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False Memories

[...]And if the knowledge sort of passed esoterically into my head from a real person living a real life, who is that person? I'd like to know. How much more of my life's memories are his, not mine, but have never been tested to see if they belong to me or him?

I don't know if I have shared my experiences on this forum of occasionally meeting a chap who looks exactly like me. He lives somewhere around the area where I live.

Some of my friends and acquaintances have seen or met him, leading to "hilarious consequences", etc. (actually not in any way hilarious and occasionally annoying).

The very first time I met him was a huge surprise for both of us, and was also the occasion where I discovered he is deaf and a user of sign language who doesn't seem to speak. This goes some way to explain the misunderstandings that have arisen when friends of mine have seen or met him and thought he was me.

If it wasn't for this one fact - that he is deaf - I would be very tempted to imagine that we are somehow connected in an immaterial, esoteric way, and that he learned to ride a motorcycle and the knowledge "drifted" into me via our "special connection". Or something like that. It would be a fun idea and I'd love to have experienced something special like that.

Trouble is, the (fictional) memories are filled with spoken conversations and listening to experienced trainers, etc. That can't be the magically-transferred memory of a deaf person can it? That blows the "esoteric connection" hypothesis to bits.

If anyone is interested, I will write about my doppelganger experiences in the relevant thread (can anyone recommend the correct thread?)
 
http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/doppleganger.4461/page-8#post-1615604

Here is the start of my 3-part essay (sorry it went on for so long) on the mysterious "other me". I met him, and nothing supernatural happened. it felt pretty supernatural, though.

Don't worry about the spelling. As a German speaker, it irritates me how the "correct" spelling is itself wrong. It should be "Doppelgänger", which can also be spelled "Doppelgaenger".

It is pronounced differently too; not "gang" like a gang of kids, but "gaeng", which sounds a bit like the way an English person would say "geng" as in "Gengis Khan" (Genghis Khan). That's not a great explanation. Sorry.



Edit: I have just been reminded that the infamous conqueror's name is correctly pronounced something like "Jingis" Khan. But you still get my point, yeah?
 
Can I just point out to Mods that there is another false memory thread?
http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/false-memories.1485/#post-22413

I'll post this here as it's the most recently active thread.

This is exactly as I remember it.

We were going to see Superman 2 at the cinema and it was a Saturday morning. There were two Mums (one of them was mine) in charge of a posse of kids. The release date in the UK for that film is April 1981, so I will have been ten years old.

We had only got to the end of the street when I noticed a shiny tin lid lying in the road, just like the lid of a treacle tin. I picked it up and started using it to reflect the sun onto the other members of the group, the same way that you can use a mirror to annoy people. I must have dazzled a passing honeybee because the next thing I knew was a stinging sensation on my thumb of the hand I was holding the lid with.

I remember seeing the bee clinging to my thumb and alerting the others about what had happened. My next memory is of the group huddled around me, looking at the sting which was still stuck in me. An older boy then got a leaf from a garden hedge and scraped the sting away. We continued to the cinema, end of story.

A couple of months ago I was talking to my mother and the subject turned to bees and wasps. She asked if I remembered the time when she was stung by a bee, at the top of the street, on the way to the cinema. Her version of events was identical to mine, save for the shiny tin lid and the fact that she was stung and not me.

So one of us has created a false memory, but who? I was adamant that my version was the correct one. Well I would be. None of us like to think we could be so wrong about something like that, which actually involved physical pain.

But if she can create such a striking memory and believe it, then I suppose I can too.
 
I'm happy to believe that some part of my mind just invented the whole thing, in the way you say, except that I actually managed to acquire a skill. I don't understand how my mind could have conjured up the ability to change gear with my left foot while operating a clutch with my left hand, since this configuration doesn't turn up on any other type of vehicle that I have ever used.

That's very puzzling. It sounds like a "muscle memory", from some part of your life no longer accessible to your conscious brain. The lessons and license might be confabulations, by your mind, to cover up this gap.
 
I have a memory, fairly clear, of an event which apparently never happened.

It was when I was very young, just a toddler. My parents had a tempestuous marriage and were both very odd, in many ways. One night, my mother told us that we would follow father's car, after he left the house (he often worked nights), and find where he parked it, and let down the tires. This was because he had done something to annoy her.

She took my older sister, and they did most of the talking. But they put me in the car, I was in the back seat. We were told to keep his car in view, and I concentrated on the red tail lights. We followed the car up a steep hill, then around many streets. Eventually, we went to the parked car, and let down the tires, which required stabbing them with the sharp points of nappy pins. I think these were probably my nappies.

Years later, I asked my father about this. He said it could not be so, simply because never in his life had his tyres been all let down. "I have sometimes wondered what I would do if that happened," he said. My mother died many years earlier, so I could never ask her. My sister doesn't remember it either.

The memory is weird. I remember the mixture of fear and thrills - and yet, I had no doubt that my mother was right, being too young to reason. I have no other clear memories of that time - only that one night. Did it really happen? Did we go after someone else? I remember she said it was father, no one else. Golly - did we get the wrong car? But she would surely know her own husband's car.

One other thing, is that years later, when I returned to live in the part of Sydney where they lived, I found that the main road out went up a hill. As I was driven along it, I thought - this is the hill. This is where we drove that night.
 
I have a memory, fairly clear, of an event which apparently never happened.

It was when I was very young, just a toddler. My parents had a tempestuous marriage and were both very odd, in many ways. One night, my mother told us that we would follow father's car, after he left the house (he often worked nights), and find where he parked it, and let down the tires. This was because he had done something to annoy her.

She took my older sister, and they did most of the talking. But they put me in the car, I was in the back seat. We were told to keep his car in view, and I concentrated on the red tail lights. We followed the car up a steep hill, then around many streets. Eventually, we went to the parked car, and let down the tires, which required stabbing them with the sharp points of nappy pins. I think these were probably my nappies.

Years later, I asked my father about this. He said it could not be so, simply because never in his life had his tyres been all let down. "I have sometimes wondered what I would do if that happened," he said. My mother died many years earlier, so I could never ask her. My sister doesn't remember it either.

The memory is weird. I remember the mixture of fear and thrills - and yet, I had no doubt that my mother was right, being too young to reason. I have no other clear memories of that time - only that one night. Did it really happen? Did we go after someone else? I remember she said it was father, no one else. Golly - did we get the wrong car? But she would surely know her own husband's car.

One other thing, is that years later, when I returned to live in the part of Sydney where they lived, I found that the main road out went up a hill. As I was driven along it, I thought - this is the hill. This is where we drove that night.
Maybe she tried, but failed. Nappy pins probably wouldn't do the job (even though they are quite large).
 
This is certainly quite believable, and could have contributed a great deal. I certainly had plenty of friends who rode motorcycles. That's part of the evidence that I never had one during the "fictional" episode; it certainly wasn't a memory of learning in secret. I would have been sure to tell everyone at the time, had it really happened ...

Are you sure of that? I mean, as a youngster, were you ever close mouthed about doing things which the olds might disapprove of? The reason I raise this, is that I wonder if you went secretly with some friends to try to learn to ride a motorcycle. I certainly had plenty of friends who rode motorcycles.

If you had some practice, but then had a serious but not huge accident, this may have been covered up by the people who were with you. Especially if you were riding illegally, with no proper supervision, as youths often do. I raise the suggestion of an accident, because it would explain almost everything. You could have had a concussion, which when you recovered, (maybe after a few days in hospital) you totally forgot about. Then, your brain knew about motorcycles, but could not access the proper memories, and obligingly created the tales about the instructor, the license etc - these may have all been lacking in the real experience. The brain just wants to make sense of things and make things better.

Your ability to ride remained with you, as a muscle memory, integrated into your life, through a false memory.
 
I've just read somewhere, possibly on these boards that any memory you might have from before the age of four is likely to be a memory of a story you were told.
I have some memories that I think are from before that age but I can't pin down an exact year.
My first memory (I think) was my Dad picking me up and telling me off from my cot. I didn't even know he'd done that but as soon as he apologised to me with tears in his eyes when I was about 20 (I wasn't an abused kid before anyone starts hating my Dad), an occasional dream I'd had all my life just suddenly 'pinged' into my head .. I'd be lying in bed in the dream (at whatever age I was when I had each dream), the room was completely dark and more like an elevator shaft shape so I couldn't get out of bed if I'd wanted to ..

Each dream was exactly the same, I'd suddenly become scared because I knew there was something frightening coming down from the top of the room/shaft then I'd be pulled up out of the bed .. it was weird how I didn't try and make sense of what my Dad had just told me, the dream memory just 'pinged' straight into my head. I've never told my Dad because I don't want him to feel guilty in case there was a connection. I've not had that dream once since he told me.
 
I have a very strange and very distinct memory, when i was a child i often stayed at my grandparents house at weekends whilst my Mother and Father ran their pub.
I have this memory of sitting on their living room floor in front of an old, rather rough-cut internal door when a Giraffe pushes its head and neck under the door which had a 1/2 to 1 inch gap at the bottom. sitting here now I can still see the giraffe, which had a sort of "cartoonish" aspect to it.
I was talking to my Dad the other day and mentioned this memory for the first time, he laughed and said he remembered it well :shock:
apparently he and my mother were there at the time and my Mother said , "There's a draft coming under that door" to which I, at the age of about 3 we calculated said "How can a Giraffe get its head under that door?"
I know memories can be created and this is still crystal clear in my mind, strange, but with an explanation in this case.

Previously posted on here, copied and pasted from original
 
old thread revival time again....
i have always had a vivid recollection of being in my nana's house as a kid, when over the radio came a message-interrupting the music, saying that the king has been pronounced as dead....
Only being young at he time (possibly 7 or 8) i didn't take any more notice and carried on playing.
a good few years later i remember telling my parents that i remember the king dying, to which they both laughed saying that there was no way i could remember that as i wasn't even born???
i swear that i remember hearing it, i suppose it may have been something else, but i remember the words KING.... DEAD and no it wasn't Elvis!!
 
old thread revival time again....
i have always had a vivid recollection of being in my nana's house as a kid, when over the radio came a message-interrupting the music, saying that the king has been pronounced as dead....
Only being young at he time (possibly 7 or 8) i didn't take any more notice and carried on playing.
a good few years later i remember telling my parents that i remember the king dying, to which they both laughed saying that there was no way i could remember that as i wasn't even born???
i swear that i remember hearing it, i suppose it may have been something else, but i remember the words KING.... DEAD and no it wasn't Elvis!!
Was it a play?
 
I thought 9/11 was some kind of R4 dramatisation using a Tony Blair speech for a good thirty seconds or so. I'd just come out of the loo.
"Where's the music?"
"Martin's put one of his crappy plays on again" was the sarky reply.
 
I thought 9/11 was some kind of R4 dramatisation using a Tony Blair speech for a good thirty seconds or so. I'd just come out of the loo.
"Where's the music?"
"Martin's put one of his crappy plays on again" was the sarky reply.

Yeah, for a moment I'd thought the car radio had accidentally got switched over to one of the fundamentalist Christian stations - they were often dramatizing the apocalypse. Alas, not that time.
 
I have cases where my memory was mostly correct, but there were glaring contradictions.

The biggest example is Hurricane Katrina. I remember it happening and I remember collecting change during lunch in my high school to send as donations. That much definitely happened.

However, I remember this happening much later in the year. Sometime around April. Now, in most cases I would write it off that my memories have gotten muddled over the year (and that is probably still very likely the case). But i'm not the only person who remembers it in April.

It's comes under the phenomena called the Mandela Effect. You probably read about last year regarding the controversy surrounnding The Berenstain Bears vs. The Berenstein Bears (Berenstain is correct,but not what I remember), bur for those that haven't, it's wear multiple people remember major events in the exact same way. That suggests more than just muddled memories.

All sort of theories abound as to the cause. Time travel is one of the more common ones and self-explanatory. Though I can't help but wonder what possible change to the timeline could push a major meterological event back 8 months. That goes far beyond murdering lepidoptera.

Another ties into Buddhism. Everyone knows that Buddhist believe in reincarnation, however some sects believe that, instead of assuming a new life, you return to the moment of your birth and begin again. Again, that might explain people who remember Mandela dying in prison inthe 80s (the namesake of the Mandela Effect) or Tank Man getting run over by the Chinese military at Tiananmen Square, but changing the weather?

A theory, somewhat related to both, is that of Quantum Immortality. The idea is that when someone dies, they never percieve it, but instead jump into an alternate timeline where they survived. This would solve the problem of individual effect events that they could not, but it creates a problem of old age (unless there are timelines where people are immortal.
 
I didn't just already have knowledge, I had an actual physical skill. All of it, including the really difficult balance stuff like balancing the throttle and clutch while riding at VERY slow speed around an obstacle course; I didn't just already know how to do this (and it doesn't come easily for most people, nor did I learn it quickly in the imaginary lessons I "had" in my trumped-up memory of learning it "the first time")... I actually was already pretty good at it, as if I had been practicing it over and over and over, like I remember doing, except that this memory was of practice that had never happened. A physical skill, with "muscle memory" and hard-won reactions etc, can't be learned from reading.

severs1966, I have no explanation for your experience, but it does remind me of a story I once heard. This was years ago, probably in the 80's, so the details are a little fuzzy, but this is what I recall -

A man had turned up, on the docks in Los Angeles, I think, in a fugue state. He had no memory and no identification. No one knew where he had come from, and the man himself had no idea. He appeared on national TV, hoping someone would recognize him (which is where I saw the story).

The only clue he had was that he seemed to know a lot about aviation, so someone took him up in a small plane to see what he knew about flying. Turned out he was quite skilled at flying, knew how all the controls and gagues worked, etc. so they speculated he might have worked in the aviation industry.

Well, someone did recognize him, and it turned out he had been wanted by the police at the time he disappeared. It also turned out he had no experience with airplanes.

While it's easy enough to understand how the stress of being in legal trouble might trigger a fugue state, it doesn't explain how he suddenly knew how to fly!

The biggest example is Hurricane Katrina. I remember it happening and I remember collecting change during lunch in my high school to send as donations. That much definitely happened.

However, I remember this happening much later in the year. Sometime around April. Now, in most cases I would write it off that my memories have gotten muddled over the year (and that is probably still very likely the case). But i'm not the only person who remembers it in April.

This is interesting, because I also remember hurricane Katrina happening at another time of year. In my case, though, I clearly recall it happening in November! Whenever the anniversary comes around, it always takes me by surprise, because it seems so "off". This is really strange, because we lived on the Texas coast at the time, so were very aware of the hurricane's progress and hurricanes in general. We even had quite a bit of rain from the outside edges of the storm. What's more, a number of New Orleans residents who'd lost their homes were housed in our apartment complex, including right next door! But all this seems to have happened in November.

My memory is quite good with dates and times of year, so I honestly can't figure out how this one is so far off track. :confused:



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Do y'all find that memories of childhood before you could read are much fuzzier than memories after you had acquired reading? I do. Makes me wonder if language and reading affect memory.
 
Do y'all find that memories of childhood before you could read are much fuzzier than memories after you had acquired reading? I do. Makes me wonder if language and reading affect memory.
Interesting idea G. I'd have thought semantic memory might improve with language skills. How on earth might you test that?
 
That's very puzzling. It sounds like a "muscle memory", from some part of your life no longer accessible to your conscious brain. The lessons and license might be confabulations, by your mind, to cover up this gap.
Procedural memory, which is generally based no 'doing the thing in question'. Most odd.
 
Do y'all find that memories of childhood before you could read are much fuzzier than memories after you had acquired reading? I do. Makes me wonder if language and reading affect memory.

If there were an effect (and I believe there is ... ) it would presumably be progressive, and its progression would most reasonably be expected to correlate with two key successive developments / transitions:

(1) spoken language acquisition; and then ...
(2) symbolic / textual / reading skills acquisition ...

... rather than a single transition at the latter phase alone.

Second, one would reasonably presume such a progressive effect would be most evident with respect to recall of, specificity (e.g., naming objects / persons) within, and abstract connections attributed to the 'content' of early versus later memories. The most immediate perceptual aspects of a given memory (e.g., the 'raw footage' of a given scene) would be the earliest and most basic elements retained, with descriptive details and abstracted relationships following as linguistic-style cognitive capabilities emerge and evolve.

Once language is acquired, it imposes a sort of cognitive bondage in the sense that (crudely stated ... ) all our subsequent indexing and recall of raw experience is mediated via what may be construed as internal linguistic interaction(s). Any pre-language 'raw footage' is thus left murky and beyond decisive grasp until and unless it can be absorbed and integrated within the narrative generated through the later-acquired, linguistic, mode of reflection.

The eventual reliance on language entailed in becoming encapsulated within our individual narratives helps to explain recent research results indicating false memories can be created and nurtured through recurrent linguistic cueing alone.
 
What an interesting thread. I have so much to add, don't know where to start.
My false memory may not have been false but it seems very unlikely.
Basically I grew up on the top floor of a tower block [7th floor].
That day we were visited by a family my parents tried to avoid because thy were loud and their kids [two girls] extremely bad behaved. But they let them in that day to get it over with.

As the grown ups talked in the living room, I was tortured by the two girls by them combing my long hair with a dolls comb [I was about 2-3 years old]. I cried but let them do it because they were about 5 or 6 years old and very scary. We were also on the balcony, which I knew fully well how to behave on but other kids used to get over excited.

So far this is all true. Then this happens:
I remember that they wanted to dangle me over the balcony and I tried to wriggle out of it, but they held my mouth shut. However they managed to talk me round. I didn't want to but they assured me [rolleye] that they'd just hold me and then pull me back in and it would be fun...

I remember clearly being lifted up and then dangled by my ankles off the balcony. I remember clearly seeing the outside of the wall close to my face [face inwards]. I remember clearly thinking that I shouldn't move. Then they pulled me back and I ran to my parents [at last; and whispered into my mum's ear what had happened]. My parents went mental and literally threw that family out. AFAIK it was mainly for the rough play but something must have made my parents mad enough to tell them to leave.

Yet I don't know if it actually happened. Not 100%. I never forgot and can still see what I saw.
It could have happened but something about it seems so far fetched that I have never been too sure, despite my memory. There were no witnesses and everyone I tell this says usually "nahh, that couldn't have happened, you must have imagined it".

That out of the way, I just wanted to say to OP that sometimes we 'know' how to do things just by observation. If you want something bad enough, you can often copy something difficult quite well without having it actually learned. However there is a snag to that and that is that you can lose it really quickly once you learn it properly. It's almost as if copying only works until you learn the 'real thing'.

[Example: When I was young I did an apprenticeship in hairdressing 3 years in Germany]. I watched the others so intently that when it was my turn, I looked and felt for all intents and purposes like an old pro. I held the scissors properly and did all the right movements, despite never having learned it before. Then when I understood what I was doing, I completely lost the ability for a while until my muscles had learned it properly]. I had that with many other things that I knew perfectly well even though I have never done it, but only when I watch something and really want to be able to do something.
Could it have been a similar case with you being able to ride the motorbike?

I have to admit that the details of the memory are amazing and seem as if you really experienced it. However...
I often have very vivid dreams and when I wake up I feel I have just actually lived through the whole scenario. There are people in my dreams that were lifelong friends and that I knew very well, yet they were all made up by my brain. When I wake up from such a dream it feels as if I left an actual life behind and start missing the people that I knew so well. I can describe them and know their family and where they lived etc. Basically as if I had been there. Yet it is only a very vivid dream.

Could your experience have been a mixture between an intensely vivid dream coupled with copying skills gained by observations?
Plus you may not have lost the abilities when you did it the second time round. After all this is not written in stone.

Last but not least, I will also keep my mind open that something more interesting happened here than my suggestion. As I really like the original post.
 
Yet I don't know if it actually happened. Not 100%. I never forgot and can still see what I saw.
It could have happened but something about it seems so far fetched that I have never been too sure, despite my memory. There were no witnesses and everyone I tell this says usually "nahh, that couldn't have happened, you must have imagined it".

People tend to not want to believe some of the awful things humans can do to other humans.
I was tied up in a basement by a male group of distant relatives (they were kids, but not necessarily that young) for being a 'spy', then set out against a fence "to be shot at dawn", and after I got loose, successfully ran, and went in the house, the only response to this was that I was handed a soda for a treat.
"X wouldn't do that" and "X couldn't possibly have happened" are some reactions people really need to think past.
If it's any comfort, please don't let it get to you that people generally don't want to lend credence to bad things, and that doesn't in any way invalidate what you remember.
 
People tend to not want to believe some of the awful things humans can do to other humans.
I was tied up in a basement by a male group of distant relatives (they were kids, but not necessarily that young) for being a 'spy', then set out against a fence "to be shot at dawn", and after I got loose, successfully ran, and went in the house, the only response to this was that I was handed a soda for a treat.
"X wouldn't do that" and "X couldn't possibly have happened" are some reactions people really need to think past.
If it's any comfort, please don't let it get to you that people generally don't want to lend credence to bad things, and that doesn't in any way invalidate what you remember.

This is so true. At its best denial happens to avoid embarrassment, at its worst it's about gaslighting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting
 
When I saw this thread title, I immediately wanted to add this note, but I read through the thread first. It seems many, let's call them "doubtable", memories are from early in life. The original poster's memory of learning to ride a motorcycle is an exception.

My impossible memory is from my university years, and it is about a very well-known event. There is a song, "I Don't Like Mondays", by the group The Boomtown Rats, from their album The Fine Art of Surfacing. The song is their response to an event: a teenage girl with psychological problems started shooting at a line of grade-school kids from her home. When eventually apprehended and asked about her motivation, she replied "I don't like Mondays."

Now we take an excursion from the world of possibility. (Away from the world of fact? We would think so...) I remember seeing the news report about the shooting on television, but the trouble is that at that time I had already been hearing the song for several months, just on the radio and such, and had already heard the story. And here's the newscaster announcing the events as if they had happened earlier that day! I was utterly at a loss, but did not take up the matter with anyone, for fear of being sent to whatever institution the deranged young lady was sent to. I still remember this vividly.
 
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