Buying In - (Page 54) 54 rob walker were shown a (fake) print ad for the theme park, making the “Remember the Magic” case in autobiographical terms— “remember the characters of your youth, Mickey, Goofy, and Daffy Duck,” and so on. Moments later, the experiment leader from the first week announced that the childhood experience data had been coded wrong and that everyone would have to fill out their forms again. After seeing the ad, about 90 percent of these subjects reported a greater likelihood of having shaken hands with a cartoon character at a theme park than they had beforehand. Asked whether the ad might have had an effect on their memories, almost all said no. Finally, the researchers repeated the experiment, with a twist. This time, the ads and ad evaluation questions were tweaked to include Bugs Bunny, who (you might recall) is not a Disney character at all. About 16 percent of subjects subsequently claimed that, as a child, they had shaken hands with Bugs Bunny at a Disney theme park. Subsequent research found that repeated fake-ad exposure led to higher false memory rates—25 percent in one study and 36 percent in another. In one of those studies, subjects who had indicated they remembered meeting Bugs were asked point-blank what exactly they recalled about this incident; 62 percent remembered shaking Bugs’s hand, and more than a quarter specifically recalled him saying, “What’s up, Doc?” More recently, neuroscientists working with functional magnetic resonance imaging machines to take pictures of neurons firing in a particular section of the brain have suggested that brain activity among those recalling “true” and “false” memories appears to be quite similar. It’s all the same, apparently, to the interpreter, as it helps us keep “our” stories straight.
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