Bugs Bunny at Disneyland?

Horrors! Say it isn't true! Your mind must be playing tricks on you!

Actually, your mind CAN play tricks on you. A research work reported at the 2003 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Meeting, as reported in Science 28 February 2003, had an interesting experiment on something they said would never happen.

Even impossible memories can be fabricated from suggestions, researchers reported at the AAAS annual meeting last week. And such memories can create physiological responses that are indistinguishable from those elicited by remembering real trauma.

Many people think their memories of dramatic events, such as where they were when they heard that President Kennedy was shot, are very reliable. But that doesn't appear to be true. To demonstrate the power of suggestion over such memories, Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues implanted a memory into people who had witnessed a bombing in Russia. They interviewed volunteers twice, 2.5 years and 3 years after the bombing. During the second interview, the team posed the suggestive question: "When you were taking part in our study, you mentioned a wounded animal. Could you tell us about it?" Almost 13% of the people recalled, incorrectly, that they had seen an injured pet.

Critics have argued that such false-memory experiments might call up real experiences--perhaps some subjects did see bleeding animals. So Loftus implanted a clearly impossible memory: a person in a Bugs Bunny outfit shaking hands and hugging children at Disneyland. "Bugs is a Warner Brothers character. He wouldn't be allowed on Disney premises," Loftus says. Her team recruited volunteers who had been to Disneyland earlier in their lives. They were shown an advertisement for Disneyland with pictures of Bugs and text describing a trip to Disneyland that included meeting the wascally wabbit. Weeks later, 36% of the volunteers who had seen the ads vividly recalled that they had seen Bugs Bunny in real life: They shook his hand or even hugged him, they reported.

"Her work points out to people that, in terms of our own subjective experiences, what we think is crystal-clear imagery could be inaccurate at the very deepest level," says psychologist Michelle Leichtman of the University of New Hampshire, Durham. A study of people who claim to have been abducted by space aliens helped psychologist Richard McNally of Harvard University determine how deep imagined events can go. His team recorded 10 volunteers' abduction stories. Volunteers listened to audiotape clips of their stories while the researchers measured heart rate, sweating, and facial muscle tension. All stress responses were elevated, to the point that they mirrored those of people remembering Vietnam combat events or childhood sexual abuse. More than half of the alien abductees exhibited some symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder.

The response to trauma "is driven by emotional beliefs, whether accurate or not," McNally reported. "If you sincerely think you were being abducted by aliens, you were." The result "is troubling," says Leichtman. "It underscores the similarities between true and false memories at an even more profound level" than researchers generally think.

So, if you see Bugs, or Elmer, or Tweety, etc. shaking hands and hugging people at Disneyland, just remember, it never happened!

:)

Zz.