How Memory Errors Have An Impact In A Person's Life

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Memory errors must do with the incorrect information of a specific detail or event. Memory errors might include recalling events that never happened. Furthermore, memory errors happen because of many different reasons such as being emotionally involved in a situation. In this paper, I will discuss how memory errors have an impact in a person’s life and why the human brain creates false memories.
An incident that occurred in the news about a memory error is when news anchor Brian Williams falsely said that he was supposedly on board a helicopter that got shot down in Iraq in 2003. A critic that didn’t buy his story was Rosie O’ Donnell as she believed that he would have known if he was in helicopter that was hit by a missile.
In a study 20 percent of the participants had false memories because of false information. One person had mentioned that they had seen video footage of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11 thus one in 5 of the people claimed to remember seeing the video footage although there was no video footage. Also, if the false repeated information is repeated over a long period of
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“The Innocence Project in the US campaigns to overturn eyewitness misidentification and lists all the people who have subsequently been acquitted.” Furthermore, the project states that there have been 311 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the US which also includes 18 people who were sentenced to death before DNA evidence could prove they were innocent. Christopher French who works for Goldsmiths University which is in London stated that “there is a lack of awareness of how unreliable human memory.” In an article called, “Why does the human brain create false memories? By Melissa Hogenboom wrote that “one man who wrote in wrongly believed his girlfriend had a sister who died while at the dentist thus, he had such a strong conviction that he kept all his dentist visits