Health Briefs has heard for decades how important it is
to get enough sleep. The list of ill
effects of insufficient shut-eye is long and complex. Now add one more: false memories. Have you ever remembered something and had to
stop and ask yourself if it really happened or if it was from an old
dream? Police detectives have found out
just how unreliable the human memory can actually be under some
conditions. If there are 5 witnesses to
a single incident, often there can be 5 differing reports about what actually
happened. And under certain
circumstances, such as repetition of incorrect information, the weary mind will
actually fold that false information into the active memory, and thus be
incapable of separating factual from implanted details.
Health Briefs has discovered that if you don't get enough sleep, your brain will get back at you.
The Health Briefs TV show has discovered that a lack of
sleep can make a person even more susceptible to memories that seem concrete to
the subject, but prove to be not entirely based on the facts. A study published in the journal
Psychological Science recounts that 104 subjects were shown crime scene
photographs and then sent to bed, with half of them having their sleep
disrupted in the middle of the night.
The next morning, the group who did not get a continuous night's sleep
scored low on their memories of the photographs and actually reported details
that were not present in the evidence.
Law enforcement officials have known for a long time that eyewitness
testimony can be faulty at times, and it seems the more witnesses there are,
the more uncertain events become.
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