Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [125]
21 Brian Gonsalves, Paul J. Reber, Darren R. Gitelman, et al. (2004), “Neural Evidence that Vivid Imagining Can Lead to False Remembering,” Psychological Science, 15, pp. 655–660. They found that the process of visually imagining a common object generates brain activity in regions of the cerebral cortex, which can lead to false memories of those imagined objects.
22 Mazzoni and Memon, “Imagination Can Create False Autobiographical Memories,” note 20.
23 The effect is called “explanation inflation”; see Stefanie J. Sharman, Charles G. Manning, and Maryanne Garry (2005), “Explain This: Explaining Childhood Events Inflates Confidence for Those Events,” Applied Cognitive Psychology, 19, pp. 67–74. Preverbal children do the visual equivalent of what adults do: They draw a picture of a completely implausible event, such as having a tea party in a hot-air balloon or swimming at the bottom of the ocean with a mermaid. After drawing these pictures, they often import them into their memories. A week later, they are far more likely than children who did not draw the pictures to say yes, that fanciful event really happened. See Deryn Strange, Maryanne Garry, and Rachel Sutherland (2003), “Drawing Out Children’s False Memories,” Applied Cognitive Psychology, 17, pp. 607–619.
24 Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair, p. 104. See note 14.
25 Bernstein’s letter: Maechler, The Wilkomirski Affair, p. 100; Matta’s defense of Wilkomirski, p. 97; our emphasis.
26 Richard J. McNally (2003), Remembering Trauma. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 233.
27 Michael Shermer (2005, February), “Abducted!” Scientific American, pp. 33–34. Quotes on p. 33.
28 Clancy, Abducted, p. 51. See note 15.
29 ”One night I woke up”: Clancy, Abducted, p. 34; “I’ve been depressed,” p. 34; baffling symptoms such as missing pajamas and unexpected nosebleeds, p. 33.
30 For example, Giuliana Mazzoni and her colleagues showed in their laboratory how people can come to regard an impossible event (witnessing a demonic possession when they were children) as a plausible memory. One step in the process was reading about demonic possession, in passages that said it was much more common than most people realized, accompanied by testimonials. See Giuliana Mazzoni, Elizabeth F. Loftus, and Irving Kirsch (2001), “Changing Beliefs About Implausible Autobiographical Events: A Little Plausibility Goes a Long Way,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 7, pp. 51–59.
31 ”I couldn’t be touched”: Clancy, Abducted, p. 143. Will Andrews, “I was ready to just give up,” and his wife’s question, p. 2. See note 15.
32 Clancy, Abducted, p. 50.
33 Richard McNally, personal communication.
34 Richard J. McNally, Natasha B. Lasko, Susan A. Clancy, et al. (2004), “Psychophysiologic Responding During Script-Driven Imagery in People Reporting Abduction by Space Aliens,” Psychological Science, 5, pp. 493–497. See also Clancy, Abducted (note 15), and McNally, Remembering Trauma (note 26), for reviews of this and related research.
35 It is interesting, nonetheless, that the autobiographies that once served as inspiring examples of a person’s struggle to overcome racism, violence, disability, exile, or poverty seem today so out of fashion. Modern memoirs strive to outdo one another in the gruesome details of the writer’s life. For an eloquent essay on this theme, see Francine Prose, “Outrageous Misfortune,” her review of Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle: A Memoir for The New York Times Book Review, March 13, 2005. Prose begins, “Memoirs are our modern fairy tales, the harrowing fables of the Brothers Grimm reimagined from the perspective of the plucky child who has, against all odds, evaded the fate of being chopped up, cooked and served to the family for dinner.”
36 Ellen Bass and Laura Davis (1988), The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse. New York: Harper & Row, p. 173. This statement remains in the revised and expanded third edition, 1994, on p. 183.
37 For the best full account