Larry Mayes Memories Of Thing's Unseen

Memories are known as the mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experiences. In her article, Memories of Thing s Unseen, Elizabeth Loftus proves that memory can be very faulty at times and not only can memories be changed, but false memories can be planted into the mind. In addition, she also explains the characteristics and consequences of false memories and discusses the role of imagination inflation. Faulty memory has a lot of negative effects, but most importantly it has led to at least a hundred people being wrongly imprisoned. For example, Larry Mayes was convicted of raping a gas station cashier after the victim positively identified him in court. Mayes spent twenty one years in prison after attorney Thomas Vanes wrongfully prosecuted him of the crime. It was only two decades after prosecuting Mayes that Vanes saw the result of old evidence being subjected to new DNA testing, and he changed his mind. In a newspaper, Vanes wrote, “he was right, I was wrong” (Loftus). Faulty memory can change a person’s life forever and it is just one of the reasons why the study of memory is so important (Loftus).
In the mid 1990’s investigators succeeded in getting people to incorrectly believe that when they were children, they had been lost in a shopping mall for an extended time, hospitalized overnight, or involved in an unfortunate accident at a family wedding. The investigators were able to do this by enlisting the help of family members to construct scenarios describing true and false experiences and feeding these scenarios to the subjects as if they were all true. A significant minority of subjects came to accept all or part of the suggestion and claimed it as their own experience (Loftus). However, what if there were no family members to help out with the experiment and it were more like a real world situation? Then guided imagination and imagination inflation can come into