Julia Shaw

What is real?

I mean, I mean that in every way.

And I think that's because I grew up with someone who had a unique view of what is real in real time.

And so seeing that, I think, just affected me profoundly because not only was it very destabilizing in terms of my upbringing, but also it's just in your face that people...

quite literally are seeing and hearing different things than you and to not jump from that to what else are people perceiving differently than me I think would be almost like a missed opportunity and so I went to study psychology partly to understand that and what was going on there and then that took me down the sort of reality hole and honestly the reason I went to criminal psychology because I could have gone into any other the criminal psychologists were the most they were the most fun

I feel like lots of psychologists, they took themselves so seriously.

And I just, I couldn't.

I was like, I don't, this isn't the vibe.

And so the criminal psychologists were, they had this gallows humor.

They were doing these, like, arguably the most serious of the crimes in the cases.

And yet were somehow having fun and having nice lives.

And I saw myself and I went, well, I want to do this version.

And so I did.

And it's often quite procedural.

So I'm also much more interested in applied sciences, because I like the idea of

You know, what do we do with this information?

And the thing that interests me most from a research perspective, I mean, I did my PhD in false memories.

So implanting false memories of committing crime, which was the study that ended up going viral because I was the first to do it.

And I built on a history of people implanting false memories of various kinds of other emotional events.

But it was the first time that someone had combined false confessions research and false memory research.