THE RABBIT ILLUSION - Are your thoughts traveling through time?
Spoiler alert, this little experiment actually has nothing to do with rabbits. Sure, they are cute but besides the analogy with rabbit being magically pulled out of a magicians hat, this illusion is about time travel and your mind filling in the blanks to create what it wants to create. Our brains are funny like that, they sometimes make us believe in things that are actually not there. It kind of makes you wonder, how much of our experiences are actually entirely made up?
CC0 licence, Pixabay, author: qimono , adapted by me
Our memories often seem like they are solid and strong but they are far more complex than we usually realize. They are subject to change, unreliable, and reconstructed as we age. We can even create new false memories through effective suggestion and be tricked into remembering events that never happened. This phenomenon ranges from simple things like incorrectly recalling that you turned the light off to those more serious things like falsely remembering details of an accident you witnessed. False memories are one of the leading causes of false convictions.
"A false memory is a mental experience that is mistakenly taken to be a veridical representation of an event from one's personal past."
Johnson, M. K., 2001
Misinformation and misattribution of the original source can influence false memory but the existing knowledge can also interfere with the formation of a new memory and cause the recollection of an event to be entirely false. False memories can also be strongly induced through suggestion.
Your memory changes
depending on the questions about it.
One of the groundbreaking research from 1974 was when participants watched the video of an automobile accident and were then asked questions about what they saw in the film. Some participants were asked 'How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?' while others were asked the same question but the words 'smashed into' were replaced with 'hit.' A week later, when they were asked to describe the accident, those that heard smashed into were more likely to have a false memory of seeing broken glass in the film and recolected that cars were going faster then they actually did.
You can check the research here:
Semantic integration of verbal information into a visual memory by Loftus EF, Miller DG, Burns HJ.
It goes all the way back to Freud...
Psychologists Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud were investigating trauma victims including those of childhood sexual abuse and Freud wrote a book The Aetiology of Hysteria, in which he discussed repressed memories of childhood sexual trauma in their relation to hysteria. After those two men, Elizabeth Loftus came with her work in 1974 (that experiment with the crash video was hers too) and has been a leading memory researcher ever since.
Would you believe that people can be convinced that an entire event had happened when in fact it did not? They can. One of Elizabeth Loftus' psychology students created the experiment in 1997 in which he produced four booklets containing recollections of events from childhood and gave each to a family member. One of them was different than the other three.
One false story...
The stories in the booklets were true except for the one given to Coan's brother. It was a description of him being lost in a shopping mall as a child when an older man found him and returned him to his family again. It was completely made up, such a thing had never happened to his brother but he not only remembered it but also recalled additional details and was unable to identify it as being the false story.
Music and similar words...
Another interesting thing is that subjects in experiments performed at the University of Virginia that were in a more negative mood were less likely to recall false memories implanted previously. They played two different music types to them. Those that were induced into a more positive mood produced more false memories. This technique is often combined with the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm to create false memories. People listen to words such as sun, hot, relax, beach, tan and when asked to repeat them, recall words like vacation or sunbathing because they are semantically linked.
And now we can adress the topic at hand, the rabbit illusion or the experiment that leads to thinking how our thoughts are traveling throug time or the phenomenon known as POSTDICTION. In prediction, we forecast the future but in the postdiction, a future stimulus influences how you see the past. A direction is different.
How does it work?
Watch the video below, it only lasts 50 seconds so forget about the excuse that you do not have time for this. There will be a cross on the screen, focus on it and then watch out for the flashes at the bottom of the screen. All you have to do is count how many flashes you saw. Easy, right? Good luck and see you in 50 seconds...
The researchers made a video that had three parts:
- A beep and a flash on the left side of the screen
- A beep
- A beep and a flash on the right side of the screen
Each part of the video is separated with 58 milliseconds and even though there are only two flashes, most people perceived three. How many did you see? Did you see a flash in the middle of the screen when the second beep buzzed? It appears that your brain used postdictive processing to fill in the gap.
"When the final beep-flash pair is later presented, the brain assumes that it must have missed the flash associated with the unpaired beep and quite literally makes up the fact that there must have been a second flash that it missed. This already implies a postdictive mechanism at work. But even more importantly, the only way that you could perceive the shifted illusory flash would be if the information that comes later in time — the final beep-flash combination — is being used to reconstruct the most likely location of the illusory flash as well."
Noelle R. B. Stiles
The second experiment that accompanied the first is similar but this time, there really are 3 flashes but only first and the last one have the buzzer. People watching did not see the second flash that did not have the buzzer sound accompanying it.
This shows that sound can lead to a visual illusion and that the brain combines senses over space and time to generate a sense of perception. The study's senior author, Shinsuke Shimojo explained how the significance of this is twofold:
1. Postdiction is a key process in perceptual processing for both a single sense and multiple senses (sight in the first and sight and sound in the second)
2. These two illusions are among the very rare cases where sound affects vision, not vice versa which indicates dynamic aspects of neural processing that occur across space and time
"Postdiction may sound mysterious, but it is not — one must consider how long it takes the brain to process earlier visual stimuli, during which time subsequent stimuli from a different sense can affect or modulate the first."
Shinsuke Shimojo
You can read the entire research article about these illusions here:
What you saw is what you will hear: Two new illusions with audiovisual postdictive effects
by Noelle R. B. StilesI, Monica Li, Carmel A. Levitan, Yukiyasu Kamitani, Shinsuke Shimojo from Biology and Biological Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, United States of America, Cognitive Science, Occidental College, Los Angeles, California, United States of America, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, Seika, Soraku, Kyoto, JapanSo, I am not to trust my own brain?
Nope. This is where objectivity proves to be more precise. Your brain can play tricks on you and science has been aware of this for a long time. Just because you saw something does not mean it is there and just because you think something does not make it true. This is why we have double-blind studies in science. They help eliminate the possibility of influencing the research by our opinions and memories. What is true for you may not be true for others and sometimes may not be true at all. Don't you just love our brains? :)
To read more about this subject, check out these references:
- False Memories from psychologytoday.com
- What Is a False Memory? from verywellmind.com by Kendra Cherry, reviewed by Steven Gans, MD
- False Memories from psychologistworld.com
- How This Time-Traveling Illusion Tricks Your Brain from livescience.com by Laura Geggel
- Mind Maze: How Your Memory Deceives You from livescience.com by Michael Dhar
- False memory from wikipedia.org
Oh, ONE LAST THING!
All my titles had a little rabbit in them, right?
Image sources AND LICENCES in order of appearance:
- all images used in this post are free for commercial use, they are royalty free with the links to original images provided under them
- line divider that I use is from FREE CLIPART LIBRARY, and is here
- title pictures are made by me using the CC0 images from pixabay that can be found here
- my bitmoji avatar was created on https://www.bitmoji.com/, visit the site to create yourown
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Ach, this is one area of science that makes my blood boil! I am VERY sceptical about "false memory syndrome". However I'm not suggesting that we all have perfect memory ability. Instead I would describe it as "potentially inaccurate memory" or "the ability of the mind to be manipulated".
The reason I am so wary of the idea of "false memory" is that it can be – and has been – used to make people doubt their own mental capabilities. It has been used to dispute witness testimonies in judicial cases. It can therefore be used to limit people's rights and freedoms.
And I didn't fall for the flashing light experiment, because I could see it coming! I saw only two flashes. Though I admit, if I had been watching it out of context I might have believed I saw three flashes.
I've read about the Elizabeth Loftus "shopping mall" experiment before. There were only 24 participants, and only a quarter of them, 25%, reported remembering the "false" event.
The reason I've put "false" in quotes is because... maybe this wasn't even a false memory. Most of us can remember a time when we got lost as a small child, and even if it was only for a short time, it would have seemed scary at that age. And it was quite likely that when we were lost, an older person would have found us. Even if that older person was in their 30s, to a 5-year-old they might appear as an "elderly"! So maybe those "implanted" memories weren't quite as false as they might appear.
In any case, I think that experiment is flawed, yet it is often quoted as "proof" of "false memory syndrome".
I enjoy your science posts, so I hope you don't mind me disputing this aspect. I just think it has wider implications, and with so much riding on it, I don't think we should be giving too much credence to dubious research carried out on a group of 24 people.
Shopping mall experiment is older and served as an intro to the main point of the post. This new one with the sound is excellent and I really hope you will find the time to read the full research.
I think we should. This is how it starts, with smaller research leading to bigger ones, more funding is necessary but this topic surely is interesting and important enough to be worked on more in the future. Nothing is exact now but it does raise good questions and open doors for more to come. Thank you for your valuable contribution to this topic.
This was my gut reaction as well as I am a little cautious about false memory syndrome as I know it has been falsified in court cases or used to discredit people when it cannot really be proved and I have heard that thing about them all as well because he hasn't been lost in a mall right? But then again the vine does play funny tricks on us and fill in gaps when there are none
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Well all I can say, whatever you believe, put your all into it.
This is incredibly important to know because... If we can re-model our past memories we have a tool to change our future decisions and "change the destiny".
I hate that word, destiny... Gives me the chills. Our every decision has consequences and is shaping our future but... Yeah, I kind of get what you mean. If we are set in our ways of thinking and react controlled with our learned behavior with no rational thought, then yes, you can say that we are under the influence of our own made destiny. Decision making is subjective and depends on past experience, if the memory of an experience is false then a decision may be wrong. Understanding the brain as an organ is really important and hormones and synapses can be your friends or they can be your worst enemies :D
Mind jumps down seven rabbit holes upon reading this article, mixes them up, and tries to play tricks on me...
Thanks for keeping it real, Petra. Your articles always get me thinking. :)
Thanks honey, I love that your mind is enjoying this, much love 💚
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All of us have these false memories - more than once I was hanging on to a memory that turned to be inaccurate, although I could have sworn it was true. Thanks for another amazeball post!
I have them too from time to time, I think we all do hihi. Thanks for your feedback honey, I am glad you enjoyed the read 💚
Such a great article, I am always fascinated by how the mind works and to what degree it can made up our reality. I have noticed that minds rephrase, and interpret situations and events in such a way that supports a firmly held belief or feeling. If someone belived he is being conspired against, his mind always rearrange and reframe the events to support that belief. When he is presented with the evidence of the inconsistency of his belief, hw would accept it for a while, sooner or later the original belief resurface again with the same arrangment of events.
It would be of great use for every one to understand the biases his mind makes and to learn how to watch his mind and maintain objective perspective.
Oh yeah, our strong beliefs do often determine how we react and I do agree that only by learning about it brings us closer to understanding and maintaining objectiveness. Thank you for your lovely feedback. 💚
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I can only hope you are on the jury when they come for me.
hihihi, why? My mind is subjected to failure just like any other :D
Well, I didn't go back and look but I think there was not a rabbit with every title.
I saw the two flashes, but I was 'geared up' to pay really serious attention. I would have picked the second flash to be higher on the screen than the first, but since I was specifically concentrating on it I knew there were two flashes and three beeps.
Really interesting post that absolutely highlights the problem with 'eye witness' accounts. I was once rounded up in a 'mistaken' identity case. The good news is that I could prove exactly where I was at the exact time but it was ugly for a short while. Turns out the actual guy had different color hair and was shorter than me, but still would be considered tall and skinny (I was skinny when I was young) and the witness was convinced it was me.
Thank you Petra for a really inventive post.
Oh, I am glad that everything turned ok for you back then. Yeah, witnesses sometimes have problems with remembering. There is a great show called BRAIN GAMES and it often has all sorts of great little experiments. If you have not seen it yet, watch it. Thank you for your lovely feedback 💚