Multi Sport
DA
So 6 weeks after the alleged attack Ford says hi to Judge.... yea.
Ponderable
- Thread starter Bruddah IZ
- Start date
Multi Sport
DA
Ford can't remember if she showed the reporter her therapists notes. What a great memory...
Multi Sport
DA
Ford, who claims to have a fear of flying, is trying to play the sympathy card by claiming that she was afraid to fly to Washington. Yet she has flown to Costa Rica, Hawaii and the South Pacific to go Surfing...
Eyewitnesses believe that their recall is complete and perfect, but in truth, memories are, at best, sensory and emotional impressions blurred by imagination, belief, ambiguity, and time. As convincing as juries may find the testimony of witnesses, good prosecutors know that human memory is, more often than not, the least reliable source of evidence.
That's true for several reasons. For one, attitudes and beliefs can affect the memories we form. Scientists at Cornell University told college students a story about a man who walked out on a restaurant bill. Half the participants were told that the man "was a jerk who liked to steal." Half were told that the man left without paying because he received an emergency phone call. “One week later the people who were told he was a jerk remembered a higher bill--from 10 to 25 percent more than the bill actually was. Those who were told he had an emergency phone call remembered a slightly lower-than-actual bill,” says investigator David Pizarro. “Negative evaluations,” he concludes, “are capable of exerting a distorting effect on memory."
It is even possible to remember something that never really happened. In one experiment, researchers showed volunteers images and asked them to imagine other images at the same time. Later, many of the volunteers recalled the imagined images as real. Using fMRI, the researchers were able to determine which parts of the brain formed the false memories and which formed the real ones. “We think parts of the brain used to actually perceive an object and to imagine an object overlap,” says Northwestern University scientist Kenneth Paller. “Thus, the vividly imagined event can leave a memory trace in the brain that’s very similar to that of an experienced event.”
The memory trace is, of course, chemical. Memories are stored with the formation of particular proteins in the brain. Each time a memory is recalled, the proteins can be reformed or modified. How this process works is a research question of great interest to neuroscientists. This week, researchers affiliated with a project at MIT reported a giant step toward explaining how external stimuli can distort mental representations to produce brand new, seemingly accurate—but completely false—memories.
Steve Ramirez and his colleagues used a combination of optical and genetic techniques to control the activity of individual neurons in the brains of specially bred experimental mice. The researchers studied a group of brain cells in the hippocampal region of the mouse brain. They found that they could create false associations between events and environments by artificially stimulating the neurons.
Specifically, Ramirez and his team identified particular cells that were activated by foot shocks in a particular environment. Then they moved the mice to another, shock-free environment and stimulated those same neurons. This reactivation of the neurons that fired when the mice were shocked caused the mice to freeze (a natural response to fear) even when no shock was given. So strong were the implanted false memories that the mice froze, even when the hippocampal cells weren’t stimulated.
These findings demonstrate that memories can be induced by artificial means, and they provide a model for studying the mechanisms of false memory formation in humans. A member of the MIT team, Susumu Tonegawa, commented on the significance of the research in Science magazine's weekly podcast:
Independent of what is happening around you in the outside world, humans constantly have internal activity in the brain. So just like our mouse, it is quite possible we can associate what we happen to have in our mind with a bad or good high valence, online event. So, in other words, there could be a false association of what you have in your mind rather than what is happening to you, so this is a way we believe that at least some form of strong force memory observed in humans could be made. Because our study showed that the false memories and the genuine memories are based on very similar, almost identical, brain mechanisms, it is difficult for the false memory bearer to distinguish between them. So we can study this, because we have a mouse model now.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-sense/201307/remembering-something-never-happened
That's true for several reasons. For one, attitudes and beliefs can affect the memories we form. Scientists at Cornell University told college students a story about a man who walked out on a restaurant bill. Half the participants were told that the man "was a jerk who liked to steal." Half were told that the man left without paying because he received an emergency phone call. “One week later the people who were told he was a jerk remembered a higher bill--from 10 to 25 percent more than the bill actually was. Those who were told he had an emergency phone call remembered a slightly lower-than-actual bill,” says investigator David Pizarro. “Negative evaluations,” he concludes, “are capable of exerting a distorting effect on memory."
It is even possible to remember something that never really happened. In one experiment, researchers showed volunteers images and asked them to imagine other images at the same time. Later, many of the volunteers recalled the imagined images as real. Using fMRI, the researchers were able to determine which parts of the brain formed the false memories and which formed the real ones. “We think parts of the brain used to actually perceive an object and to imagine an object overlap,” says Northwestern University scientist Kenneth Paller. “Thus, the vividly imagined event can leave a memory trace in the brain that’s very similar to that of an experienced event.”
The memory trace is, of course, chemical. Memories are stored with the formation of particular proteins in the brain. Each time a memory is recalled, the proteins can be reformed or modified. How this process works is a research question of great interest to neuroscientists. This week, researchers affiliated with a project at MIT reported a giant step toward explaining how external stimuli can distort mental representations to produce brand new, seemingly accurate—but completely false—memories.
Steve Ramirez and his colleagues used a combination of optical and genetic techniques to control the activity of individual neurons in the brains of specially bred experimental mice. The researchers studied a group of brain cells in the hippocampal region of the mouse brain. They found that they could create false associations between events and environments by artificially stimulating the neurons.
Specifically, Ramirez and his team identified particular cells that were activated by foot shocks in a particular environment. Then they moved the mice to another, shock-free environment and stimulated those same neurons. This reactivation of the neurons that fired when the mice were shocked caused the mice to freeze (a natural response to fear) even when no shock was given. So strong were the implanted false memories that the mice froze, even when the hippocampal cells weren’t stimulated.
These findings demonstrate that memories can be induced by artificial means, and they provide a model for studying the mechanisms of false memory formation in humans. A member of the MIT team, Susumu Tonegawa, commented on the significance of the research in Science magazine's weekly podcast:
Independent of what is happening around you in the outside world, humans constantly have internal activity in the brain. So just like our mouse, it is quite possible we can associate what we happen to have in our mind with a bad or good high valence, online event. So, in other words, there could be a false association of what you have in your mind rather than what is happening to you, so this is a way we believe that at least some form of strong force memory observed in humans could be made. Because our study showed that the false memories and the genuine memories are based on very similar, almost identical, brain mechanisms, it is difficult for the false memory bearer to distinguish between them. So we can study this, because we have a mouse model now.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-sense/201307/remembering-something-never-happened
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False Memory
Some memory errors are so “large” that they almost belong in a class of their own: false memories. Back in the early 1990s a pattern emerged whereby people would go into therapy for depression and other everyday problems, but over the course of the therapy develop memories for violent and horrible victimhood (Loftus & Ketcham, 1994). These patients’ therapists claimed that the patients were recovering genuine memories of real childhood abuse, buried deep in their minds for years or even decades. But some experimental psychologists believed that the memories were instead likely to be false—created in therapy. These researchers then set out to see whether it would indeed be possible for wholly false memories to be created by procedures similar to those used in these patients’ therapy.
In early false memory studies, undergraduate subjects’ family members were recruited to provide events from the students’ lives. The student subjects were told that the researchers had talked to their family members and learned about four different events from their childhoods. The researchers asked if the now undergraduate students remembered each of these four events—introduced via short hints. The subjects were asked to write about each of the four events in a booklet and then were interviewed two separate times. The trick was that one of the events came from the researchers rather than the family (and the family had actually assured the researchers that this event had not happened to the subject). In the first such study, this researcher-introduced event was a story about being lost in a shopping mall and rescued by an older adult. In this study, after just being asked whether they remembered these events occurring on three separate occasions, a quarter of subjects came to believe that they had indeed been lost in the mall (Loftus & Pickrell, 1995). In subsequent studies, similar procedures were used to get subjects to believe that they nearly drowned and had been rescued by a lifeguard, or that they had spilled punch on the bride’s parents at a family wedding, or that they had been attacked by a vicious animal as a child, among other events (Heaps & Nash, 1999; Hyman, Husband, & Billings, 1995; Porter, Yuille, & Lehman, 1999).
More recent false memory studies have used a variety of different manipulations to produce false memories in substantial minorities and even occasional majorities of manipulated subjects (Braun, Ellis, & Loftus, 2002; Lindsay, Hagen, Read, Wade, & Garry, 2004; Mazzoni, Loftus, Seitz, & Lynn, 1999; Seamon, Philbin, & Harrison, 2006; Wade, Garry, Read, & Lindsay, 2002). For example, one group of researchers used a mock-advertising study, wherein subjects were asked to review (fake) advertisements for Disney vacations, to convince subjects that they had once met the character Bugs Bunny at Disneyland—an impossible false memory because Bugs is a Warner Brothers character (Braun et al., 2002). Another group of researchers photoshopped childhood photographs of their subjects into a hot air balloon picture and then asked the subjects to try to remember and describe their hot air balloon experience (Wade et al., 2002). Other researchers gave subjects unmanipulated class photographs from their childhoods along with a fake story about a class prank, and thus enhanced the likelihood that subjects would falsely remember the prank (Lindsay et al., 2004).
Using a false feedback manipulation, we have been able to persuade subjects to falsely remember having a variety of childhood experiences. In these studies, subjects are told (falsely) that a powerful computer system has analyzed questionnaires that they completed previously and has concluded that they had a particular experience years earlier. Subjects apparently believe what the computer says about them and adjust their memories to match this new information. A variety of different false memories have been implanted in this way. In some studies, subjects are told they once got sick on a particular food (Bernstein, Laney, Morris, & Loftus, 2005). These memories can then spill out into other aspects of subjects’ lives, such that they often become less interested in eating that food in the future (Bernstein & Loftus, 2009b). Other false memories implanted with this methodology include having an unpleasant experience with the character Pluto at Disneyland and witnessing physical violence between one’s parents (Berkowitz, Laney, Morris, Garry, & Loftus, 2008; Laney & Loftus, 2008).
Importantly, once these false memories are implanted—whether through complex methods or simple ones—it is extremely difficult to tell them apart from true memories (Bernstein & Loftus, 2009a; Laney & Loftus, 2008).
To conclude, eyewitness testimony is very powerful and convincing to jurors, even though it is not particularly reliable. Identification errors occur, and these errors can lead to people being falsely accused and even convicted. Likewise, eyewitness memory can be corrupted by leading questions, misinterpretations of events, conversations with co-witnesses, and their own expectations for what should have happened. People can even come to remember whole events that never occurred.
The problems with memory in the legal system are real. But what can we do to start to fix them? A number of specific recommendations have already been made, and many of these are in the process of being implemented (e.g., Steblay & Loftus, 2012; Technical Working Group for Eyewitness Evidence, 1999; Wells et al., 1998). Some of these recommendations are aimed at specific legal procedures, including when and how witnesses should be interviewed, and how lineups should be constructed and conducted. Other recommendations call for appropriate education (often in the form of expert witness testimony) to be provided to jury members and others tasked with assessing eyewitness memory. Eyewitness testimony can be of great value to the legal system, but decades of research now argues that this testimony is often given far more weight than its accuracy justifies.
entire article:
https://nobaproject.com/modules/eyewitness-testimony-and-memory-biases
Some memory errors are so “large” that they almost belong in a class of their own: false memories. Back in the early 1990s a pattern emerged whereby people would go into therapy for depression and other everyday problems, but over the course of the therapy develop memories for violent and horrible victimhood (Loftus & Ketcham, 1994). These patients’ therapists claimed that the patients were recovering genuine memories of real childhood abuse, buried deep in their minds for years or even decades. But some experimental psychologists believed that the memories were instead likely to be false—created in therapy. These researchers then set out to see whether it would indeed be possible for wholly false memories to be created by procedures similar to those used in these patients’ therapy.
In early false memory studies, undergraduate subjects’ family members were recruited to provide events from the students’ lives. The student subjects were told that the researchers had talked to their family members and learned about four different events from their childhoods. The researchers asked if the now undergraduate students remembered each of these four events—introduced via short hints. The subjects were asked to write about each of the four events in a booklet and then were interviewed two separate times. The trick was that one of the events came from the researchers rather than the family (and the family had actually assured the researchers that this event had not happened to the subject). In the first such study, this researcher-introduced event was a story about being lost in a shopping mall and rescued by an older adult. In this study, after just being asked whether they remembered these events occurring on three separate occasions, a quarter of subjects came to believe that they had indeed been lost in the mall (Loftus & Pickrell, 1995). In subsequent studies, similar procedures were used to get subjects to believe that they nearly drowned and had been rescued by a lifeguard, or that they had spilled punch on the bride’s parents at a family wedding, or that they had been attacked by a vicious animal as a child, among other events (Heaps & Nash, 1999; Hyman, Husband, & Billings, 1995; Porter, Yuille, & Lehman, 1999).
More recent false memory studies have used a variety of different manipulations to produce false memories in substantial minorities and even occasional majorities of manipulated subjects (Braun, Ellis, & Loftus, 2002; Lindsay, Hagen, Read, Wade, & Garry, 2004; Mazzoni, Loftus, Seitz, & Lynn, 1999; Seamon, Philbin, & Harrison, 2006; Wade, Garry, Read, & Lindsay, 2002). For example, one group of researchers used a mock-advertising study, wherein subjects were asked to review (fake) advertisements for Disney vacations, to convince subjects that they had once met the character Bugs Bunny at Disneyland—an impossible false memory because Bugs is a Warner Brothers character (Braun et al., 2002). Another group of researchers photoshopped childhood photographs of their subjects into a hot air balloon picture and then asked the subjects to try to remember and describe their hot air balloon experience (Wade et al., 2002). Other researchers gave subjects unmanipulated class photographs from their childhoods along with a fake story about a class prank, and thus enhanced the likelihood that subjects would falsely remember the prank (Lindsay et al., 2004).
Using a false feedback manipulation, we have been able to persuade subjects to falsely remember having a variety of childhood experiences. In these studies, subjects are told (falsely) that a powerful computer system has analyzed questionnaires that they completed previously and has concluded that they had a particular experience years earlier. Subjects apparently believe what the computer says about them and adjust their memories to match this new information. A variety of different false memories have been implanted in this way. In some studies, subjects are told they once got sick on a particular food (Bernstein, Laney, Morris, & Loftus, 2005). These memories can then spill out into other aspects of subjects’ lives, such that they often become less interested in eating that food in the future (Bernstein & Loftus, 2009b). Other false memories implanted with this methodology include having an unpleasant experience with the character Pluto at Disneyland and witnessing physical violence between one’s parents (Berkowitz, Laney, Morris, Garry, & Loftus, 2008; Laney & Loftus, 2008).
Importantly, once these false memories are implanted—whether through complex methods or simple ones—it is extremely difficult to tell them apart from true memories (Bernstein & Loftus, 2009a; Laney & Loftus, 2008).
To conclude, eyewitness testimony is very powerful and convincing to jurors, even though it is not particularly reliable. Identification errors occur, and these errors can lead to people being falsely accused and even convicted. Likewise, eyewitness memory can be corrupted by leading questions, misinterpretations of events, conversations with co-witnesses, and their own expectations for what should have happened. People can even come to remember whole events that never occurred.
The problems with memory in the legal system are real. But what can we do to start to fix them? A number of specific recommendations have already been made, and many of these are in the process of being implemented (e.g., Steblay & Loftus, 2012; Technical Working Group for Eyewitness Evidence, 1999; Wells et al., 1998). Some of these recommendations are aimed at specific legal procedures, including when and how witnesses should be interviewed, and how lineups should be constructed and conducted. Other recommendations call for appropriate education (often in the form of expert witness testimony) to be provided to jury members and others tasked with assessing eyewitness memory. Eyewitness testimony can be of great value to the legal system, but decades of research now argues that this testimony is often given far more weight than its accuracy justifies.
entire article:
https://nobaproject.com/modules/eyewitness-testimony-and-memory-biases
Multi Sport
DA
Can the Dems look any worse? Wow, this whole episode has the potential to blow up in their face the longer it drags out and more information about how they sat on this comes out. They were invited to do a joint investigation and they passed. They already had the information from Ford and, in private interviews with Cavanaugh did not ask or even bring up anything about sexual harassment or improprieties? Seriously? Oh, and Chuckie baby. What a piece of work he is...
Sheriff Joe
DA
Let me know if you have heard this one before,
Illegal Alien Accused of Murdering Girl Entered U.S. as 'Unaccompanied Minor'
4 hours ago
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...MwBXoECAgQGQ&usg=AOvVaw2JOuGnI8KU79wu3sb2Qf9D
Illegal Alien Accused of Murdering Girl Entered U.S. as 'Unaccompanied Minor'
4 hours ago
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...MwBXoECAgQGQ&usg=AOvVaw2JOuGnI8KU79wu3sb2Qf9D
It looks like the FBI will get a week to investigate the allegations against Kavanaugh. This is a great opportunity for Kavanaugh's name to be cleared. Trump's response was measured and presidential and seemed genuine. This is all great for the country. Sadly, 2 -3 hours of cable news will fuck this all up!
Sheriff Joe
DA
Who is this?
Sheriff Joe
DA
I knew you would come around and get on the bus.
Fake News!
Sheriff Joe
DA
It's ok, you can be a closet Trumpian, there are millions of you out there.
I am gonna be extra nice to you.
What happened? Did you get tired of everyone picking on and lying about Trump too?
Awwww " Pussy Man II " is lurking in old yearbooks of
all male schools, what's sa matta Bob....
Multi Sport
DA
My oldest just sent me a text.
Son.. Dad, do you know who James Taylor is?
Me.. Yes.
Son.. I'm sitting feet from him at a party where he is playing. He's pretty good.
Me... Uh, yea. Send me a video. Are you sure it's "the" James Taylor?
He sent me the videos. Lucky kid..
Son.. Dad, do you know who James Taylor is?
Me.. Yes.
Son.. I'm sitting feet from him at a party where he is playing. He's pretty good.
Me... Uh, yea. Send me a video. Are you sure it's "the" James Taylor?
He sent me the videos. Lucky kid..
Derp'
Cable news? I don't blame the players, blame the game. The mood in Washington is toxic, and there's a huge partisan divide so getting things done is next to impossible. So of course the news is bad, because what they are covering is bad. Republican leadership has been a disaster and I hope order and balance will start to be restored to Washington soon. Not saying Republicans are bad people... but the conservative "experiment" has been a disaster- from Oklahoma and Nebraska, all the way to DC.
Interesting to see which way this goes. Kavanaugh came out punching, so we know he's in it to win it. Problem is for all his sound and fury, kinda seems like he didn't win anyone over. In fact he might have even lost Flake, and now he doesn't have the votes in the Senate.
Sheriff Joe
DA
Are you kidding me? Trump is getting all kinds of things done, why do you think you guys want him out so bad.
Sheriff Joe
DA
Feds Seize 140 Pounds of Meth, Heroin, Fentanyl at Arizona Border
1 hour ago
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...MwA3oECAgQEQ&usg=AOvVaw3XiREtls8qiZEUqNJS8bXe
1 hour ago
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...MwA3oECAgQEQ&usg=AOvVaw3XiREtls8qiZEUqNJS8bXe
Trumps not getting much done the next president can't undo by simply passing their own executive orders.
Just saying, if things don't go as well as you're hoping this Nov, just don't freak out. I mean whats Trump polling, a 30% approval rate. Yikes.