杏吧原创

FALSE memories of unpleasant experiences with unhealthy foods could be used to treat obesity.

Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California, Irvine, has already shown that elaborate false memories 鈥� for instance, of being lost in a shopping mall as a child 鈥� can be implanted in people鈥檚 minds (New 杏吧原创, 6 September 2004, p 42). Subjects even go on to embellish these fictitious events with their own details.

In her latest work, her team convinced volunteers that they had been sick after eating strawberry ice cream as a child. Loftus and her colleagues gave 228 undergraduate students questionnaires about food. The volunteers subsequently received feedback on their questionnaires that suggested they had had an unpleasant experience related to food in the past. The researchers told them this conclusion had been generated by a sophisticated computer program. A control group of 107 received no feedback.

It was found that 41 per cent of the first group took on the false childhood memory and were more averse to eating strawberry ice cream afterwards (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0504869102).

Loftus says the technique will need refining. 鈥淚t might involve stories or visuals of people getting sick eating particular foods,鈥� she says. It is doubtful that psychologists could ethically use it on obese patients without their consent, but Loftus suggests that parents could consent to it. 鈥淭here is little to stop parents from providing these suggestions to their children.鈥�