lose yet another game. I’m up in the last row of the bleachers with a bunch of friends, laughing, gossiping, dishing on AP tests. You know, the usual banter of freaks and geeks. But here is the crucial detail: In my autobiographical memory, we are all drinking from those slender glass bottles of Coca-Cola (the vintage kind), enjoying our swigs of sugary caffeine. Although I can’t remember much else about the night, I can vividly remember those sodas: the feel of the drink, the tang of the cola, the constant need to suppress burps.

It’s an admittedly odd detail for an otherwise logo free scene, as if Coke had paid for product placement in my brain. What makes it even more puzzling is that I know it didn’t happen, that there is no way we could have been drinking soda from glass bottles. Why not? Because the school banned glass containers. Unless I was willing to brazenly break the rules — and I was way too nerdy for that — I would have almost certainly been guzzling Coke from a big white styrofoam container, purchased for a dollar from the concession stand. It’s a less romantic image, for sure.

So where did this sentimental scene starring soda come from? My guess is a Coca-Cola ad, one of those lavishly produced clips in which the entire town is at the big football game and everyone is clean cut, good looking and holding a tasty Coke product. (You can find these stirring clips on YouTube.) The soda maker has long focused on such ads, in which the marketing message is less about the virtues of the product (who cares if Coke tastes better than Pepsi?) and more about associating the drink with a set of intensely pleasurable memories.

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http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/ads-implant-false-memories/

[RandomThoughts]

1. That makes sense.

I would guess the area that you store the idea for a soft drink, used to be in one container, and now is in another, by what you said many commercials.

So when you replay that childhood memory, and it goes through the sequence of events, and looks for the bottle of coke part of the sequence stored as a memory image, it gets the overwritten image. Then the part that assembles the pieces in the story of the memory seamlessly integrates it into that story.


So many parts of your brain storing many different objects, make up the story. And one of those objects got changed, but since the story is also reconstructed in mental playback it fits in.

That would be my guess.

Side note, there is a delusion that your memory is not accurate, and that can be done by creating an environment that changes around you. If someone can get you to question your memory, it can create the disorientation used against people.

[Orrex]

2. A friend once almost punched me when I told him that the Luke-n-Biggs scene wasn't in the movie

It's a sequence from somewhere on Tattooine, and Luke and Biggs are talking about something or other, and my friend remembered it clearly, becoming quite agitated when I suggested that the scene wasn't shown in the film. This was back in the early to mid 80s, before Lucas went mad and tried to take over the world, so the scene didn't actually appear in any theatrical cuts of EPIV.

I haven't seen this friend for decades, but he insisted that he'd seen a rare cut, rather than mentally compositing the bit into his memory of the flick. After all, there were stills available, and snippets shown on programs like The Making of Star Wars, but not in the movie that they showed on the big screen up to that time.

False memory is a crazy thing!