writerkit | Oh, Joy, False Memories Are in the News

I cannot, in a quick Google search, find any evidence these people are directly connected to the False Memory Syndrome people. And the malleability of memory is a thing that needs to be studied, just by people who are open to all possibilities and not starting with a predetermined conclusion.

But it hasn't been nearly long enough since the Memory Wars for someone who's published over 100 articles on the subject to not have been active during the Memory Wars, and at that point if you want to be doing responsible reporting you need to specify what they were doing during that time, or it's too hard to determine if the people you're writing about are credible or not. There's not enough evidence of false memories as a widespread thing for this to be an especially exciting find, especially since they don't appear to have tried this technique on real memories, in which case they haven't proven whether this is actually reversing the false memory or just a second manipulation of memory in the reverse direction. (Have you noticed that all the "memory is malleable" people are focused on creating false memories and no one ever asks whether you can be made to be convinced real memories are false? I'm not sure how you'd design this experiment such that it gets past the IRB, since you're basically asking permission to gaslight people in the name of science, but someone needs to be devoting effort to the question if they want to study this at all seriously.)

The question is whether someone-- either the reporter or the scientists-- is trying to reignite the Memory Wars.