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that memory is not a video recorder [but that] it’s a constructive activity that is in many ways accurate but prone to interesting errors and distortions. It’s the constructive side of memory that is most relevant to historians.

Is it the case then that our memories constantly change every time we access them?

That certainly can happen depending on how you recount a memory. What you emphasize. What you exaggerate. What you don’t talk about. All of those things will shape and sculpt the memory for future use. Certainly the potential is there.

Research on memory shows that the more distant in time the event, the more prone to inaccuracy the memory. There are several experiments when subjects recorded impressions of an event soon afterward, then a year later and then a few years later, and the memory changed.Yes. It’s not that the information is lost but, as the memory weakens, you become more prone to incorporating other kinds of information or mixing up elements of other events. This has been seen, for example, in the study of flashbulb memories. Where were you when Kennedy was shot? Where were you when you heard about 9/11?

Isn’t there a tendency to add details or information that may make the story more convincing or interesting later?Yes. That’s more a social function of memory. It may be that you draw on your general knowledge and probable information from your memory in a social context where there may be social demands that lead you distort the memory.

What are the different memory systems?

What is the difference between working memory and permanent memory?Working memory is really a temporary memory buffer where you hold onto information, manipulate information, use it, and it’s partly a gateway to long-term memory and also a buffer that you use when you’re retrieving information from long-term memory and that information temporarily resides in working memory, so to speak.

Your discussion of the testimony of White House Counsel John Dean about Watergate is illuminating. There was a perception that Dean had a photographic memory and he testified in rich detail about events. Yet later studies of White House tape recordings revealed that he was often inaccurate.

He was perceived because of all the detail with which he reported events and the great confidence to be something analogous to a human tape recorder. Yet there was interesting work done by psychologist Ulric Neisser who went back and analyzed what Dean said at the hearings as compared to available information on the White House taping system and basically found many and significant discrepancies between what Dean remembered and what was actually said. He usually had the gist and the meaning and overall significance right, but the exact details were often quite different in his memory than what actually was said.

That seems to get into the area of false memories and how they present problems in the legal system.We know from DNA exonerations of people wrongfully convicted of crimes that a large majority of those cases -- one of the more recent estimates is that in the first 250 cases of 2011 DNA exonerations, roughly 70 to 75 percent of those individuals were convicted on the basis of faulty eyewitness memory.

One of the interesting recent lines of research that my lab has been involved in over the past few years has been looking at similarities between what goes on between the brain and mind when we remember past events on the one hand and imagine events that might occur in the future or might have occurred in the past. What we have found, particularly with brain scanning studies, is that you get very similar brain networks coming online when you remember past events and imagine future events, for example. Many of the same brain regions or network of structures come online, and this has helped us understand more why, for example, imagining events that might have occurred can be so harmful to memory accuracy because when you imagine, you’re recruiting many of the same brain regions as accessed when you actually remember. So it’s not surprising that some of these imagined events can actually turn into false memories under the right circumstances.

One reasonably well accepted distinction involves episodic memory, the memory for personal experience; semantic memory, the memory for general knowledge; and procedural memory, the memory for skills and unconscious forms of memory.Those are three of the major kinds of memory and they all have different neural substrates.

One of the points from that Ross Perot study is that his supporters often misremembered what they felt like at the time he reported he had dropped out of the race. The nature of that misremembering depended on their state at the time they were remembering and what decisions they had made about Perot in the interim affected how they reconstructed their earlier memories.Again, that makes nicely the point that our current emotions and current appraisals of a situation can feed back into our reconstruction of the past and sometimes lead us to distort our memories so that they better support our current emotions and our current selves. We’re often using memories to justify what we currently know, believe and feel.

memory doesn’t work like a video camera or tape recorder.That is the main point. Our latest thinking on this is the idea that one of the major functions of memory is to support our ability to plan for the future, to imagine the future, and to use our past experiences in a flexible way to simulate different outcomes of events.

flexibility of memory is something that makes it useful to support this very important ability to run simulations of future events. But that very flexibility might be something that contributes to some of the memory distortion we talked about. That has been prominent in the last few years in my thinking about the constructive nature of memory.

The historian Daniel Aaron told his students “we remember what’s important.” What do you think of that comment?I think that generally holds true. Certainly, again, more important memories tend to be more significant with more emotional arousal and may elicit “deeper processing”, as we call it in cognitive psychology

Both studies suggest that “weight of evidence” reporting is an imperfect remedy. It turns out that hearing from experts on both sides of an issue distorts our perception of consensus — even when we have all the information we need to correct that misperception.

In one study, all the participants were presented with a numerical summary, drawn from a panel of experts convened by the University of Chicago, of the range of expert opinion on certain economic issues.

One group of participants, however, was presented not only with the numerical summary of expert opinion but also with an excerpted comment from one expert on either side of an issue.

Then, all the participants were asked to rate their perception of the extent to which the experts agreed with one another on each issue. Even though both had a precise count of the number of experts on either side, the participants who also read the comments of the opposing experts gave ratings that did not distinguish as sharply between the high-consensus and the low-consensus issues. In other words, being exposed to the conflicting comments made it more difficult for participants to distinguish the issues most experts agreed on (such as carbon tax) from those for which there was substantial disagreement (such as minimum wage).

This distorting influence affected not only the participants’ perception of the degree of consensus, but also their judgments of whether there was sufficient consensus to use it to guide public policy.

What explains this cognitive glitch? One possibility is that when we are presented with comments from experts on either side of an issue, we produce a mental representation of the disagreement that takes the form of one person on either side, which somehow contaminates our impression of the distribution of opinions in the larger population of experts.

Another possibility is that we may just have difficulty discounting the weight of a plausible argument, even when we know it comes from an expert whose opinion is held by only a small fraction of his or her peers.

It’s also possible that the mere presence of conflict (in the form of contradictory expert comments) triggers a general sense of uncertainty in our minds, which in turn colors our perceptions of the accuracy of current expert understanding of an issue.

the implications are worrisome. Government action is guided in part by public opinion. Public opinion is guided in part by perceptions of what experts think. But public opinion may — and often does — deviate from expert opinion, not simply, it seems, because the public refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of experts, but also because the public may not be able to tell where the majority of expert opinion lies.

Our lack of appreciation for the fallibility of our own memories can lead to much bigger problems than a misattributed quote.

Memory failures that resemble Dr. Tyson’s mash-up of distinct experiences have led to false convictions, and even death sentences. Whose memories we believe and whose we disbelieve influence how we interpret controversial public events, as demonstrated most recently by the events in Ferguson, Mo.

, for false memories, higher confidence was associated with lower accuracy.

In general, if you have seen something before, your confidence that you have seen it and your accuracy in recalling it are linked: The more confident you are in your memory, the more likely you are to be right

. This fall the panel (which one of us, Daniel Simons, served on) released a comprehensive report that recommended procedures to minimize the chances of false memory and mistaken identification, including videotaping police lineups and improving jury instructions.

When we recall our own memories, we are not extracting a perfect record of our experiences and playing it back verbatim. Most people believe that memory works this way, but it doesn’t. Instead, we are effectively whispering a message from our past to our present, reconstructing it on the fly each time. We get a lot of details right, but when our memories change, we only “hear” the most recent version of the message, and we may assume that what we believe now is what we always believed.

Studies find that even our “flashbulb memories” of emotionally charged events can be distorted and inaccurate, but we cling to them with the greatest of confidence.

With each retrieval our memories can morph, and so can our confidence in them. This is why the National Academy of Sciences report strongly advised courts to rely on initial statements rather than courtroom proclamations:

In fact, the mere act of describing a person’s appearance can change how likely you are to pick him out of a lineup later. This finding, known as “verbal overshadowing,” had been controversial, but was recently verified in a collective effort by more than 30 separate research labs.

The science of memory distortion has become rigorous and reliable enough to help guide public policy. It should also guide our personal attitudes and actions.

It is just as misguided to conclude that someone who misremembers must be lying as it is to defend a false memory in the face of contradictory evidence. We should be more understanding of mistakes by others, and credit them when they admit they were wrong. We are all fabulists, and we must all get used to it.

Subliminal is a good book on this subject, as is Thinking, Fast and Slow. It is not merely that our memory is a game of telephone in which we garble the memory as we retrieve and re-store it. It appears to be a very useful part of existence, which has stayed with us or gotten stronger with evolution. There seems to be utility in forgetting, misremembering, and having memories coalesce with those of others in our social groups.

Loftus’s research has already rattled our justice system, which relies so heavily on eyewitness testimonies.

“It’s so powerful when somebody tells you something and they have a lot of detail,” Loftus said. “Especially when they express emotion. To just say, ‘Oh my god it must be true.’ But all those characteristics are also true of false memories, particularly the heavily rehearsed ones that you ruminate over. They can be very detailed. You can be confident. You can be emotional. So you need independent corroboration.”

When later asked about the events, the superior memory subjects indicated the erroneous facts as truth at about the same rate as people with normal memory.

been able to successfully convince ordinary people that they were lost in a mall in their childhood, pointed out that false memory recollections also occur among high profile people.

All memory, as McGaugh explained, is colored with bits of life experiences. When people recall, “they are reconstructing,” he said. “It doesn't mean it’s totally false. It means that they’re telling a story about themselves and they’re integrating things they really do remember in detail, with things that are generally true.”

“puzzling why (Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory) individuals remember some trivial details, such as what they had for lunch 10 years ago, but not others, such as words on a word list or photographs in a slideshow,” Patihis and colleagues noted in the PNAS study. “The answer to this may be that they may extract some personally relevant meaning from only some trivial details and weave them into the narrative for a given day.”

For all of us, the stronger the emotion attached to a moment, the more likely those parts of our brains involved in memory will become activated.

“Why did evolution do that?” McGaugh said. “Because it was essential for our survival.

We now know animals are likely susceptible to memory distortions too, as MIT researchers recently were able to successfully plant false memories in mice.

“We’re all creating stories. Our lives are stories in that sense.”

“but you as the writer have the obligation to get as close to the truth as you possibly can,” Meyer said

The mind and its memory do not just record and retrieve information and experiences, but also infer, fill in gaps, and construct, wrote Bryan Boyd wrote in On the Origin of Stories. “Episodic memory’s failure to provide exact replicas of experiences appears to not be a limitation of memory but an adaptive design.”

To counter the weak employment market, Summers called for major growth in government expenditures to fill needs that the private sector is not addressing:In our society, whether it is taking care of the young or taking care of the old, or repairing a lot that needs to be repaired, there is a huge amount of very valuable work that needs to be done. It’s much less clear, to use a modern phrase, that there’s a viable business model for getting it done. And I guess the reason why I think there is going to need to be a lot of reflection on the role of government going forward is that, if I’m right, that there’s vitally important work to be done for which there is no standard capital business model that will get it done. That suggests important roles for public policy.

the report calls for tax and regulatory policies to encourage employee ownership, the strengthening of collective bargaining rights, regulations requiring corporations to provide fringe benefits to employees working for subcontractors, a substantial increase in the minimum wage, sharper overtime pay enforcement, and a huge increase in infrastructure appropriations – for roads, bridges, ports, schools – to spur job creation and tighten the labor market.

Summers also calls for significant increases in the progressivity of the United States tax system.

He advocates aggressive steps to eliminate “rents” — profits that result from monopoly or other forms of government protection from competition. Summers favors attacking rents in the form of “exclusionary zoning practices” that bid up the price of housing, “excessively long copyright” protections, and financial regulations “providing implicit subsidies to a fortunate minority.”

Signaling that he now finds himself on common ground with stalwarts of the Democratic left like Elizabeth Warren and Joe Stiglitz, Summers adds, “Government needs to try to make sure everyone can get access to financial markets on an equal basis.”

Summers supports looking past income inequality to the distribution of wealth. During our conversation, he pointed out that “a large fraction of capital gains escapes taxation entirely” through “the stepped up basis at death.”

The idea that an economy could suffer from a persistent shortage of demand is an enormous switch for Summers or anyone who had been adhering to the economic orthodoxy in the three decades prior to the crisisin 2008. Baker goes on to argue that Summers “now recognizes that the financial system needs serious regulation.”

Many of the policies outlined by Summers — especially on trade, taxation, financial regulation and worker empowerment — are the very policies that divide the Wall-Street-corporate wing from the working-to-middle-class wing of the Democratic Party. Put another way, these policies divide the money wing from the voting wing.

Summers has forced out in the open a set of choices that Hillary Clinton has so far avoided, choices that even if she attempts to elide them will amount to a signal of where her loyalties lie.

“The core problem,” according to Summers, is thatthere aren’t enough jobs, and if you help some people, you can help them get the jobs, but then someone else won’t get the jobs. And unless you’re doing things that are affecting the demand for jobs, you’re helping people win a race to get a finite number of jobs, and there are only so many of them.

he is “all for” more schooling and job training, but as an answer to the problems of the job marketplace, “it is fundamentally an evasion.”

Summers’s analysis of current economic conditions suggests that free market capitalism, as now structured, is producing major distortions. These distortions, in his view, have resulted in gains of $1 trillion annually to those at the top of the pyramid, and losses of $1 trillion every year to those in the bottom 80 percent.

Summers’s ascendance is a reflection of the abandonment by much of the party establishment of neo-liberal thinking, premised on the belief that unregulated markets and global trade would produce growth beneficial to worker and C.E.O. alike.

Larry Summers, who withdrew his candidacy for the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve under pressure from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in 2013, has emerged as the party’s dominant economic policy strategist. The former Treasury secretary’s evolving message has won over many of his former critics.

This tendency to inflexibly hear what was expected was worsened after giving a dopamine-releasing drug, and more pronounced in participants with elevated dopamine release, and more apparent in participants with a smaller dorsal anterior cingulate (a brain region previously shown to track reliability of environmental cues).

"All people have some perceptual distortions, but these results suggest that excess dopamine can exacerbate our distorted perceptions," said Dr. Horga.

Applied welfare economics is the fruition of microeconomics.

It is hard to imagine a basic course in microeconomics failing to include numerous cases and examples drawn from all of the fields listed above. This is because microeconomics is so basic. It represents the trunk of the tree from which all the listed subfields have branche

The specialization of production and the institutions of trade, commerce, and markets long antedated the science of economics. Indeed, one can fairly say that from the very outset the science of economics entailed the study of the market forms that arose quite naturally (and without any help from economists) out of human behavior

In microeconomics this is translated into the notion of people maximizing their personal “utility,” or welfare.

At the beginning of the process, those who adopted the new hybrids made handsome profits.

The economics of supply and demand has a sort of moral or normative overtone, at least when it comes to dealing with a wide range of market distortions. In an undistorted market, buyers pay the market price up to the point where they judge further units not to be worth that price, while competitive sellers supply added units as long as they can make money on each increment.

The strength of microeconomics comes from the simplicity of its underlying structure and its close touch with the real world. In a nutshell, microeconomics has to do with supply and demand, and with the way they interact in various markets.

If price controls keep bread (or anything else) artificially cheap, the predictable result is that less will be supplied than is demanded.

Had the government given wheat farmers coupons, each of which permitted the farmer to market one bushel of wheat, wheat marketings could have been cut by the desired amount. Production inefficiencies could be avoided by allowing the farmers to buy and sell coupons among themselves.

monopoly represents the artificial restriction of production by an entity having sufficient “market power” to do so.

Modern monopolies are a bit less transparent, for two reasons. First, even though governments still grant monopolies, they usually grant them to the producers. Second, some monopolies just happen without government creating them, although these are usually short-lived.

A final example of what occurs with official prices that are too high is the phenomenon of “rent seeking,” which occurs when someone enters a business to earn a profit that the government has tried to make unusually high.

If the wage does not adjust downward to equate supply and demand, the rate of urban unemployment will rise until further migration is deterred. Still other examples are in banking and drugs.

Rent seeking also occurs when something of value (like import licenses or radio/TV franchises) is being given away or sold below its true value

The great unifying principles of microeconomics are, ever and always, supply and demand. The normative overtone of microeconomics comes from the fact that competitive supply price represents value as seen by suppliers, and competitive demand price represents value as seen by demanders.

these filters will isolate people in information bubbles only partly of their own choosing, and the inaccurate beliefs they form as a result may be difficult to correct."

the proliferation of search engines, news aggregators and feed-ranking algorithms is more likely to perpetuate ignorance than knowledge.

It would seem that excessive social media use may intensify not only feelings of loneliness, but also ideological isolation.

"What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact."

Recent studies show that although most people consume information that matches their opinions, being exposed to conflicting views tends to reduce prejudice and enhance creative thinking.

the desire to prove ourselves right and maintain our current beliefs trumps any attempt to be creative or more open-minded.

"our objects of inquiry are not 'truth' or 'meaning' but rather configurations of consciousness. These are figures or patterns of knowledge, cognitive and practical attitudes, which emerge within a definite historical and cultural context."

the internet is best understood as a cultural lens through which we construct – or distort – reality.

we can only deal with this overwhelming range of choices by ignoring most of them.

trolling is so effective for enticing readers' comments, but so ineffective for changing their viewpoints.

Will accumulating facts help you understand the world?

we have developed a dependency on technology, which has eclipsed our reliance on logic, critical thinking and common sense: if you can find the answer online, why bother thinking?

it is conceivable that individuals' capacity to evaluate and produce original knowledge will matter more than the actual acquisition of knowledge.

Good judgment and decision-making will be more in demand than sheer expertise or domain-specific knowledge.

The cost of the drugs also isn't given, although there has been a push that commercials offer this vital information. Furthermore, we're not offered quantitative information about risks or side-effects.

When you think about it, it’s actually the perfect cycle for the pharmaceutical companies whereby an increase in sales of one medication directly increases the demand of the other with the only losers being us, the consumers."

Ambiguities are often reconciled with other observed data, such as that we know by other means that the planet is too small to cause the scale of distortion seen.

“The two previous theories of degeneracy deal with cases where the background star appears to pass close to the foreground star or the foreground planet. The AI algorithm showed us hundreds of examples from not only these two cases, but also situations where the star doesn’t pass close to either the star or planet and cannot be explained by either previous theory,” said Zhang in a Berkeley news release.

But without the systematic and confident calculations of the AI, it’s likely the simplified, less correct theory would have persisted for many more years.

As a result — and after some convincing, since a grad student questioning established doctrine is tolerated but perhaps not encouraged — they ended up proposing a new, “unified” theory of how degeneracy in these observations can be explained, of which the two known theories were simply the most common cases.

“People were seeing these microlensing events, which actually were exhibiting this new degeneracy but just didn’t realize it. It was really just the machine learning looking at thousands of events where it became impossible to miss,” said Scott Gaudi

But Zhang seemed convinced that the AI had clocked something that human observers had systematically overlooked.

Just as people learned to trust calculators and later computers, we are learning to trust some AI models to output an interesting truth clear of preconceptions and assumptions — that is, if we haven’t just coded our own preconceptions and assumptions into them.

that a coming storm will sweep elites from power

and that violence might be necessary to save the country.

In October 2021, 17 percent of Americans believed in the conspiracy theory, up from 14 percent in March

the percentage of people who rejected QAnon falsehoods shrank to 34 percent in October from 40 percent in March

After Mr. Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, QAnon was expected to be hobbled without him. But it has persisted despite that and despite efforts by tech platforms to staunch its spread. Forensic linguists have also tried to unmask and defang the anonymous author who signed online messages as Q.

Robert P. Jones, the founder and chief executive of the research group and a social science researcher with decades of experience, said he never expected to be dealing with serious survey questions about whether powerful American institutions were controlled by devil-worshiping, sex-trafficking pedophiles. To have so many Americans agree with such a question, he said, was “stunning.”

Believers are “racially, religiously and politically diverse,”

Among Republicans, 25 percent found QAnon to be valid, compared with 14 percent of independents and 9 percent of Democrats.

Media preferences were a major predictor of QAnon susceptibility, with people who trust far-right news sources such as One America News Network and Newsmax nearly five times more likely to be believers than those who trust mainstream news

Fox News viewers were twice as likely to back QAnon ideas

Most QAnon believers associated Christianity with being American and said that the United States risked losing its culture and identity and must be protected from foreign influence

seven in 10 believers agreed with the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump.

More than half of QAnon supporters are white, while 20 percent are Hispanic and 13 percent are Black.

They were most likely to have household incomes of less than $50,000 a year, hold at most a high school degree, hail from the South and reside in a suburb.

Conservatives were at a disadvantage because Romney supporters like Jennifer Rubin and Hugh Hewitt saw it as their duty to spin constantly for their favored candidate rather than being frank about his strengths and weaknesses.

Conservatives were at an information disadvantage because so many right-leaning outlets wasted time on stories the rest of America dismissed as nonsense. WorldNetDaily brought you birtherism. Forbes brought you Kenyan anti-colonialism. National Review obsessed about an imaginary rejection of American exceptionalism, misrepresenting an Obama quote in the process, and Andy McCarthy was interviewed widely about his theory that Obama, aka the Drone Warrior in Chief, allied himself with our Islamist enemies in a "Grand Jihad" against America. Seriously? 

Conservatives were at a disadvantage because their information elites pandered in the most cynical, self-defeating ways, treating would-be candidates like Sarah Palin and Herman Cain as if they were plausible presidents rather than national jokes who'd lose worse than George McGovern.

How many hours of Glenn Beck conspiracy theories did Fox News broadcast to its viewers? How many hours of transparently mindless Sean Hannity content is still broadcast daily? Why don't Americans trust Republicans on foreign policy as they once did? In part because conservatism hasn't grappled with the foreign-policy failures of George W. Bush. A conspiracy of silence surrounds the subject. Romney could neither run on the man's record nor repudiate it.

Most conservative pundits know better than this nonsense -- not that they speak up against it. They see criticizing their own side as a sign of disloyalty. I see a coalition that has lost all perspective, partly because there's no cost to broadcasting or publishing inane bullshit. In fact, it's often very profitable. A lot of cynical people have gotten rich broadcasting and publishing red meat for movement conservative consumption.

On the biggest political story of the year, the conservative media just got its ass handed to it by the mainstream media. And movement conservatives, who believe the MSM is more biased and less rigorous than their alternatives, have no way to explain how their trusted outlets got it wrong, while the New York Times got it right. Hint: The Times hired the most rigorous forecaster it could find.   It ought to be an eye-opening moment.