I've Convinced People They Have Committed Crimes That Never Taken Place

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In your book, you say that any event can be forgotten or misremembered. You have also convinced people they have committed crimes that never occurred. This has profound implications for how we understand and appraise things like confessions,. And just retelling of doing bad things, including criminal activity. So i wanted to look at the intersection of false memories and false confessions. I wanted to specifically add what we would consider agency into the mix. For me, that's a much more interesting aspect of it, the sort of, what if i convince you that you committed a crime or did something negative emotional? And so that's what i wanted to do. It's not a party trick. It

Our guest on this episode is Dr. Julia Shaw, the author of The Memory Illusion.

Julia is famous among psychologists because she was able to implant false memories into a group of subjects and convince 70 percent of them that they were guilty of a crime they did not commit, and she did so by using the sort of sloppy interrogation techniques that some police departments have been truly been guilty of using in the past.

From her book’s website: “In The Memory Illusion, Dr Julia Shaw uses the latest research to show the astonishing variety of ways in which our memory can indeed be led astray. Fascinating and unnerving in equal measure, the international bestseller The Memory Illusion has been translated into 20 languages and offers a unique insight into the human brain, challenging you to question how much you can ever truly know about yourself.”

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