During the popularity of psychoanalysis, many psychological problems were considered to be caused by childhood trauma, so some psychologists tended to dig into childhood memories. However, possibly due to the suggestive nature of the methods, some false accusations appeared, such as false allegations of child sexual abuse.
The movie 《狩猎》 (The Hunt), starring Mads Mikkelsen, is a reflection of this kind of false accusation. Some scholars are concerned about these false memories, so they designed an experiment: recruiting a small number of 5-year-old children and asking their parents to often tell false stories of getting lost in the mall in a week. The results showed that about 25% of the children regarded it as a memory and even filled in the missing details.
However, this type of memory implantation experiment is very unethical, so there seem to be no similar experiments in recent years to confirm it. Fortunately, there is also a widespread social phenomenon that can be observed, which is the Mandela effect. In 2013, when Mandela passed away, many people outside of South Africa said, wasn’t Mandela already dead in the last century?
And the lyrics “fifty-six ethnic groups”, the character “𪠽” (the simplified version of 噹) in books, the color of Pikachu’s tail, etc., many people feel that their memories do not match the facts. Since there has been no large-scale epidemic of new encephalitis in society, it is not the activation of Reading Steiner to see the history of other world lines, but simply a widespread false memory.
Current AI images can be made very realistic. If they are used to implant false memories, they may be more efficient, X user 寒涟漪 worried.