Hi, this is Caitlin Luna, host of Speaking of Psychology.

This podcast was recorded live during the 2018 APA convention in San Francisco.

This episode is about how our memories may not be as reliable as we like to think.

As always, we want to hear from you, so please

email me at K-Luna at APA.org if you have any comments or ideas for us. That's K-L-U-N-A-A-8.org.

I'm joined by Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, a distinguished professor at the University of California,

Irvine. Dr. Loftus is well known for her research on human memory, notably false

memories. Dr. Loftus has been honored by APA's review of general psychology as one of the 100

most eminent psychologists of the 20th century. Welcome, Dr. Loftus. Thank you. It's wonderful to

have you here today. My pleasure. So your research tells us something I would think

is unsettling about our minds, that our memories aren't set in

stone, that they're basically subject to manipulation.

So can you explain that a bit more?

One of the things that I and other people who do similar work

have shown is that once you have an experience

and you record it in memory it

doesn't just stick there in some pristine form you know waiting to be played

back like a recording device but rather new information new ideas new thoughts

suggestive information, misinformation can enter

people's conscious awareness and cause a contamination, a distortion, an alteration in memory.

And that's the kind of thing that I've been studying for the past many decades.

And how can human memories be manipulated?

...