This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

by Daniel J. Levitin

Seemingly minor interventions can powerfully affect the accuracy of memory retrieval. An important series of studies was carried out by Elizabeth Loftus of the University of Washington, who was interested in the accuracy of witnesses’ courtroom testimonies. Subjects were shown videotapes and asked leading questions about the content. If shown two cars that barely scraped each other, one group of subjects might be asked, “How fast were the cars going when they scraped each other?” and another group would be asked, “How fast were the cars going when they smashed each other?” Such one-word substitutions caused dramatic differences in the eyewitnesses’ estimates of the speeds of the two vehicles. Then Loftus brought the subjects back, sometimes up to a week later, and asked, “How much broken glass did you see?” (There really was no broken glass.) The subjects who were asked the question with the word smashed in it were more likely to report “remembering” broken glass in the video. Their memory of what they actually saw had been reconstructed on the basis of a simple question the experimenter had asked a week earlier.