Andrew E. Budson

“With his colleagues Jason Mitchell and Dan Schacter, Andrew examined this illusory truth effect in older adults and individuals with Alzheimer’s disease.8 The participants in this experiment studied 44 ambiguous statements that were randomly assigned “true” or “false” labels, such as, “It takes 32 coffee beans to make a cup of espresso: FALSE,” and “It takes 4 hours to hard boil an ostrich egg: TRUE.” When participants were then asked which statements were true, healthy older adults correctly identified 77% of the true statements as being true, but they also identified 39% of the false statements as being true. Although this result is startling in itself, the Alzheimer’s results are even more so. Individuals with Alzheimer’s disease correctly identified 69% of the true statements as being true, but also identified 59% of the false statements as being true—more than the half you’d expect them to identify if they were just guessing. This means that if you tell an individual with Alzheimer’s that some information isn’t true, they may be more likely to remember that the information is true than if you didn’t say anything at all. The bottom line is that you should never tell an individual with Alzheimer’s what isn’t true (“Don’t take your medicine after dinner”)—just tell them what is true (“Take your medicine on an empty stomach”
― Andrew E. Budson, Why We Forget and How To Remember Better: The Science Behind Memory