Out of body memories

A recent study from two Swedish universities appear to be showing that how well our memories work depend on where our ”self” is located. Unfortunately according to the Swedish news agancy Tidningarnas telegrambyrå (TT) the study isn't published yet so this comment is only based on what is reported in the ordinary press, and we all know how warped science reporting can be. The findings will be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) next week according to TT.

What they appear to have done is to show some events to people divided into two groups, one group present in ”themselves” and one group present outside of ”themselves”. The out of body experience was created using VR-goggles, an interesting and well tested technique to achieve this effect. They later tested the participants memories of the events and found that the people who were present in “themselves” remembered the events much better than the ones using the VR-goggles.

This reminded me about a similar study made concerning the effect of the environment on memory. The experiment was conducted as following. Half of the participants learned some information on land beside a pool and the second half learned the same information under water in the pool. For the memory test phase half of the people in the pool did it on land, and half of the people on land did the memory task under water. It was found the what was important for a good recall of the information was that the retrieval of the memory was in the same environment as the one you learned the information.

I haven't read the study so I don't know if they in some way took this into account but the study would be flawed if the memory test was not made using the same division of the subjects in the learning phase and the test phase as described above. If the memory test was made without the VR-goggles for all the participants it is not a surprise that the people who learned the information without the VR-goggles had the best result.