The decline of mindfulness and the rise of entirely false memories.
A long held popular view that most young people can agree on today is that social media is consuming our intellect. Lets face it; the increase in uses of Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat then back again to Instagram for hours upon hours has more of an impact on us than we cared to give time and thought to.
Our intellect may, on face value seem to be the most obvious choice of casualty but really our ability to be self-aware and mindful shushed by the brains much preferred ease of autopilot that social media offers, requiring much less energy is like the grey strand in a head of blond hair; only becoming noticeable as more strands surface. In other words, we aren’t mindful of it until we uncover it ourselves or worse yet, until others point it out to us; in excruciatingly worse detail than we ourselves knew to be true (disclaimer: depending on how critical the person your unfortunate to meet is).
But what if you were told that you’d always had grey strands in your hair since childhood by your parents- but it had fell out in youth only to resurface again in adulthood? Is there a part of you that is right now, looking to put the pieces of a broken puzzle together to create a clearer picture of what was said to you together? After all, it must be facts right? You’re memory may be fallible but your aging parents with their busy lives aren’t right?
Professor Loftus of the University of California, Irvine also shared the same train of thought and with this researched whether it would be possible to implant entirely false memories; working from previous studies done that found that leading questions could contaminate memory and affect participant decisions; in particular the wording style being a closely examined factor.
After gathering past information regarding the participants she would come to use to interview. She presented them with 4 stories, 3 of which were correct and factual and 1 which was made to seem like an everyday event that a person is highly likely to experience; brimming with false information and embellished with threads of deceit. She had found that overtime, the participants would start to believe the fourth story as a fact on account of how mundane the event was; for example ‘getting lost in a shopping mall’.
They would believe it so much so that they would trick their brains into colouring the black and white picture of what they had been told, decorating the memory with detail; they previously did not know of before the interviews and examining process begun. Proving that memories fade and change with time. This experiment seemed to be a simple task that influenced the mind so convinced of a false narrative into submissive agreement.
That the professor was only able to influence based on facts and information gathered by what was given to her through family before the experiment had begun. The very fact that the first 3 stories were factually true created trust and built an atmosphere of rapport.
The result of this experiment, was somewhat to be expected as we’re all aware that our memories fade with time, this occurs due to the advent of new memories that take the place of old. Largely propagated by the focus that is attributed to forming strong connections between neurones when new memories are made this directly takes the pressure and focus off the old memories which in turn become weak connections that get eliminated by the pruning process as described in ‘ the brain: the story of you’ by David Eagleman.
Its not then unusual that social media platforms that bombard us with feeds and recommended pages in line with what the algorithm has gathered from the past, depending on length of time used and consistency in doing so, covertly begins to interrupt and contaminate the inner depository of our memories. Deluding us into believing things in the past happening, when they in fact haven’t. Or worse yet, wiping memories all together as we begin to adopt false memories of someone else’s reality as ones own.
By disabling and distracting ourselves from thinking and being mindful of this important intangible process we, with time we feel a cognitive decline that is associated with prolonged social media use as a product of subscribing to an autopilot, lazy brain culture that has long become the norms of our society. It slowly trickles into our personal and professional relationships and lives and dangerously causes us to question ourselves down the line. who am i? our only answers coming from an algorithm, that seemingly knows us better than we know ourselves but you I’ll tell you who you are for free; without the annoying ads or incessant feed suggestions. You are you, when your are mindful of you. But that’s just all my opinion.
