Blurring the Boundary Between Memory and Perception - SciAm

Article

Found this pretty interesting. I always knew about the false-memory phenomenon, but I had no idea it was so sensitive and could be triggered so easily.

Nice find, O'!

Thanx for the link. They didn't produce a false memory, though, only a false perception IMHO.

Is the argument that false memories are based on false perceptions?

Kind of. First they're stating that perception is not strict and encompassing, more a "guessing" and "constructing" process. And that it makes it possible to fool it by making the brain "fill the gaps" on its own.

So they led experiments based on tricking your perception and then called their results "false memories". It's perfectly okay, why not, if you tend to remember something not as it was under particular circumstances, it can be called a false memory.

The problem is that if they had to explain how full-blown false memories appear in dreams the explanation based on distorted perception of some external source would fail. There's no external source.

So to me personally this article looks like somebody wanted to make a "sensational claim" out of nothing. We can obtain vivid false memories without any external source, so who can seriously say that they've discovered something "important" about their nature after merely finding a few visual distortion tendencies :)