Good Bye to Good Memories

Everyone thinks that he has an excellent memory until he discovers the embarrassing truth! This is  Restak's message in one of the chapters of his book The Naked Brain. In the chapter entitled "Make My Memory", he says that people will often say that even though generally their memories fade with time, there is an exception. They'll say that if something is sufficiently emotionally arousing, they'll remember it for years. Is that so?

To Restak, this type of "flashbulb memory", e.g the events of 911, this heightened memory of some emotionally arousing events is often taken to be a kind "gold standard of accuracy." But not so! Heike Schmolck of the Baylor College of Medicine, recorded what his subjects said three days after the verdict of the O J Simpson trial, then 15 and then 32 months later and found that after 15 months, only half of what the subjects remember match their original and only 11% had major discrepancy but after 32 months the figures were 29% and and 40% respectively. He found that the longer the time since the relevant event happened, the more the brain "re-arranged the memory of such events: "While we remember situations very well that went along with the emotions, emotions don't help us memorize facts.".  Richard McNally of Harvard, another memory expert said that " in many instances, memory for the central gist of something that happened is retained, whereas memory for details fades or changes.".

Something called "memory morphing" ie. the creation of false memories of something which never actually happened is already being practised on us by marketers. Research by market-oriented psychologists say that 25% of normal adults will accept the suggestion that they had been lost at age 5 in a shopping mall and been rescued by an elderly person or that as a child they had spilled a bowl of punch at a wedding. According to a paper entitled "Make My Memory: How Advertising Can Change our Memories of the Past", people can with imaginative suggestion, be led to believe that they had experiences that were manufactured. If one were told to imagine being lost at age 5, we are twice as likely than the controls, to express 2 weeks later, that the event actually happened. The technical term for this is "imagination inflation.". Thus many marketers will add phrases like "original", "old-fahioned", "since 1924" etc. to their products to provide their customers with the basis for forming a false memory, an illusion of a childhood experience they never had.

We are more suggestible than we think. In an experiment, participants drank an unpleasant-tasting orange drink spiked with salt and vinegar, then looked at an advertisements suggesting that the drink was "refreshing" and were then asked whether they liked it. A good proportion of the participants reported that they found the drink "refreshing".! Our memories are not "recalled": they are "reconstructed" from different sensory modes. Hence, they are " frequently lost, distorted or drastically altered," says Restak. Our state of mind at the time at the time of recall will also affect such recall. If we are sufficiently depressed, we may even alter our memories of what seemed happy at the time to such an extent that they took on a dark and forboding tone. "The more social neurosceintists delve into the bramble bush of human memory, the less secure we should feel about the reliability of our own memories."

If, we are shown, for example, a trailer of a film of an upcoming movie and formed an impression and are then shown a professional review either positive or negative, even our "memory" of how we originally felt may change according to a study by Kathryn Braun and Gerald Zaltman of Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, even when the participants were specifically reminded to respond according to their initial opinion, not their opinion after reading the reveiw. Braun says, "Consumers can be influenced to recall prior experience differently and in a manner consistent with a marketing communication, without being aware that what they recall has changed"! Moreover, they were not even aware that they had altered their memory of their first impression! This is called "backward framing." But in "forward framing", we are told ahead of time what we are likely to experience when we see a particular movie. If we are shown a positive review, people are more likely to see the movie. That's why we see so many positive reviews on the internet of the relevant films being shown. In an experiment with a rigged Disney advertisement suggesting that children visiting Disneyland would have the chance to shake hands with Bugs Bunny (something impossible because Bugs Bunny is a Warners Brothers character), yet 16% of the adults who read the ad "recalled" meeting Bugs Bunny  during a childhood visit to Disneyland but no one who had not read the rigged ad recalled such a meeting! Braun says that "In some sense, life is a continual memory alteration experiment where memories continually are being shaped by new incoming information. And in marketing the alteration will occur whether or not that was the intent of the marketer." Therefore, she warns us that we ought to be aware of that power and that we might have been influenced, without our even being aware of it.

Marketing people are now using contextual advertising to positively influence the customer's feelings about their products. This is how Gerald Zaltman describes it: "A Coke ad depicting teens dancing at a party to a particular style of music activates one neuron cluster, thus producing a particular experience of Coca-Cola. Antoher ad showing a baby polar bear and baby seal sharing a Coke activates a different neuron cluster, thus producing yet another experience. The two social settings depicted in the ads have different meanings for an individual and thus are likely to activiate different internally stored Coke associations.". This applies several principles of memory: we understand something new by associating it with a known past experience; memories are generalized based on typical rather than specific examples; each time we remember something, we unconsciously induce subtle changes in the details of that specific recollection. An advertisement will thus be most effective if it presents information combined with a subtle emotional underpinning.

We are entering the age where science is being used in the interest of commerce. Brand loyalty is being built by associating a particular brand with pleasant and positive emotional experiences because the cost of acquiring new customers is about 5 times the cost of maintaining establshed ones. According to Restak's investigation, making brand loyalists out of just 5 % more customers leads, on average, to an increase in profit per customer between 25 and 100 %. That is what the "no question asked"  return policies are all about! We are misled through the activation of specific regions in our brain associated with the generation of emotions by having positive emotions being subtly and imperceptibly linked to the relevant products by the advertisers suggesting true or even possibly "false" memory association! If we are not vigilant, we shall be the unwitting victims of our psychology!.