Thanks for the "False Memories"

(HealthScout) -- True memories and those recollections you only think are real leave different traces in your brain, scientists report.

When you see something you've seen before, your brain registers a stronger electric charge than when it's an image you only believe you've seen, says a study in a recent issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

"The general notion is that some representation of what you see when you see [a] word leaves a memory trace in the brain, and when that sensory experience is produced again, the brain recognizes what it's seen before," says study author Michael Stadler.

Stadler and his colleagues asked subjects to study lists of related words, such as "table," "sit" and "desk." Later the subjects were shown these words and others, some of which were related, such as "chair." They were then asked whether they had studied the words or not.

About 75 percent of the time, they guessed they had seen both the studied words and the related words, so they didn't distinguish on a conscious level between "true" and "false" memories, Stadler says.

But their brains weren't fooled.

Stadler measured electrical responses through electroencephalograms, and saw the brain registered a stronger electrical response when the word being viewed was one the person had studied than when it was a word that hadn't been studied.

Studying a word had left a "sensory signature" that reappeared when the word was seen again, Stadler says.

The whole question of false and true memories is mired in controversy because of the importance of so-called recovered memories in rape and child abuse cases, Stadler says.

"I want to be careful to not say there is no such thing as a recovered memory," he says. "But when you're asking someone to recollect something, what they're recollecting could be prone to these kinds of errors."

The fact that subjects were wrong 75 percent of the time suggests the fragility of memory, Stadler says, and it means we shouldn't always be convinced by eyewitness testimony in court cases or patient accounts of medical histories and symptoms.

"Memory is not a verbatim tape recording of an experience," Stadler says. "Instead, memory is really a reconstructive process."

The study's findings jibe with other research on memory, says Dr. Daniel Offer, a professor of psychiatry at the Northwestern University Medical School. In his own study reported last spring, Offer says, men at 48 reported drastically different recollections of their early lives than they first reported when they were 14.

"Their memories were no better than chance," Offer says. "People just don't have accurate memories."

Most memories contain emotional content that can cloud the facts, Stadler says, and time also blurs lines.

"We're giving memory the best chance here," Stadler says. "What it does is illustrate how susceptible memory is to these errors."

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