Mind Field

Hi, I'm Michael Stevens,

but who are you?

Do you even know who you are?

Are you your memories?

I don't remember that.

I don't remember that at all.

Are you the choices you make?

The focus tester

is actually a magician.

- That's scary. -

Or are you your past?

I hit the back of my head and I forgot my entire life.

Just like you hit a delete button on a computer.

Wow.

Have you ever looked at a photograph of yourself

and thought, "That's what I look like?

Ugh."

We often think we look bad

or not right in photos

because photos show us what we really look like

to other people.

The you that you're used to seeing

is mirror you.

Every mirror you look into reverses your face.

Most selfie cameras do this too,

so we tend to prefer that version of ourselves.

If you wanna see yourself in a mirror

the way other people see you in real life,

take two mirrors

and position them at a 90-degree angle.

What you see won't be yourself reversed,

but how you look in real life.

So who would you say you are really?

Are you how you look?

Or how you dress?

Or are you the atoms that make you up?

Because all of those things change throughout your life.

Ah, maybe the real common thread,

that which doesn't change,

is your history,

your memory.

But what if we remember things differently

from the way they actually happened.

Does that mean we don't know ourselves?

False memories are

frighteningly easy to create.

Today, we're gonna make some,

and we're gonna have a little fun doing it.

We have created a fake game show

called "Who You Were."

We're gonna bring contestants down memory lane

and have them tell us about their past.

Some of which we're going to completely make up.

We're gonna plant a few little seeds in this mind field

and see if we can grow

some fake memories.

Hi, I'm Michael Stevens,

and welcome to the show

that takes you on a trip down memory lane

from who you are

all the way back through...

"Who You Were."

Please welcome today's very special guest,

- Timothy DeLaGhetto. - How's it going, man.

- Thanks for coming in. - Thanks for having me.

- Excited to kinda dive into some memories?

- Yeah, I don't really know what to expect.

To begin, though, let's give the audience

a taste of your life.

Oh, my God, let's take a look.

So Tim was raised in California

where he and his parents owned and operated

- a Thai food restaurant. -

Tim found popularity as a rapper,

comedian, actor, and Internet personality,

and has attracted over 3 million subscribers.

In order to... to kind of see how you became who you are today

let's go back to who you were. - Let's do it.

- We spoke to your parents... - Mm-hmm.

And they told us some of their favorite memories

from when you were very, very young.

- Okay. - I'm going to start

with some true stories

before I slip in the false memory.

When you were seven,

you were pretty much held prisoner

by a very controlling school girl.

The girl took control of your life

and always wanted to know what you were doing.

- I remember her. Like, she was,

like, my... my best friend, sort of,

but then she was also very, like, possessive of me.

But you guys aren't together still.

No, we might be Facebook friends.

- Okay. Here's a memory.

You weren't a crybaby on the first day of school...

- Yeah. - Until you noticed that

all the other kids were crying and then you joined in.

You know, I empathize with people...

- Right. - And, uh, I was just kind of,

like, helping them feel like we were all a team.

Now here's the fake story

we made up out of thin air.

- Here's another memory. - Mm-hmm.

When you were about four or five years old...

- Mm-kay. - You actually took a ride

in a hot air balloon, but you dropped something

from the balloon.

I don't remember that at all.

- Really? - Yeah, like, at all.

- We're going deep... far back. - I didn't even know

I've ever been in a hot air balloon

until you just reminded me. - It was in Echo Park.

- Was it? - Yeah.

No clue.

Timothy is not accepting the story as truth yet.

Time for our second subject.

- Dylan, how are you? - I'm doing great, man.

You were, uh, inseparable

from you Superman cape when you were young.

Once, you even tried to use your super powers

to stop a car driving down the street.

- Yeah, try to stop a car, like, with my... with my hand

and everything. - Did you succeed?

You know, the dude hit his brakes.

Okay, next memory.

So when you were about four or five years old,

you took a ride in a hot air balloon

and you dropped something.

Huh.

Uh...

I'm not sure if I remember that to be honest.

Sometimes enriching the false story

with a realistic detail can trigger the brain

to begin filling in the memory. Here goes.

Did you have a favorite toy or anything

that maybe you had brought?

Oh, I mean, I had, like, some action figures, I think.

Um, I do remember, like, losing one.

I'm not sure, like... that was, like, the... what happened.

If I, uh, was in a hot air balloon.

That's a crazy adventure

if I actually, like, did something like that.

Hi, Victoria.

When you were around four or five years old,

you took a ride in a hot air balloon

and you dropped something.

- I don't remember that. - Four or five years old?

- Up in the air? - No.

How many times you been in a hot air balloon?

None.

Of course none of the subjects

remember the balloon ride.

It never happened,

but we are not done with them yet.

24 hours from now,

we'll take our subjects to Echo Park...

Okay.

The site of their supposed childhood balloon ride,

to see if any of the seeds I planted today

have taken root.

This is where you took your first hot air balloon ride.

- Are you serious? - I'm serious.

We might not be able

to remember our past accurately all the time,

but at least we have direct insight

into our own mental states.

We know how we feel,

what we like,

and why.

Except we don't.

Psychologists call our tendency to overvalue

how we explain our own behavior

while distrusting that other people

truly understand their own...

An interesting manifestation of this bias

is something called...

It is surprisingly easy

to fool someone into believing

they made a choice that they never did,

and the amazing thing is that

they'll also defend that fake choice

as if it were what they had always wanted.

We feel like we know ourselves pretty well.

We know why we like the things we like.

We know why we decided to do the things that we did.

But do we?

Today, we'll be showing our subjects sets of photos

and asking them to choose the photo

of the person they'd prefer to work with.

But this isn't exactly what it looks like.

The focus tester

is actually a magician

who will be using slight of hand

to swap some of the faces they choose

for faces they've rejected.

Will they catch the trick?

Or will they justify and explain a decision

they never actually made?

Thank you for participating in this study