Authors: Alex Boese
Chris furrows his brow. “I remember that it was 1981 or 1982,” he says slowly, as if struggling to recall. “We had gone shopping at the University City shopping mall in Spokane.”
Then his voice quickens: “I was with the guys for a second, and I think I went over to look at the toy store, the Kay-Bee toys, and, uh, we got lost, and I was looking around and I thought, ‘Uh-oh. I’m in trouble now.’ You know. And then I . . . I thought I was never going to see my family again. I was really scared, you know?”
Chris’s tone is confident. It is clear he remembers this frightening event. What he doesn’t realize is that it never happened.
The researcher in this scene was Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Irvine. She had implanted a memory in Chris’s head. Not with surgery, but through the power of suggestion. It was a trick she had performed often. In her book
The Myth of Repressed Memory
she boasted:
I’ve molded people’s memories, prompting them to recall nonexistent broken glass and tape recorders; to think of a clean-shaven man as having a mustache, of straight hair as curly, of stop signs as yield signs, of hammers as screwdrivers . . . I’ve even been able to implant false memories in people’s minds, making them believe in characters who never existed and events that never happened.
Chris was a participant in Loftus’s most famous experiment—the lost-in-a-mall study, conducted in the early 1990s. Subjects believed they were taking part in a study of childhood memories. They each received a booklet containing four short accounts, written by a relative, of events from their past. If they didn’t remember an event, they were asked to write “I do not remember this.” But if they did remember it, they were asked to elaborate both in the booklet and in a series of follow-up interviews.
What participants didn’t know was that one of the narratives, about the subject getting lost in a shopping mall at the age of five, was fictitious. Their relatives, who were collaborating with the experimenter, provided enough personal details to make the story plausible.
The mere suggestion of the story was enough to implant a corresponding memory in the minds of many participants. Over a quarter of them (seven out of twenty-four) claimed to remember the event clearly. Many described it as an extremely vivid memory, and during follow-up interviews they freely supplied new details. When told that, in reality, they had
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never been lost in a shopping mall, they were dumbstruck. They insisted it must have happened. After all, they could remember it. Not until their relatives confirmed that it hadn’t happened would they accept being mistaken.
Loftus rejects the videotape-recorder model of memory popularized by Wilder Penfield, in which our brains neatly file away everything we experience. She prefers to think of the mind as a bowl of water. “Imagine each memory as a teaspoon of milk stirred into the water,” she writes. She describes all the memories in the mind constantly getting mixed around, blending and merging together into a cloudy, convoluted mess.
Which has to make you wonder about those childhood memories we all carry around—our first day at school, opening a present on our birthday, getting lost at a shopping mall. Did any of it really happen the way we remember? Or is it all just a product of our overactive imagination . . . or someone else’s?
A woman plays solitaire, waiting for her husband to return home. As she shuffles the cards, she feels the numbing fingers of sleep creep over her. Her eyelids grow heavy. “Just a little nap,” she thinks as she leans forward to rest her head on the table. Within seconds, sleep overcomes her. Immediately, unbeknownst to her, her body begins a complex physical process. First, her body temperature and blood pressure drop. Her breathing grows shallow. Her heart rate slows, and her muscles relax. If someone were measuring her brain waves, they would see a gradual shift toward a slow, rolling pattern. If she remains asleep long enough—perhaps sixty to ninety minutes—her vital signs will abruptly change again. Her brain will become intensely active—as much so as if she were awake, as bizarre, irrational dreams flit through her head. Nearly all her muscles will lose their tone, held still by a temporary paralysis. She will have entered the phase of sleep known as rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep—so named because of the characteristic movement of the eyes, back and forth, and up and down, beneath the eyelids. This stage of sleep could also be called nocturnal-erection sleep, because the sexual organs of both genders (and people of all ages) become engorged with blood during the twenty or thirty minutes this stage lasts, as though the body is making sure the plumbing still works. Throughout the remainder of the night, her body will cycle back and forth between REM and non-REM sleep. She’ll awake unaware that any of this has happened.
Sleep and its physiological changes are mysterious, and for the most part unnoticed, phenomena. As our consciousness slips away, it can seem as though a phantom force takes control of our body. Faced with such an enigma, researchers have often resorted to peculiar analytical methods—as the experiments in this chapter demonstrate—to unlock sleep’s secrets.
“My fingernails taste terribly bitter. My fingernails taste terribly bitter.” A disembodied voice repeats the phrase over and over. A boy opens his eyes and lies very still in the darkness, listening to the words. He looks to his left and right. None of his camp mates seem to hear what he’s hearing. They are all asleep in their cots. “My fingernails taste terribly bitter,” the voice says again. The boy wonders if the voice is coming from inside his head. Is he going mad?
The boy was not going mad. Unbeknownst to him, he was a participant in a sleep-learning experiment devised by Professor Lawrence LeShan of William and Mary College.
In 1942 LeShan played a phonograph recording of the phrase “My fingernails taste terribly bitter” in a room where twenty young boys were sleeping at an Upstate New York summer camp. He played it in the middle of the night, after he felt sure none of them were awake. Competing with the chirping of crickets, the phrase repeated in the darkness 300 times a night, fifty-four nights in a row. The boys heard it in their sleep 16,200 times before the summer was over.
LeShan wanted to find out whether verbal suggestions given during sleep could influence waking behavior. All the boys bit their nails. So would repeated nocturnal exposure to a negative suggestion about nail biting cause them to abandon this nervous habit?
One month into the experiment, a nurse surreptitiously checked their nails during a routine medical examination. One boy seemed to have kicked the habit. LeShan boasted that skin of a healthy texture had replaced the “coarse wrinkled skin of the habitual biter.”
But a week later, disaster struck. The phonograph broke. Eager not to abandon the experiment, LeShan improvised by delivering the suggestion himself, three hundred times a night. If any of the boys had wondered before what was going on, they now would have been completely bewildered as they woke to the sight of a grown man standing in the darkness insisting that his fingernails tasted terribly bitter.
Surprisingly, direct delivery of the suggestion had a greater effect. Within two weeks, seven more boys had healthy-looking nails. By contrast, a control group of twenty boys not exposed to the suggestion continued to bite away.
Why the sudden success at the end of the experiment? LeShan speculated that it was because his voice was clearer than the phonograph. Another theory would be that his midnight confessions thoroughly spooked the children.
If I stop biting my nails
, they probably thought,
the strange man will go away
.
LeShan achieved a 40 percent success rate. Does this mean sleep learning works? For a long time, many researchers were inclined to believe so—especially since a string of other studies seemed to confirm the theory. For instance, during World War I a U.S. naval researcher reported success teaching sixteen cadets Morse code as they slept, though he never published his results. A 1947 study at the University of North Carolina found a group of students could learn a list of words faster if aided by a sleep-learning machine. A 1952 George Washington University study reported sleep instruction accelerated memorization of a list of Chinese words. There was also a widely repeated anecdotal account, disseminated by a tape-recorder salesman, of a housewife surreptitiously using the technique to train her husband to like salad.
By the late 1940s public interest in sleep learning was at an all-time high—fueled by spectacles such as a public demonstration of sleep learning, sponsored by a company selling learn-a-foreign-language phonograph records, in a storefront on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. Curious pedestrians stopped to watch as 1949’s Miss Washington, Mary Jane Hayes, wearing a strapless bathing suit, climbed into a bed and pretended to doze as a machine whispered French phrases in her ear. “
Bon soir
. . . Good night . . .
Bon
. . . good . . .
le soir
. . . the night.” One reporter covering the event joked, “Frankly, I’d rather spend my nights thinking about Miss Washington than about a French noun.” Ms. Hayes, after changing her first name to Allison, later became a prominent figure in the dreams and fantasies of many young men when she played the title character in
Attack of the 50-ft Woman
.
An inventor named Max Sherover announced plans to market a commercial sleep-learning machine, which he called the Cerebrograph. It was a combination record player, clock,
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and pillow microphone. He secured testimonials from celebrities such as opera star Ramón Vinay, who claimed the device helped him memorize his lines. However, the gadget never caught on with the public, even when Sherover relaunched it with a new name—the Dormiphone.
In 1956 the scientific tide began to turn against sleep learning when William Emmons and Charles Simon published the results of a carefully controlled study conducted at Santa Monica College. The two researchers used an electroencephalograph (an instrument that measures brain activity) to make sure their subjects were fully asleep—a precaution previous researchers had never taken—before reading them a list of nouns. Under these conditions, the sleep-learning effect disappeared.
Since that time, scientific interest in sleep learning has gone through ups and downs—though mostly downs. Much of the current research into the subject is conducted by high school students for science fairs. However, some informal studies carried out by Bill Steed of Emeryville, California, during the 1970s are worth mentioning. Steed chose frogs as his subjects, and motivational messages such as “Think positively” and “Don’t let your past destroy your future” as their sleep lessons. (They must have been English-speaking frogs.) These same frogs went on to become regular champions at the Calaveras County frog-jumping competition (made famous by Mark Twain). So maybe there is something to the theory of sleep learning. After all, it’s hard to argue with a high-jumping frog.
On the first day, Randy Gardner woke at six a.m. feeling alert and ready to go. By day two he had begun to drag, experiencing a fuzzy-headed lack of focus. When handed a series of objects, he struggled to recognize them by touch alone. The third day he became uncharacteristically moody, snapping at his friends. He had trouble repeating common tongue twisters such as
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers
. By the fourth day, the sand-clawed demons of sleep were scraping at the backs of his eyeballs. He suddenly and inexplicably hallucinated that he was Paul Lowe, a large black football player for the San Diego Chargers. Gardner, in reality, was white, seventeen years old, and 130 pounds soaking wet.
Gardner, a San Diego high school student, was the subject of a self-imposed sleep-deprivation experiment. He had resolved to find out what would happen to his mind and body if he stayed awake from December 28, 1963, to January 8, 1964, a total of 264 hours—eleven days. Assisting him were two classmates, Bruce McAllister and Joe Marciano Jr. They kept him awake and tracked his condition by administering a series of tests. They planned to enter the results in the Greater San Diego High School Science Fair. But transforming the ordeal from a science fair stunt into one of the most widely cited sleep-deprivation experiments ever conducted was the arrival of Stanford researcher William C. Dement, who flew down from Palo Alto to be with Randy as soon as he heard what was going on.
No one knew what Randy might experience as more days passed, or whether he might cause himself permanent brain damage, because only a handful of sleep-deprivation trials had ever been conducted. One of the earliest studies in this field had come to an inauspicious conclusion. In 1894 Russian physician Marie de Manaceine kept four puppies awake almost five days, at which point the puppies died. She reported that the research was “excessively painful,” not only for the puppies but for herself as well. Apparently monitoring sleepy puppies 24/7 is hard work.
However, the few studies conducted on humans offered more hope. In 1896 doctors J. Allen Gilbert and George Patrick kept an assistant professor and two instructors awake in their lab at the University of Iowa for ninety hours. After the second night, the assistant professor hallucinated that “the floor was covered with a greasy-looking, molecular layer of rapidly moving or oscillating particles.” But no long-term side effects were observed. Then, in 1959, two disc jockeys separately staged wake-a-thons to raise money for medical research. Peter Tripp of New York stayed awake for 201 hours while broadcasting from a glass booth in Times Square. Tom Rounds of Honolulu upped the ante by remaining awake 260 hours. Both Tripp and Rounds suffered hallucinations and episodes of paranoia, but after a few good nights’ sleep they seemed fully recovered. It was Rounds’s record Gardner hoped to beat, which is why he set his goal at 264 hours.