this has been stuck in my head for a couple days now. so here's the thing. say you were thinking of something, it can be anything, but it involves you and it never happened to you but in your mind. and while you were thinking about it, you just kept adding detail and detail until suddenly, it gets so realistic that you convince yourself that it is real while totally knowing that it's completely FAKE. so real that the images and emotions are just as vivid and strong as real memories. eventually, you can relive it like any other memory. and like any other memory, you can't get it out of your head. even if it's just laying there dormant in the back of your head. anyway, what do you think? do you consider them to be a memory?
Well it really depends on the circumstances that this occurs under. Our memories are susceptible to to small minute "suggestions" that can find their way into memory. For example, say you witness a car run a yellow yield sign and smash into another car. During a report you're giving a police officer he/she asks if the car ran the red stop sign. In this scenario there's a big chance that you'll actually encode the information of the red stop sign into your memory of the accident, because you're attention may have been drawn more to the smash as opposed to minute details of the situation (i.e. gender of the drivers, the type of sign, etc.). Our own memories are also never fully reactivated when we remember them. They may be cued by certain experiences, but when you're actually remembering something you're not fully able to remember it 100%. It is very common for us to use the most major of experiences that a memory has to offer and then reconstruct around those key experiences to produce the memory. In the early 90's there also happened to be a large number of lawsuits against private psychotherapists who used hypnosis on their clients. While their clients were under hypnotic suggestion, some of these practitioners had purposefully implanted suggestions that they had been sexually assaulted or molested as children so as to squeeze more money out of them. This was done via the unconscious. What you're suggesting is that someone actually will and convince themselves that their own lies are the truth to the point where they actually no longer see them as lies. I don't think this is entirely possible. It's perfectly easy to misconstrue an experience or attribute related yet different characteristics to a situation, but for someone to fabricate an entire memory and lose base with the falsehood of that memory doesn't seem likely. At least not for something as effortful and conscious.
I think I know what you're talking about. It feels like a memory, but you know it isn't. I just treat them like dreams I had, where it could be real, but you know it isn't. I know I wouldn't be able to get myself to comepletely 100% believe they're real, but it's fun to pretend. However, some people go too far and they think these fantasies are real, and then they go crazy because they think they have memories of things that never happened.
I don't see why not. You can eventually become so obsessed with something that you want to be exactly like it and you eventually think it actually happened. I look at them as dreams.
It feels like a memory because you've convinced yourself that it is. The dictionary defines the term 'memory' as the act or fact of retaining and recalling impressions. So if you're retaining the thought and recalling the emotions, it's a memory =D
i can't imagine that happening, but if you've suffered from amnesia people can put false memories in your head
Cool, this stuff reminds me of Chain of memories. So, you can trick yourself to think stuff that never happened, but you think that at one point you thought it, thus leading to a false memory?
Well no one short of being diagnosed with delusional and paranoid schizophrenia would actually be capable to effortfully will something false into something true without truly knowing that it isn't true. Even most patients with schizophrenia don't exhibit something as vivid.
Well nothing like that has ever happened to me before. I get this feeling that something specific was going to happen after I remember what my dream was. Sometimes I'm home and then I'd trip over something and then right in teh split second, my mind tells me that it knew this was going to happen, I just never knew it. Usually, I thought it was just my asthma getting to me but then it's been doing it several times exact time and exact place multiple times. I believe that they are not fake memories but something that will happen or they are just your imagination that you wished had just happened. This is my thought. :3
Basically paranoid and delusional schizophrenics would be capable of it to some degree. But nothing like what is being suggested in the topic.
