Memory Implantation for Fun and Profit

[Zukin]

I was thinking about false memories and started wondering if a person could deliberately implant memories in order to solve anxiety problems, improve confidence, or become more successful. For example, I've never had a girlfriend. Like a lot of guys, this leads to a catch 22 where they aren't confident with women because they've had no prior experience and lots of women pick up on that lack of confidence, preventing them from achieving success with women.

Based on how malleable the brain is, I was thinking of deliberately implanting a false memory of being successful with women in the past, maybe even having had an incredibly attractive girlfriend. This is like hypnosis taken to the next level.

Would it be safe to try this, or could this lead to serious mental problems down the road?

[Shamou]

It has been showed that the brain cannot tell the difference between a real experience and one that is vividly imagined... so, yes, you can use your imagination to build up your confidence... and it will even change your self-image...

And, there is no way that it could create mental problems down the road...

Lastly, if I could give you just one little advice on how to succeed with girls... it would be to try to make them feel better about who they are... usually... it never fails...

.

[Michael Tipper]

I think you are on the right path, but you just might have the terminology a little back to front.

As Shamou has said, you can't tell the difference between a real and a vividly imagined event and so if you create a vivid picture of what you want to happen and use all your senses, get fully involved with your emotions too, you trick you brain into believing that it has already happened.

What will occur then is that the brain will start to notice things that you might otherwise have missed that will help you make your visualisation become reality.

It can start to get a little bit metaphysical here, but without going down that route, if you imagine yourself to be successful, confident and comfortable around the opposite sex then you will start to create that identity and your brain will support you in that by having you do stuff consistent with that identity.

But generally when it comes to the fairer sex, respect them, make them laugh and be interested in them rather than trying to impress them with your own achievements and you won't go far wrong.

I hope that helps

[Brutha]

There were some researchers who implanted the memory that someone got ill from eating icecreem in their childhood in people.
That resulted in the person not wanting to eat icecream anymore.

Would it be safe to try this, or could this lead to serious mental problems down the road?

Having false memorys can give you problems when you find out that they in fact are inaccurate. For that reason good hypnotists don't delete past memories.

When you want to do something like this you should use false memories of single events (a few hours) that have no other significant effects (like the icecream example).

[lindeelou]

What a very interesting idea...
The only problem here is that you would miss out on SO much of lifes ups and downs, the loves won and loves lost that build character, give us our
vunerabilities, our ability to empathize with others.
Looking back on all the loves I have had, i have learned something very important from all of them, and that is in all honestly what is is all about.
Someone you love comes into your life to teach you something, leave you with something, help you know yourself. Having a false lesson
would do the job, but you'd miss so much.
Go with the flow, remember to make women feel special, and if possible,
let them always be right. It's better to be happy than right.
My last relationship ended because of a power struggle where neither one of us wanted to ever be wrong.

[Freelancer]

Originally Posted by lindeelou

What a very interesting idea...
The only problem here is that you would miss out on SO much of lifes ups and downs, the loves won and loves lost that build character, give us our
vunerabilities, our ability to empathize with others.
Looking back on all the loves I have had, i have learned something very important from all of them, and that is in all honestly what is is all about.
Someone you love comes into your life to teach you something, leave you with something, help you know yourself. Having a false lesson
would do the job, but you'd miss so much.
Go with the flow, remember to make women feel special, and if possible,
let them always be right. It's better to be happy than right.
My last relationship ended because of a power struggle where neither one of us wanted to ever be wrong.

Can someone teach you any great lesson without hurting you?

You know I think that most men have reinforced images of failure's with women so often that they lost the guts to actually experience anything new. If thats true (and it certainly was for me) than this technique is awesome, its like learning something in a few months of time that would otherwise take decades of trying.

Do you think that a man should always agree with a women in a argument or otherwise the relationship will break?

[Brutha]

You know I think that most men have reinforced images of failure's with women so often that they lost the guts to actually experience anything new. If thats true (and it certainly was for me) than this technique is awesome, its like learning something in a few months of time that would otherwise take decades of trying.

Someone with enough skills in hypnosis to implant such a false memory should also be able to deal with issues like lack of confidence without implanting false memories.

[Sunnybayes]

Originally Posted by Zukin

I've never had a girlfriend. ... no prior experience ...

Trying to implant memories... hehe have fun with that.

But anyway. Make real memories... don't make stuff up.

Here are two pages that have brought me tons of confidence with dealing with women and also just life in general (after learning it for about 4 months):

You are new.

Read that page and then find the link about the newbie mission to learn how to get confidence.

And also a nice summary page on how to start the process


Also, on the forums page of that first website, check out the "reports" category for some memories that other people had.

Have FUN! (for the next year)

One last thought. You know visualizing is the same thing as implanting a memory, except that memory is of the future instead of something that happened in the past. But since you have not actually been with a real woman then your visualizations/false memories are probably not going to be realistic so you have to ground them to reality by actually experiencing them if you want them to be useful. But they would be helpful at first because it would help to remove your fear of approach because fear happens when your conciousness is pointed at an invariant representation that does not have its sub invariant representations defined. what the hell does that mean?
read these 2: Find the definition of fear here, my method of getting over fear

you could also listen to steve's podcast about how to get over fear.

[betlamed]

Originally Posted by Brutha

Having false memorys can give you problems when you find out that they in fact are inaccurate. For that reason good hypnotists don't delete past memories.

I imagine that this is one good reason. (It might also make for a nice hollywood flick.) ... Another one comes from the assumption that you make your experiences for a reason, so if you delete an experience, you will just repeat it.

As much as I love fussing around with my own brains, I think it is far more simple and effective to change the emotional perception of a real memory by ways of NLP, timeline therapy, etc.

Feeling good about myself NOW also means feeling good about my past experiences NOW.

What exactly IS a good past experience? Is it a feeling that you had back then, or is it a feeling that you have NOW?

Do you need to know that you felt good about your experiences when you had them? Just exactly how good does it feel to know that you feel good about them now?

Oh, and as to the original question: Would it be safe? I bet it would. You focus on a positive experience, you implant a positive memory, and you make sure that you do what's called an eco-check in nlp lingo ... I doubt that you can trick yourself into a dangerous situation. In fact, I did try this, and now I have a fuzzy feeling about a certain situation - the factual memory says it didn't happen, and the emotions feel as if it did. It's fun, actually, and if it proved not-so-effective for me, that only means that other people will experience other things.

[Steve Roh]

Originally Posted by Zukin

I was thinking of deliberately implanting a false memory of being successful with women in the past, maybe even having had an incredibly attractive girlfriend...

Would it be safe to try this, or could this lead to serious mental problems down the road?

I don't know about serious mental problems, but IMO it would be a bad idea.

Sure, you could let yourself believe (at a superficial level) fake memories of being successful with women; but emotionally you would still be insecure and nervous about them. Imagine what happens if you start to interact with women on this non-reality based basis: you find it easy to get up the nerve to talk to them, but once you get to know each other better, your insecurity shows through eventually. You will have an internal conflict between "outer success" and "inner truth". This ends up making you even more insecure. So even if you do end up being "successful" with women, you will not really enjoy it (deep inside you will always be thinking "If they only knew the real me... I hope they don't find out..."). This is the path to a very stressful life.

The idea of implanting a false memory of having an incredibly attractive girlfriend in the past, seems to be a perfect way of ruining any potential relationship with perfectly fine "real" women. Do you want to live in a world populated by women who can never rise above "second best" in comparison to your fantasy girlfriend? Sounds like a miserable existance to me!

Originally Posted by Zukin

I've never had a girlfriend. Like a lot of guys, this leads to a catch 22 where they aren't confident with women because they've had no prior experience and lots of women pick up on that lack of confidence, preventing them from achieving success with women.

I think your basic assumption is wrong. Your lack of confidence is not because you've had no prior experience with women; your lack of confidence is because you think you need prior experience with women to succeed. If prior experience were a prerequisite for confidence, then confidence would have no meaning.

Also, if you focus on "achieving success with women", not only is that adding to your nervousness, since there is so much at stake when you look at it that way, but women probably pick up on that desperation ("Oh, he just wants to achieve success with a woman... I just happen to be the one who's around...").

A more rational approach is to identify and neutralize whatever emotion is causing the lack of self-confidence. This is a bit harder than just slapping on a fake memory, but it's real change. Then you will not care about either being rejected or being "successful", and you will be secure inside and out; female humans seem to like that kind of male.

Here is a favorite random quote from Conan the Barbarian that maybe has some relevance:

"He did not care any more... life and death... the same. Only that the crowd would be there to greet him with howls of lust and fury. He began to realize his sense of worth... he mattered."

Hope this helps!

[betlamed]

BTW, does anyone here have a real experience with an implanted memory?

I strongly doubt that this is easily possible.

Something I actually DID: I used self-hypnosis and NLP to change a memory of a situation where I was not able to talk to a woman into one where I did talk to her.

Now, this obviously did not "work" - else I wouldn't be able to write this. But it DID work on an emotional level - it created a reference point in my brains, and it got a lot easier for me to accept the possibility of me talking to a woman, and it was one step on the road to the "success with women" I currently enjoy.

So, yeah, I guess that we can actually fool around with our own brains a lot more safely than many of us tend to think, simply because it's not that easy to trick yourself into some scenario that is actually harmful. There are lots and lots of safety nets built into our neurology, and it would just take too much time and effort to destroy them.

[Zukin]

Thank you for your responses everybody.

Just an update: I didn't actually implant false memories, but I have altered a great deal of my past memories, especially embarrassing ones. I did this by a process similar to the swish pattern in NLP.

I would think of a past embarrassing memory and imagine it taking place. Then, I would replace it with a more desirable memory. Now, if my brain ever starts to bring up that embarrassing memory, it brings up the pleasurable experience I implanted instead.

However, I found an even more useful method: being in the present moment. Usually I try to remain focused on the present moment, so there's no reason for me to think about my past.