Paramnesia: "near-remembering", or on the false trail of "parallel" memory.

This is how he is arranged, man, that he is never enough of himself as he is. And therefore, in childhood, he, like the Lord God, seeks to extend himself to the entire Universe, to be everywhere, to participate in everything.

He is all - in a thirst for miracles and magical feats - but in the end, his old age is always poisoned by torments: he could do both this and that - but he was not honored. For at the age of young and mature - when everything is possible - all scattered into attempts and efforts to capture the living space (with its subsequent zealous guarding) - was it a dream?!

But it is not so easy to part with what has not come true. It is alive. It comes in dreams, in fantasies - and now your own personality is gradually woven into the lines reading novel the movie you are watching...

For what has not come true longs for its incarnation. At least in the form of artificially - and skillfully - caused by virtual sensations.

Not allowed into a measured and stable life, in moments of despair it comes to mind in the form of false memories - memory distortions, often - a very ingenious device.

Well, lacks the personality of what is! Not enough colors, smells, bodily sensations, sounds!

And then false memories carefully supplies her with all this: take it - and love it, squeeze it, feel it!

Paramnesia - the taste of non-existent life

Paramnesia (“parallel”, false memories) is a common attribute of neurological and mental diseases. But this is optional So.

In one form or another, it can also be characteristic of creative and artistic personalities (or simply overly sensitive and impressionable ones).

It is also inherent in the “specially created” ages for it - children's and senile. Ages when there is still - or already - not enough strength to create in matter.

The cause of the condition can also be chronic, ongoing intoxication (as such with alcoholism, and as a result of a chronically current infection, for example, with tuberculosis).

In a word, paramnesia is the essence and destiny of those who are powerless to create physical life. But - only those who already know (or still remember) its taste.

And on the basis of this memory and knowledge they create new life life based on false memory. With myself (not realized in true life) in all the main roles.

But there are a lot of main roles. This means that there must be at least as many options for “plot development” in order to be able to play them all.

And they exist. Here they are.

Classification of "memory substitution"

On this moment Paramnesias include the following memory disorders:

• cryptomnestic (cryptomnesia);
• echomnestic (echomnesia);
• confabulation (or);
• pseudo-reminiscences (or pseudo-reminiscences);
• fantasmatic (or fantasies).

Cryptomnesia: and I am not me, and the memory is not mine

With this type of false memory, 2 variants of the symptom complex are possible.

In the first case (one's own life is like someone else's), the patient - or an impressionable person - refers to own life as if it were true is not life at all. She's just the head of someone else's novel (or movie). Wherein this person just plays one of the roles.

In the second "scenario" (someone else's life - as his own), the patient does not just live the plot of the book he read or the performance he saw - he "weaves" himself into this "monogram", and in the end he is absolutely sure: everything happened to him, this is his story life, his love and hate.

The main symptoms of cryptomnesia are loss of personality (depersonalization) when there are problems with separation:

• dream - and reality;
• thoughts and beliefs on their own - and once heard or read;
• the events of his life - and incidents from the lives of strangers.

Cryptomnesia, classified as borrowed memories, is almost always the transfer of other people's memories (read, seen, etc.) from the past to the present.

This disorder may be the result of neurological diseases and disorders:

• depression and emotional trauma;
• delusional manifestations due to intoxication with alcohol or narcotic and other chemicals.

Of the causes of the psychiatric class, these are most often manifestations of:

• schizophrenia;;

Echomnesia: we are a long echo of each other

It is no coincidence that the name of this disorder, in addition to the ancient Greek word mnesis - memory, also includes the word echo - reflection.

For the event of the past, like a lost and restless echo, endlessly repeats itself in the head of the “victim” of love. "ailment" or from another similar reason. There is even a case described when a meeting with the same person was “repeated” for the sufferer “in the same room” at least 80 times!

At that time, the obsessive state was explained by intoxication psychosis (Dibenamine), very similar symptoms are observed with quinacrine intoxication.

Attributable to dual perception, the phenomenon of echomnesia (or Peak's reduplicating paramnesia) may be the result of:

• Korsakov's syndrome;
• paralysis;
• pathological process in the temporo-parietal region.

Fantasy shameless flight

- the term, literally translated as "prewriting", combines a whole group of memory illusions, which can be:

• ekmnestic (anchored on the events of the past);
• mnemonic (based on the present moment);
• fantastic (with the addition of imaginary fragments to real events);
• delusional (with the addition of delirium of ordinary or fantastic content);
• oneiric (or genesis);
• spontaneous (spontaneous, for example, in Korsakov's psychosis);
• induced (or suggested - at).

A feature of the phenomenon is embellishment-distortion uncontrollably, to the point of pathology, played out by a fantasy of an event that really happened in the past, which from now on becomes a false memory.

Having “dived” into the past, consciousness returns, proudly dragging some insignificant event that happened in the past “to the surface” of the present time, unrecognizably, to a brilliance, remade by an unbridled play of the imagination.

Confabulation occurs as a result of:

• psychosis of various origins;
• paraphrenia;
• Korsakov's syndrome;
• schizophrenia with delusional manifestations;
• exit from the twilight state of consciousness.

Everything that was not with me - I remember!

Pseudo-reminiscences with ancient Greek literally translated as "false memory". Or a “memory” of something that never really happened to this person.

This pathology is exclusively products human brain- A type of hallucination. But hallucinations that happened not with perception, but with his memory on the basis of an organic pathology of the brain, or as a result of the development of a paraphrenic or paranoid syndrome.

Combinations of pseudo-reminiscences with really actual memory disorders (hypomnesia and amnesia) are not uncommon.

Phantasm! More fantasy!

This is an overproduction of the brain in the form of uncontrollable pathological fantasizing on the most “sensitive” and “spicy” topics, which are not accepted in “decent society” to talk about. A kind of "mental onanism" with the "mining of a mental orgasm" at any cost (phantasies of the hysterical category).

Paralytic fantasies are distinguished by a more "clumsy"-rough, often absurd "plot", in many ways resembling fantastic confabulations.

Like other tricks of memory, phantasms are often one of the signs of her serious disorder.

Erroneous recognition, or "mask, I know you!"

It is characterized by confident (essentially false) "recognition" of the details of the area in which the person has never been, other persons or objects that it simply could not meet before.

It can also have the opposite character - a person cannot recognize himself in a mirror image, he ceases to recognize people he knows well (relatives and relatives).

This pathology is very characteristic of schizophrenia.

Diagnosis, or how to differentiate paramnesia

It is absolutely unthinkable to make such a diagnosis as paramnesia “on the fly”, without knowing either the person or the conditions in which it “grew”. Except, perhaps, cases of frank "juggling" with well-known facts and truths.

An instrumental examination of both the brain (,), and its indicators (EEG) and the state of the body in general (general clinical and biochemical studies) is also able to reveal only the physically embodied basis of a pathology other than paramnesia.

The deception of memory does not have a material embodiment - this is an exceptional feature of the subtle mental attitude of a particular person.

The main merit in her differential diagnosis always belongs to a psychiatrist (or psychoneurologist). He is the only one who, in the intricacies of feelings and words, is able to separate the signs of paramnesia from delirium, which can accompany both nervous and mental illnesses.

There are similarities between delusions of any etiology and these disorders. It lies in the fact that both states are variants of a false perception of reality.

There are two main differences between them. Delusional states:

• absolutely not amenable to correction;
• have a basis in the form of endogenous mental disorders.

How can doctors help?

The last word in the treatment of such a pathology as paramnesia has not yet been said by psychiatrists - it does not exist yet.

Methods of treatment and "strengthening" of the brain and similar drugs are proposed that improve blood circulation and metabolism of its structures (, Phenotropil).

It is necessary to have a balanced diet with a sufficient content of vital substances, rational physical activity, distracting outdoor games.

Of the methods of psychological influence, hypnotherapy, relaxation therapy, as well as methods oriental medicine: acupuncture, qigong, yoga, allowing you to achieve maximum concentration of attention on the present moment, without "running away" into the events of the past and future.

And, undoubtedly, the main condition for the success of treatment should be the desire for cooperation between the patient and the specialist doctor.

Prevention objectives

An invaluable benefit for the life of an adult patient will be brought by a revision of the usual way of life with the exception of traumatic stressful situations.

But prevention of paramnesia should still be started from early childhood.

Given that representatives of artistic and other "bohemian" circles are primarily committed to this pathology, it should be noted that that the upbringing of their children is often one-sided, aimed exclusively at creativity.

Often there is isolation of one's own children from the "horrors of life", and therefore the unfulfilled prophecy of a cloudless future and a brilliant career often "breaks" a young person at the first failure, equating the whole family to the "end of the world".

This is not about the future musician or sculptor breaking his fingers in street fight- it's just that only complete knowledge and acceptance of all the realities of life can nurture a person who can adequately withstand all the hurricanes and storms of an unpredictable, like an ocean, life.

For even the most comfortable view from the window on a street lined with flowers, cleanly washed, will not replace a wide-open horizon of life!

Paramnesia is a qualitative change in memory – confusion of memories (pseudo-reminiscences), inventing past events (false memories, fantasy), etc. It can be permutations of the present and past tenses. The phenomenon is located at the intersection of medicine and psychology.

Paramnesia in psychology

A living example: a man is sure that tomorrow he should propose to his beloved, although he is already 70 years old, and he has long been that beloved

Lost because he never offered his hand and heart. Every day he lives with the conviction that their future is still possible and it depends on tomorrow.

Paramnesia has many symptoms, but all of them involve memory issues in one way or another.

The area of ​​memory impairment also includes confabulosis. This is a syndrome of the so-called temporary insanity (it can last 5 minutes or 5 days, everything is individual). Confabulosis - false memories in concentrate, their incessant stream (at this time a person is in a clear mind, he understands who he is and where).

Medical information: in ICD-10, paramnesia is not a separate block, but belongs to group F-04 along with other disorders. Confabulosis have

T separate code - F-00 F-09.

Causes of paramnesia, for which diseases it is characteristic

Phantasm, cryptomnesia, pseudo-reminiscences and false memories (as well as confabulosis) usually occur against the background of mental disorders. These concepts are also associated with phenomena such as deja vu.

compared with delirium, sometimes identified. But the difference between them is palpable: confabulation, cryptomnesia, fantasy and other violations can be corrected. Delusional syndromes cannot be neutralized.

A syndrome characterized by false memories may also be accompanied by speech disorders (one of the manifestations is contamination: when words like “have a role” are confused instead of “have a meaning”, etc.).

Reduplicative paramnesia is rare - a person is sure that places, events, people exist in 2 or more points at the same time. Such a syndrome is sometimes accompanied by the certainty that an object (a building, for example) has been moved in space (let's say that there should be an Eiffel Tower in America, but it no longer exists in Paris).

Forms of paramnesia

There are the following types of memory disorders:

• pseudo-reminiscences;
• confabulation;
• cryptomnesia;
• fantasy.

As a rule, in its pure form, none of the listed phenomena occurs, but, as a rule, are a symptom of another disease.

Next to them is the concept of confabulosis - this is a temporary violation (disorders can be sudden or expected, i.e. chronic).

Confabulosis is characterized by inventing:

• celebrity meetings
• heroic deeds
• great discoveries, etc.

It's megalomaniac syndrome extreme degree his expressions. Hence the other name - expansive confabulosis. Sometimes confabulosis is a sign of schizophrenia.

This is an illusion of memory: the events that the person is talking about actually took place. But there is their confusion in time: what happened a year ago is transferred to now, and what happened yesterday turns out to be decades distant from the present moment in consciousness.

An extended version of pseudo-reminiscence is confabulation. Some psychologists and psychotherapists propose to combine both concepts, because both the illusion of memory and confabulation imply a syndrome of events shifting in time.

(or "hallucination of a memory") is best understood with a specific example:

The man is in the hospital, he claims that he went to Moscow yesterday for an interview, and is absolutely sure of the truth of the event. He really went to Moscow, but a year ago, not for an interview, but during his vacation. The interview here is fictional.

IN classical psychology memory hallucinations are strictly delimited from illusions. Modern psychology combines them into the phenomenon of "confabulation".

This disorder is often found in reserved, unsociable, daydreaming teenagers. Cryptomnesia involves the transfer of events from books or someone else's life into your own reality. Early symptoms:

• forget dates of events
• the person cannot remember whether the event actually happened or if he made it up
• can be mixed in the consciousness of thinking about the action and actually committed actions

Did I write a poem or copied it from someone? Did I go to the concert or just dream about it? Did the girl kiss me or was it in the book?

Cryptomnesia can be conscious. Loss of connection between the real and somewhere once seen, heard, read, etc. often caused by feelings of misunderstanding, depression, severe stress. Those. a person deliberately goes into the unreal world, and over time “forgets” about the events that he tried on himself, passing them off as real.

Phantasm is a pure notion, it is the transfer of fantasized events into reality. This syndrome is also often observed in adolescents (especially if they consider themselves to be a subculture misunderstood by society and have a developed imagination).

Phantasm has two forms of manifestation:

• hysterical - a person does not understand that he invented events, he really believes in their truth (this syndrome is usually observed in hysterical disorders);
• paralytic - it happens against the background of dementia, euphoria, various psychoses, sometimes it is equated with delusions of grandeur, here the events have a grotesque form (their absurdity is bright, it is recognized by everyone except the patient himself).

The phantasmic syndrome is dangerous, it is difficult for a person to get out of such a state, because it can destroy his psyche. Particularly delicate methods of psychology and an environment that is benevolent towards the patient can help here. Otherwise, the human subconscious will close access to real memories (perhaps their disclosure will entail shame, guilt, etc., and the body tries to protect itself by any means, including fantasy).

Treatment of paramnesia

All types of treatment of memory pathologies (cryptomnesia, confabulosis, fantasy, etc.) are based mainly on psychology. Often there is also psychotherapy.

To destroy false memories, it is necessary to use the human subconscious. For example, the Lacanian way of understanding the phenomenon of phantasy (the layering of fictional "I" on the real "I") leads to the decision to translate into reality the dreams of a person, so that fictional "personalities" unite in one - really existing one.

Confabulosis and related disorders are treated, among other things, with the help of Freudian psychoanalysis - through conversations and the disclosure of creative potential.

False memory is classified into several varieties according to the following criteria:

For reasons of origin

• Delusional false memories - associated with the patient's delusional ideas, do not relate to memory impairment or clouding of consciousness;
• suggested - characteristic of Korsakov's syndrome, develop after a hint, a leading question of another person;
• mnemonic - replacing, associated with gaps in memory, can refer to both the past and the present;
• oneiric - associated with infectious, intoxication lesions of the brain, some psychoses, schizophrenia, reflect the subject of the underlying disease;
• expansive - appear with delusions of grandeur and contain confirmation of the patient's delusional ideas.

By provoking factors

• Spontaneous or primary paramnesia occurs on its own - it is an involuntary phenomenon, and not a reaction to someone else's cue. Most often, the problem accompanies dementia, the nature of the memories is fantastic.
• Provoked or secondary confabulation is a reaction to memory impairment, a manifestation of not only dementia, but also amnesia. Less commonly, secondary paramnesia develops as a short-term phenomenon caused by experienced stress.

• Ekmnestic - the patient loses an idea of ​​the surrounding reality, his own age, relates events to the past, for example, times from childhood;
• mnemonic - false memories of current events that relate mainly to everyday life or professional activities;
• fantastic - contain numerous implausible, fantastic information, are most easily identified, as they are immediately noticeable from the outside.

Faculty of Psychology, Moscow State University

Collective, conscious

Are there false memories?

In modern psychological science memory is defined as mental process, whose functions include fixing, preserving, transforming and reproducing past experience. The abundance of the possibilities of our memory allows us to use the acquired knowledge in activities and / or restore it in the mind. However, it is possible to implant memories of events in our memory that did not actually happen.

The ambiguity of the term "memory" is revealed even in colloquial speech. By the words "I remember" we mean not only certain theoretical knowledge, but also practical skills. However, special attention deserves that side of mental life that brings us back to events from the past - the so-called "autobiographical memory". V. V. Nurkova defines this term as a subjective reflection of a segment of a person’s life path, which consists in fixing, preserving, interpreting and updating personally significant events and states [Nurkova, 2000].

One of the most important paradoxes of autobiographical memory is that personal memories are fairly easy to distort, which include the following: complete loss of access to information, completion of memories by including new elements (confabulation), combining fragments of different memories (contamination), constructing a new memory , errors in establishing the source of information and much more. The nature of such changes is determined by endogenous and exogenous factors. Under endogenous factors understand the distortion of memories by the subject himself. This can happen under the influence of special motivation, internal attitudes, emotions, individual personality traits. So, in a state of sadness, sad events are easier to remember, in high spirits - joyful ones. Sometimes distortions are caused by the action of memory defense mechanisms, such as repression, substitution, etc. In such cases, a person replaces real memories of unpleasant events with fictional ones, but more pleasant for him [Nurkova, 2000].

Sometimes people, on the contrary, fixate on traumatic memories. This selective effect of memory has been considered in studies on the influence of emotional state on mnemonic processes. A group of subjects suffering from depression and a control group were asked to recall life events associated with neutral words (“morning”, “afternoon”, “apple”). Subjects from the first group more often recalled negatively colored situations, while memories of positive and neutral events prevailed in the control group. Subjects from both groups were then asked to recall specific life situations where they feel happy. Subjects from the first group recalled such situations much more slowly, without desire, and less frequently than subjects from the control group.

Exogenous factors are understood as external influences on the memories of the subject. In their early work American cognitive psychologist and memory specialist E.F. Loftus argued that leading questions can affect a person's memories in a distorting way. Loftus later came to a similar conclusion about targeted disinformation: discussing rumors with others, biased media coverage, and so on. capable of forming false memories in a person.

A 2002 study compared the persuasive power of disinformation and hypnosis. Three groups of subjects, among whom were persons who are easily succumbed to false beliefs, practically not succumbing to such beliefs, and persons who succumb to false beliefs from time to time, were asked to listen to a story, after which they were asked questions on its content of various nature - neutral or introducing astray. The group of subjects who were in a normal state during the drying of the story practically did not make mistakes with neutral questions, but in the answers to misleading questions, the number of errors was high. Errors in this experiment were considered answers that contained false information about the events that occurred in the story told; "I don't know" was not counted as an error.

In turn, the subjects, who were in a state of hypnotic sleep while listening to the story, made slightly fewer mistakes in answering neutral questions than the previous group when answering misleading questions. In the case of the total impact of the hypnotic sleep state and misleading questions, it was recorded maximum amount memory errors. Curiously, suggestibility susceptibility did not affect the number of memory errors made when answering misleading questions or as a result of being in hypnosis. This allowed the authors to conclude that almost any person is subject to a change in the content of his memory. Thus, misinformation has a greater effect on the number of memory errors than hypnosis, while the combined effect of these two conditions leads to the greatest number of such errors, which once again confirms the plasticity of memories.

So we come to the question of the possibility of forming new memories that did not previously exist in autobiographical memory: can new memories be implanted?

The possibility of creating a holistic memory of an event that had never happened before was first proven in a study by Loftus. Participants in this study were told about an event that allegedly happened to them in childhood, and then asked to remember details about it. Believing that they were told the truth, many subjects actually supplemented these "memories" with their own colorful details. Loftus's other experiment, also on manipulation of autobiographical memory, involved pairs of siblings. First, the elder told the younger a pseudo-real fact from his childhood. A few days later, the younger was asked to tell what he or she “remembers” about an event that did not actually happen to him. The case of Christopher and Jim gained notoriety. 14-year-old Christopher heard from Jim the story of how, at the age of five, he got lost in a large department store, only to be found hours later by an older man and delivered to his parents. A few days after he heard the story, Christopher presented the researcher with a full, detailed version of the false event. In his memoirs, there were such clarifying phrases as "flannel shirt", "mother's tears", etc. .

In a series of subsequent experiments, Loftus and her colleagues were able to achieve a 25 percent rate of suggesting memories of fictional events from their childhood to subjects. Various techniques have been developed for this: an appeal to the personality problems of the subject (“your fear may be the result of a dog attack experienced in childhood”), the interpretation of dreams (“your dream tells me that you have suffered immersion to a greater depth”). "Documents" contribute most strongly to the suggestion of false memories. Their presence ensures the formation of autobiographical memories with a high degree of subjective reliability. For example, Wade, Harry, Reid, and Lindsay (2002) describe how computer program PhotoShop scientists created children's "photos" of the subjects, in which they were participants in some fictional situations (such as, for example, flying in a hot air balloon). Then the subjects were asked to tell about this event in more detail, and most of them “remembered” many precise details of a non-existent situation.

Another method allows you to implant false memories of unlikely or almost impossible events. In particular, it was demonstrated in the course of a study related to the implantation of the memory of meeting Bugs Bunny the rabbit at Disneyland. Subjects who had previously been to Disneyland were shown a fake commercial Disney studios starring Bugs Bunny. After some time, the subjects were interviewed, during which they were asked to talk about Disneyland. As a result, 16 percent of the subjects were convinced of a personal meeting with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. However, such a meeting could hardly have taken place, since Bugs Bunny is a character from another studio, Warner Brothers, and therefore could not be in Disneyland. Of those who described meeting Bugs face-to-face, 62 percent said they shook the rabbit's paw, and 46 percent said they hugged him. Others recalled touching his ear or tail, or even hearing his catchphrase ("What's the matter, Doc?"). These memories were emotionally colored and saturated with tactile details, which indicates the recognition of a false memory as one's own.

Having proved that the implantation of false memories is possible, psychologists have pondered the following question: do learned false memories affect the thoughts and further behavior of the subject. An experiment was conducted in which the subjects were made sure that they had been poisoned by certain foods in childhood. In the first group, the subjects were told that the cause of poisoning was hard-boiled chicken eggs, and in the second, pickled cucumbers. In order for the subjects to believe this, they were asked to take a survey, and then they were told that their answers were analyzed by a special computer program, which came to the conclusion that they suffered from poisoning with one of these products in childhood. After making sure that both groups of subjects formed a strong belief that the poisoning really took place in the past, the scientists suggested that this false memory would affect the future behavior of these people, in particular, make them avoid a certain product. The subjects were asked to take another survey, during which they had to imagine that they were invited to a party and choose the treats they would like to eat. As a result, it turned out that the participants in the experiment tend to avoid dishes that use the product from which they allegedly suffered in childhood. So it was proved that the formation of false memories can indeed affect the subsequent thoughts or behavior of a person.

Thus, human memory exhibits extraordinary flexibility, which is directly reflected in the structure of our memories. All people are capable of becoming victims of false memories, to the point that memories of events that at first glance seem completely impossible can be implanted into our memory. These memories can change our ideas about our own past, the past of other people, and can also significantly affect our thoughts and behavior.

Kristina Rubanova

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Matrix theory in Lately became very popular. Its essence is that our entire world is just a simulation, a computer model developed by some advanced "programmers" or artificial intelligence in general. Moreover, it is not journalists of the yellow press or science fiction writers who talk about this, but quite respectable researchers.

Meet Neurolace

Last September Bank of America Merrill Lynch(BAML) stated in a note to clients: The likelihood that our world is the result of computer simulation, - equals approximately 20-50%.

In an attempt to substantiate its assessment of the situation, BAML refers to a concept put forward by a well-known scientist and entrepreneur, the head of SpaceX and Tesla corporations. Elon Musk. At the June Code Conference dedicated to the IT industry, he spoke about the directions of development of artificial intelligence.

Thus, Musk suggested that in the foreseeable future, people will begin to interact with electronic interfaces through neurolace- a special layer implanted directly into the cerebral cortex.

Neurolace will allow people to process large amounts of data at great speed. One of its first prototypes was created in 2015, when American researchers successfully implanted such a system into the brains of mice.

But if people have already managed to create neurolace, then why not assume that it was invented even earlier, because, as they say, everything new is well forgotten old?

Guided Memories

It is known that some memories, especially traumatic ones, our brain is able to displace into the subconscious. Recently, a scientific experiment was carried out, which showed that with the help of certain medicines can block protein production PKMzeta responsible for storing memories in the so-called long-term memory. The same effect can be achieved using the techniques of suggestion and computer simulation.

The phenomenon of so-called false memories has long been known. For example, former South African President Nelson Mandela died on December 5, 2013. On the same day, there were literally millions of queries on Internet search engines about whether the information about Mandela's death was true. It turned out that a huge number of Web users were convinced that the former African leader died in prison back in the 60s or 70s of the last century!

In fact, the famous anti-apartheid fighter was indeed arrested in 1962 and spent many years behind bars. But in 1990, he was released, and in May 1994, Mandela was elected president of South Africa, becoming the country's first black leader. He was in power for five whole years. But people in different ends the globe believed that he had long died in the dungeons. They even thought they had read and heard about it on the news...

After that, the term “Mandela effect” even appeared, implying the emergence of memories in a large group of people that do not correspond to the real state of affairs, and refer, for example, to well-known historical events.

Here's another example. For some reason, most people believe that Adolf Hitler had brown eyes, and despite this, he fought for the purity of the Aryan race, and true Aryan eyes should be blue.

Meanwhile, everyone who personally knew Hitler testified that his eyes were blue. There is even a color photograph, which clearly shows the color of the Fuhrer's eyes - it is blue!

There are many such myths. For example, there are people who are convinced that the Americans landed on the moon only three times (although Wikipedia clearly states that there were six landings). Some believe that former US President Ronald Reagan died shortly after the end of his term in office, when in fact he died in 2004 at the age of 93 from pneumonia due to Alzheimer's disease.

Many have no doubt that Mother Teresa has long been canonized, although her canonization took place only in September 2016.

There are people who are sure that there are 51 or 52 states in the USA (although there are exactly 50 of them).

There are many examples of the "Mandela effect" here, in Russia. So, there is a myth that Catherine II sold Alaska to the Americans, although in fact this event took place during the reign of Emperor Alexander II. Most Russians, when asked who wrote the poem "The Prisoner", beginning with the words: "I am sitting behind bars in a damp dungeon ...", will confidently answer that it is Lermontov, while its author is Pushkin!

Thousands of Russians who Soviet years were children, “remember” how in the mid-1980s a very scary film based on the fairy tale by Gauf “Dwarf Nose” was released. But later it was not possible to find out what kind of film it was. None of the three film adaptations that were shown on Soviet television at that time (1953, 1970 and 1978) turned out to be “the one”. Some enthusiasts even tried to find a copy of the "creepy film" in the film archives, but they never found it.

On December 31, 1999, Yeltsin, announcing his resignation, allegedly uttered the phrase: "I'm tired, I'm leaving." She then became winged. But in fact, Boris Nikolayevich did not say anything about fatigue. He only said, "I'm leaving."

There is a completely fantastic hypothesis that false memories are the result of memory of parallel lives. That is, a person moves from one reality to another, parallel one, and there events proceed a little differently.

Recently, a team of psychologists from the University of Warwick (UK) found out that it is possible to artificially form in humans erroneous memories, and the majority will be convinced of their truth.

423 volunteers were told about a fictitious event they allegedly experienced as a child. Most often, it was about the drawing of a teacher by schoolchildren or participation in some kind of public event. The subjects were then asked to imagine the story in detail.

At the end, they were given a test in which they had to distinguish between false memories and genuine ones. As a result, 30.5% declared the "implanted" memories to be real. Another 23% said that such events actually took place, but the details were different.

In another experiment, people were convinced that they had committed some kind of crime in the past. And the subjects were subsequently able to describe the process of committing the crime in great detail.

If our reality is indeed the result of a simulation, then memories can be modify by changing the computer program? Why not?

In the world of phantoms

Now, says Elon Musk, there are already video games with elements augmented reality- take the same Pokémon. There are technologies that help to “impose” virtual reality on the real one.

Sooner or later, virtual reality will completely merge with the real one. But if humanity was able to create virtual reality systems of this level, then where is the guarantee that we are no longer inside such systems?

Perhaps our world is a model of the world of ancestors, which was created by our distant descendants? Is our reality what it looked like in the "real" world many years ago?

It is also possible that even our physical body is just a virtual illusion and we exist in the form of wave "phantoms". Hence the theory of the rebirth of souls: each "phantom" has a program according to which it lives for a certain amount of time, and then "dies" and is reborn in a new virtual shell. For each of us, this will mean a new "life"-reality.

Elon Musk hopes that we really live in a simulation - if it were otherwise, humanity could have perished long ago as a result of some kind of global cataclysm:

Either we will create simulators that are indistinguishable from reality, or civilization will cease to exist.

It is not clear why Bank of America Merrill Lynch customers need all this information. Perhaps so that they can decide how best to invest their funds given that our future is virtual? However, like the present and the past...

Ida SHAKHOVSKAYA, magazine "Secrets of the XX century", 2017