false memory syndrome, also called recovered memory, pseudomemory, and memory distortion, the experience, usually in the context of adult psychotherapy, of seeming to remember events that never actually occurred.
Our review suggests that individuals with PTSD, a history of trauma, or depression are at risk for producing false memories when they are exposed to information that is related to their knowledge base. Memory aberrations are notable characteristics of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression.
In psychology, a false memory is a phenomenon where someone recalls something that did not happen or recalls it differently from the way it actually happened.
Repeating entire conversations in your head is a type of rumination. It's how your mind attempts to self-soothe. The more you replay the details of a conversation, the more you may feel you can interpret what happened. You may also find that this helps you plan for a future outcome.
Hyperthymesia is the rare ability to recall nearly all past experiences in great detail. The causes of HSAM are currently unknown, but some theories suggest that it may have biological, genetic, or psychological origins. There is currently no way to diagnose hyperthymesia formally.
Factors that can influence false memory include misinformation and misattribution of the original source of the information. Existing knowledge and other memories can also interfere with the formation of a new memory, causing the recollection of an event to be mistaken or entirely false.
“False memory obsessive-compulsive disorder is a subtype of OCD characterized by intrusive self-doubts and false memories of doing something wrong. Sometimes these memories can feel so real that the person struggling with them has difficulty understanding what's true and what isn't.
Researchers think they may be starting to understand how false memories occur: They're the product of a kind of shorthand your brain uses to store memories efficiently. By false memories, we're talking about things we clearly recall happening that never actually did.
The empirical findings about memory limitations in individuals with ADHD—their attention deficits and failures to encode details—indicate that ADHD patients experience verbatim memory deficiencies and therefore an increased tendency to create false memories.
The study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, noted that attachment anxiety can lead to false memories more frequently than other personality types, such as neuroticism or attachment avoidance.
One such study revealed that stress can potentially increase the likelihood of false memory recollection; however another similar study reported stress did not affect the incidence of false memory but, that men were found to falsely recall more words than women.
Delusional disorder, previously called paranoid disorder, is a type of serious mental illness called a psychotic disorder. People who have it can't tell what's real from what is imagined. Delusions are the main symptom of delusional disorder. They're unshakable beliefs in something that isn't true or based on reality.
The best course of treatment for False Memory OCD, like all types of OCD, is exposure and response prevention (ERP) therapy. ERP is considered the gold standard for OCD treatment and has been found 80% effective. The majority of patients experience results within 12 – 25 sessions.
False memories in OCD are often related to the theme or content of the person's obsessive intrusive thoughts, such as having caused harm, offended someone, or cheated on their partner. Obsessions may also consist of uncertainty about whether a mistake was made that resulted in negative consequences.
In False Memory OCD it is possible for the person to wake up one day and feel as if they would really have killed somebody. The person can worry for hours and hours about the pain they have caused and fear their “crime” might be discovered one day. It is easy to see how frightening this can be.
However FMS has not been recognized as a psychiatric illness in any medical manuals including the ICD-10, ICD-11, or the DSM-5.
Anxiety can be so overwhelming to the brain it alters a person's sense of reality. People experience distorted reality in several ways. Distorted reality is most common during panic attacks, though may occur with other types of anxiety. It is also often referred to as “derealization.”
Results showed how patients with schizophrenia made a higher number of false memories than normal controls (p < 0.05) when remembering episodes with positive or negative outcomes.
What is a didactic memory? Didactic memory may simply be another term for eidetic memory. When a person has this type of memory, they can vividly recall memories as if they were a visual image or mental image that is burned into their minds.
Hyperthymesia, also known as hyperthymestic syndrome or highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM), is a condition that leads people to be able to remember an abnormally large number of their life experiences in vivid detail.
Eidetic Imagery Generally Isn't Found in Adults
According to Haber (1979), eidetic ability is found almost exclusively amongst young children, and is fairly rare even amongst them, occurring only in about 2% to 15% of American under-twelves.