Don't Speak, Memory

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I ran this dystopic, Mad Men--free future by Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist famous for her research on false memories, including experiments in which she convinced adults they were lost in a mall as children and got people to eat healthier by tricking them into believing they once got sick from ice cream--which actually sounds easy, since I'm pretty sure all kids at some point get sick from ice cream. She thinks a future of constantly realizing our stories are wrong will be a happy one. "It should make us more tolerant when we hear people say things that we don't think are true. Because it doesn't necessarily mean they're lying," she says. "It will be better for relationships. It's going to make things better for justice." In the future, when Mitt Romney says that he went to the Golden Jubilee of the invention of the car with his father, which took place nine months before he was born, or that he joined his dad on a march with Martin Luther King Jr., something his dad never did, we won't make fun of him for lying. We'll make fun of him for not getting to spend any time with his dad.

The point is that the information avalanche should make us a little less entrenched, a little more easily swayed. Also, you never laughed as hard as you did at the first paragraph of this column. There's no need to reread it.

Time.com

Don't Speak, Memory

If the information age doesn't shut up soon, all our best stories will be ruined