With this in mind, I have decided to quote those excerpts, and wherever you see a bracket (“[.....]“), I have replaced Saletan’s or Loftus’ words or phrases with my own; in other places I have deleted sentences.  I will also change the names so no one gets the false impression (or memory, as the case may be) that Dr. Loftus is engaged in any such work.

Let’s see what happens when fact becomes fiction:

In 1998, when [Prophet Saratan] published her first behavior-therapy [guidebook based on revelations given to her by Ur-God], she stopped short of editing memories. The [guidebook, "The Sacred Writings of Ur"], was designed to exploit the self-fulfilling power of imagination, not to alter recollections. [Prophet Saratan] and her [disciples] described memory modification as an unfortunate risk of the [indoctrination]. It might happen, they wrote, but [this is how new spiritual and religious traditions get started.]

A few years after [Prophet Saratan] published ["The Sacred Writings of Ur"], she began a new line of research, investigating whether false memories could affect behavior. The behavior had to be simple, measurable, influenced by memory, and testable in the lab. One obvious candidate was eating. Food aversions were common and powerful. You could plant a memory of a bad experience with a certain food [and thus create a taboo or sin]. Then you could test whether this memory affected the subject’s eating behavior.

In February 2005, [Prophet Saratan and her disciples] published the [ritual] egg study, concluding that “humans can be trained to avoid food [and consider them taboo; eating such foods is sinful and will result in spiritual harm].”

In the [ritual] food experiments, all the threads of [Prophet Saratan's] career came together. Instead of training a rat, she was training people. Instead of using a reward, she was using the techniques she had learned from [previous priests and prophets]. And instead of planting bad memories, she was planting [sacred or religious] ones. She was a real-life memory [priestess and had founded a new faith.]

In February 2005, [Prophet Saratan and her disciples] published the [ritual] egg study, concluding that “humans can be trained to avoid food.” Four months later, they published the ice-cream [taboo revelation] under the title, “False Beliefs About [Taboo] Foods Can Have [Spiritual] Consequences.” The diet-improvement rationale, originally an afterthought, was now central. The bottom line, they wrote, was that “we can, through suggestion, manipulate nutritional selection and possibly even improve [spiritual] health.”

[In later sacred books and teachings, Prophet Saratan] was proposing permanent deception [without disclosing this to believers]. [Outside of religion, those] who misled people in experiments were ethically obliged to tell them the truth when the experiments were over. [But because she was founding a new faith through revelations, Prophet Saratan never] abandoned her original idea to plant a memory of being told by your grandmother that you were her favorite grandchild. [Spiritual or religious] memory modification, as she envisioned it, would be left uncorrected [because it was revealed truth].

If memory therapy [and religious indoctrination] could change eating habits, why not [other thoughts, beliefs, and practices]? With [seed or tithe] money from the [newly founded Temple of Ur, Prophet Saratan and her disciples] moved on to [other thoughts, beliefs, and practices], using the same method[s]. In a report on their [implantation, suggestion, and indoctrination methods], [Prophet Saratan and her disciples] called their work “a first step in exploring the idea of using memory implantation techniques for the purposes of reducing or eliminating an unwanted behavior” [and founding a new religious faith].

Building on a biological and neural substrate that naturally generates spiritual and supernatural ways of thinking, cultural patterning can cause people to believe in just about anything.

This presumably accounts for the fact that if you tell me three things: (1) when a person was born; (2) where a person was born; and (3) the spiritual or religious beliefs of that person’s parents, I can tell you with better than 95 percent accuracy what the spiritual or religious beliefs of that person were or are.

[Dr. Elizabeth Loftus] wrote with dismay of the “horrifying idea that our memories can be changed, inextricably altered, and that what we think we know, what we believe with all our hearts, is not necessarily the truth.” Quoting a fellow psychologist, she warned readers not “to accept a false reality as truth, for that is the very essence of madness.”

Loftus never believed in the absolute sanctity of truth or memory. She believed that memory, through wishful thinking, constantly modified itself. People remembered themselves as having given more to charity than they really had. They mentally airbrushed their behavior in marriages and relationships. They minimized what they had lost and embellished what they had chosen.

[M]emories could be conveniently adjusted. And this rewriting of history was no perversion. It seemed to Loftus such a common tendency that it must be a product of evolution. In short, it was natural. Its function, she surmised, was to promote happiness or, at least, to avoid depression. And this theory matched her reflections about her own life and the lives of her friends: Often, happiness was more important than truth.

Happiness more important than truth?  This is exactly what Nietzsche discussed in the letter to his sister, which I posted here.

There is an obvious hint of Freudian wish fulfillment in this; in his classic Future of An Illusion, Freud reasonably surmised that religions often function to allay fear, soothe uneasiness, and console grief.  A similar theme was recently taken up by the anthropologist Lionel Tiger and neuroscientist Michael McGuire in their book, God’s Brain:

Positive socialization — that is socialization characteristic of religion-related events, enacting rituals, and incorporating and committing to religious beliefs — predictably brainsoothe.  Religions excel in brainsoothing.

People often need advisors about important or confusing elements of life.  Religions are directly set up to provide precisely such advice . That’s precisely what religions do, often very eagerly.  It’s scarcely a surprise that counsel may be most needed at the formal changes of status and intersections of life.

Religions are able to show strength and provide brainsoothing precisely when individuals need it or at least think they do.

As for Dr. Loftus’ hypothesis that our malleable memories (whether false, forgotten, or confabulated) were targeted by natural selection and are adaptive, the jury will have to remain out.  It is always tempting to speculate about the possible utility of something and call it an adaptation, but we must always be on guard against telling “just so” stories regarding human evolution.

The process she describes may simply be a side-effect or byproduct of other brain functions.  It could also be that our kluge-like brains are not optimally evolved, and that our memories are simply constructed or confabulated out of whatever materials might be on hand.  Religions often provide such materials.

Whichever hypothesis is correct, one thing is clear: “truth” for many people is heavily contingent on memories that may be incomplete, changeable, embellished, partial, fluctuating, or even false.

Loftus began to read popular books that told women and therapists how to recover memories of sexual abuse. The books urged therapists to ask their clients about childhood incest. They listed symptoms that supposedly indicated abuse even if it wasn’t remembered. They invited women to search for memories by imagining the abuse. They encouraged group therapy in which women could hear one another’s stories of being victimized.

These ideas sounded fishy. Suggestion, indoctrination, authority, inference, imagination, and immersion were known to alter memories in police interrogations and experiments. But could they create a whole memory?

Take serious heed of these words — suggestion, indoctrination, authority, inference, imagination, and immersion — before considering the next revelation:

From this experiment, Loftus began to sketch what she called a “recipe” for planting memories. First, you needed the subject’s trust. A therapist had that; so did a family member. Then, by suggesting that the incident might have happened, you planted a seed. The subject would think about it, and the idea, if not the scene, would start to become familiar. By coaxing the subject to imagine the scene, you could accelerate this confabulation. Gradually, she would add details, seizing authorship of the story and securing its authenticity. The fabrication was out of your hands now. The memory was hers.

This recipe was what the incest-survivor books were unwittingly teaching. It was what the recovered-memory therapists, with equal folly, were practicing. They hooked their readers and clients with checklists of supposed symptoms: headaches, guilt, low self-esteem, fear of darkness. Then they induced collaboration. “Let yourself imagine or picture what might have happened to you,” said one book. “Occasionally you may need a small verbal push to get started. Your guide may suggest some action that seems to arise naturally from the image you are picturing.” The guide, a therapist, supplied personal knowledge to help the process along. Group therapy helped, too. The more incest memories a woman heard, the more plausible her own victimization became. The more images she absorbed, the easier it was to picture the scenes she had repressed.

If there is a better description of the recipe for implanting religion and cooking up “spiritual” experiences, I am not aware of it.  Let’s take a closer look at the ingredients:

Suggestion?  Check.  Indoctrination?  Check.  Authority?  Check.  Inference?  Check.  Imagination?  Check.  Immersion?  Check.

Obtaining a child’s trust?  Check.  Telling children something happened and is true?  Check.  Planting doctrinal seeds?  Check.  Coaxing subjects to imagine “spiritual” experiences?  Check.  Hooking subjects with supposed symptoms (of insufficient belief) such as guilt, insecurity and fear?  Check.  Inducing collaboration by encouraging imagination?  Check.  Guides (i.e., parents and priests) supplying personal knowledge to help the process along?  Check.  Using group therapy — or sharing stories (in church, temple, mosque, synagogue, or study) of similar “spiritual” experiences — to move the process along?  Check.

What we have here is a fairly perfect description of what a child experiences when growing up in a Christian home in Dallas, a Muslim home in Riyadh, a Buddhist home in Kyoto, a Hindu home in Mumbai, a Mormon home in Provo, an Amish community in Pennsylvania, a Hutterite colony in Canada, and the list goes on.

A key point here is to realize that memories play a major role in all our experiences.  Unlike the memory of a computer, which sits idle and unused until actively recalled by the operating system, the brain-mind constantly avails itself of memories to fundamentally shape our sense of identity, and more importantly, to filter and interpret our experiences of the world.

With these things in mind, we should not be surprised by the fact that most people in the world have “spiritual” experiences that are glossed as religious.  Religion colored glasses can make everything seem spiritual.

It was a vivid story, told with sincerity and emotion. But the events Chris described had never happened. Chris’s elder brother, Jim, had made it up as an assignment for Loftus’ cognitive psychology class. Jim, pretending the story was real, had fed Chris the basics—the name of the mall, the old man, the flannel shirt, the crying—and Chris, believing his brother’s fabrication, had filled in the rest. He had proved what Loftus suspected: If you were carefully coached to remember something, and if you tried hard enough, you could do it.

And this was just the beginning. In the years to come, Loftus and her colleagues would plant false memories of all kinds—chokings, near-drownings, animal attacks, demonic possessions—in thousands of people. Their parade of brainwashing experiments continues to this day.

With these experiments in mind, let us consider spiritual beliefs and religious traditions.  All across the world, children are from an early age told all manner of stories about past religious events and the spiritual experiences of their parents and teachers.  Most children are, in other words, deeply embedded in a spiritual and religious milieu.

They are taught to believe these things and almost invariably, they believe what they are told.  With these beliefs deeply rooted in their minds, children begin generating their own spiritual-religious experiences, many of which have been implanted by religious traditions and teachings.  This process is self-reinforcing and continues into adulthood.  It stands to reason that these experiences are substantially shaped by environmental cues that have created “memories” initially and “experiences” subsequently.

I ended yesterday’s post by noting that the mind is a powerful conjurer.  The mind, however, is not a black box operating in isolation from the surrounding culture.  Indeed, it is fair to say that without culture the mind is empty and cannot do its work.  When the cultural inputs are spiritual and religious, the inevitable result will be that people begin experiencing — and remembering — things that never occurred or which were not caused by any external or material reality.  It is, in effect, a form of brainwashing that is powerfully sanctioned by most known societies.

The first article (“Ministry of Truth”) is here and the second (“Removable Truths”) is here.  Saletan will be posting several more installments over the coming days.  They should be required reading for anyone interested in the human mind and understanding human experience.

As is apparent from Saletan’s articles, human memory is highly imperfect.  It is also highly labile — we are able to conjure experiences of things that never happened and environmental cues, including deliberate memory implants, can create false “memories.”  In his first article, Saletan covers an experiment run by Slate on its presumably educated and literate readers.  Using fabricated images of political events that never occurred, Slate asked its readers if they remembered these events.  Here are the startling results:

[T]he fake images were effective. Through random distribution, each fabricated scene was viewed by a subsample of more than 1,000 people. Fifteen percent of the Bush subsample (those who were shown the composite photo of Bush with Clemens) said they remembered seeing that incident at the time. Fifteen percent of the Lieberman subsample (those who were shown the altered screen shot of his impeachment vote) said they had seen it. For Obama meeting Ahmadinejad, the number who remembered seeing it was 26 percent. For the Hillary Clinton ad, the number was 36 percent. For the Edwards-Cheney confrontation, it was 42 percent.

When we pooled these subjects with those who remembered the false events but didn’t specifically remember seeing them, the numbers nearly doubled. For Bush, the percentage who remembered the false event was 31. For Lieberman, it was 41. For Obama, it was 47. For Cheney, it was 65. For Hillary Clinton, it was 68.

These figures match previous findings. In memory-implanting experiments, the average rate of false memories is about 30 percent. But when visual images are used to substantiate the bogus memory, the number can increase. Several years ago, researchers using doctored photos persuaded 10 of 20 college students that they had gone up in hot-air balloons as children. Seeing is believing, even when what you’re seeing is fabricated.

All well and good but the best (or worst, depending on one’s perspective) is yet to come:

But that isn’t the scary part. The scary part is that your memories have already been altered. Much of what you recall about your life never happened, or it happened in a very different way. Sometimes our false memories have done terrible things. They have sent innocent people to jail.  They have ruined families with accusations of sexual abuse.

These are the tragedies that drive the work of Dr. [Elizabeth] Loftus, whose research inspired our experiment. To understand our minds and how they can be manipulated, she plants memories.

Saletan is hitting on some major issues here — the flaws and falsification of memories, the suggestibility of experience, the human tendency to confabulate, the ways in which history can be altered, and the power of the imagination.  Although he is discussing these issues in the context of politics and law, the relevance and applicability of these findings to “spiritual” and religious experiences is obvious.  I will touch on the most obvious today and some of the less obvious in coming days.

I have several friends who believe in reincarnation.  They are sincerely convinced they have memories of past lives, and are somewhat incredulous that I don’t have such memories also.  The source of their incredulity is my intense interest in Native American history and Native Americans generally.

Walk into my home and that interest is immediately apparent in the form of pictures, artifacts, books, etc.  My reading in Native American history is extensive, and I often talk about that history.  This has led my reincarnation friends to the conclusion that in a past life, I was a Native American.  I do not of course have any such memories, but I do have substantial knowledge of Native American histories and lifeways.  Armed with this knowledge, I am confident that I could — if I believed in reincarnation — create an imaginary world and past life as a Native American that would be exceptionally vivid.

These kinds of constructions are not limited to reincarnation.  I have no doubt that when most people report spiritual or religious experiences, they are sincere and non-delusional.  I doubt, however, that these experiences are being generated by a spiritual world, agents, or forces.  The mind is a powerful conjurer.