The Psych Student

How well do people remember a made up account?

A lot of people like the idea that faking an illness should have the karmic result of having to eventually suffer the real deal. There’s a sort of “boy who cried wolf” ethic that permeates our cultural sense of justice. But just because we think something is deserved, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will actually happen to the guilty party.

Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily has reported on new studies regarding faked amnesia. Apparently, “focal retrograde amnesia” is a common defense in murder trials.  The article says amnesia is claimed by defendendents in 45 percent of murders (I believe this has to be U.S. murder cases and not global, and it would be good to see a citation on that statistic somehwere.)  “Psychologists know that this sort of amnesia is actually quite rare,” Munger writes, “so it’s very likely that most, if not all of these defendants are faking amnesia.” Read the rest of this entry »

The website Neuro Philosophy features an article on Confabulatory hypermnesia, or severe false memory syndrome : Neurophilosophy.

In the journal Cortex, researchers describe the case of a patient with severe memory loss who has a tendency to invent detailed and perfectly plausible false memories (confabulations) in response to questions to which most people would answer “I don’t know”, such as the one above. They have named this unusual condition confabulatory hypermnesia, and believe that theirs is the first study to document it.

Also an interesting read at the same site: The woman who can’t forget