I absolutely hate mindbugs! It’s kinda scary that memory mindbugs can cause us to have false memories. When the reading was discussing how the memory mindbugs can affect us when being interrogated about a crime, it reminded me about a show I had watched a while ago. In the show, the cops were interrogating a girl who had come to report a sexual assault and there was very little physical evidence to support her claim and she kept mixing up the order of small details in her story. Clearly, this was the work of her memory mindbugs and the trauma from what had just happened to her, but the cops were not taking this into account and got her to recant her statement. Later that day her friends encouraged her not to be intimidated by the cops so they took her back to the station so she could remake her statement but the cops were yelling at her again and were making her memory mindbugs even worse so she once again recanted her statement and the cops warned her not to come back again. 8 years later some evidence came up and proved that the cops wrong but this was a clear case of memory mindbugs and this was based on a true story which makes me so mad because cops should be trained to know that mindbugs exist and know the times that our brains are most vulnerable to them. I think this also exemplifies how mindbugs can be activated by the way that the questions are being phrased or asked to you. My aunt also works for child protective services and we were talking about polygraph tests one day since we had learned about them in my LDST 102 class and she was telling me that the results don’t only depend on how the person being tested is responding but the results can also be skewed depending on how the interrogator is phrasing the questions. I thought it was very interesting that mindbugs are so much more prevalent in our lives than we think they are because I usually only think of them in terms of mind games and visual illusions but really they affect us almost every day of our lives.

Katelyn Inkman