False Memories: You can remember something that never happened.

Jake was certain he got lost in a shopping centre when he was five.

He remembered crying and searching for his parents. He remembered the panic. He even remembered a kind stranger helping him.

There was only one problem.

It never happened.

Now imagine someone tells you that, when you were little, you became seriously ill after eating strawberry ice cream. At first, the story sounds unfamiliar. Then you hear it again. And again. Years later, you might start believing it really happened. You might even develop details about the event that were never part of the original story.

It sounds unlikely. Yet decades of psychological research suggest that memory is more flexible than we might think.

Most of us treat memory as evidence. If we remember something clearly, surely it happened.

But memory is not a perfect recording of the past. It is a process of reconstruction, and information we encounter after an event can sometimes influence what we later remember.

When Memory Gets It Wrong

One of the most famous demonstrations came from psychologist Elizabeth Loftus and her graduate student Jacqueline Pickrell.

They contacted participants' parents and relatives to collect genuine childhood memories. Alongside these real memories, the researchers introduced a fictional event: the participant supposedly becoming lost in a shopping centre at around five years old and being rescued by a stranger.

Participants were interviewed several times and asked to recall the events in as much detail as possible.

About a quarter of the participants eventually reported some memory of the fictional shopping-centre event. Some described details such as what they saw or how they felt.

Think about that for a second.

These participants weren't necessarily lying. They could genuinely believe that the event had happened.

If information that was never experienced can become part of someone's memory, how much of what we remember can we actually trust?

As unsettling as the ‘lost in the mall’ study was, it wasn't the first sign that memory could be influenced.

Years earlier, Loftus and John Palmer had discovered that something as small as a single word could change people's reports of what they had seen.

In their famous car-crash experiment, participants watched a film showing a traffic accident. Afterwards, they were asked how fast the cars were travelling when they "smashed" into each other.

That small change in wording mattered.

Participants who heard "smashed" were also more likely to report seeing broken glass, even though there was no broken glass in the film.

A question asked after an event had influenced what some people later remembered about it.

And things get even stranger.

Researchers found that people could sometimes remember words they had never actually seen.

In the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) experiment, participants were shown lists of related words. For example, a list might contain words such as bed, rest and awake, all linked to the word sleep.

The word sleep itself was never presented.

Yet many participants later recalled or recognised it as though they had seen it. In one experiment, the missing word was falsely recalled about 40% of the time and was often recognised with high confidence.

Their memories had not simply disappeared. Instead, the relationships between the words had helped create a convincing memory for something that was never presented.

Researchers have even produced false memories for events that could not have happened.

In the famous Bugs Bunny at Disneyland study, participants were exposed to a fake advertisement suggesting that they had met Bugs Bunny during a childhood visit to Disneyland. Some participants later reported remembering or believing that the encounter had happened.

There was one obvious problem: Bugs Bunny is a Warner Bros. character, not a Disney character.

The study demonstrated that suggestion could contribute to memories for an impossible event.

How Does the Brain Create a False Memory?

Collectively, findings like these show that memory can be surprisingly flexible. Under certain conditions, people can remember information or events that did not occur as they remember them.

So what exactly is the brain doing?

Why would a system responsible for remembering our lives sometimes produce memories that are wrong?

The answer is that memory does not work like a camera.

When we remember an event, the brain reconstructs it using information stored from the original experience, along with knowledge, expectations and other information available at the time of remembering. A useful way to picture this is rebuilding a puzzle rather than replaying a video.

Several brain regions contribute to memory. The hippocampus, deep within the brain, is important for forming and retrieving many types of memories. The prefrontal cortex also contributes to organising and evaluating information during remembering.

Most of the time, this system works remarkably well. But remembering is not always perfect. The brain can sometimes have difficulty distinguishing information from the original experience from information that was imagined, suggested by someone else or encountered later.

This helps explain why false memories can feel so convincing.

A suggested event may become connected with genuine memories. As someone thinks about the event repeatedly, pieces of information can become integrated into a coherent story. Eventually, the person may experience that story as a genuine memory.

When False Memories Have Real Consequences

Importantly, a false memory is not the same as a lie. Someone can sincerely believe that they remember something that never happened.

And this flexibility is not necessarily a flaw.

Memory allows us to recognise patterns, learn from previous experiences and use the past to make predictions. Perfectly recording every detail of every moment would not necessarily be useful.

But the same flexibility that makes memory useful can also make it vulnerable to distortion.

And that matters because memories can influence behaviour.

Scientists have found that false beliefs about past experiences can affect what people choose to do. In food-related experiments, for example, researchers have suggested false childhood experiences of becoming ill after eating particular foods. Participants who developed stronger false beliefs about the experience subsequently showed greater avoidance of the food.

In other words, a memory does not have to be accurate to have real consequences.

It can influence what we fear, what we avoid and how we think about our past.

So, what does all of this mean?

It does not mean that your memories are fake.

It does not mean you should suddenly distrust everything you remember.

Instead, it shows that memory is a living process. Most of the time, it gives us a useful and reasonably accurate account of our experiences. But memories can also change when new information, suggestions or expectations become part of the reconstruction process.

So, the next time you find yourself completely certain about a childhood memory, it might be worth pausing for a moment and asking:

Am I remembering what happened, or the story my brain built afterwards?

And perhaps the most fascinating question of all:

If memory is a story, who is writing it?

Read more !

Lentoor, A. G. (2023). Cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying false memories: misinformation, distortion or erroneous configuration? AIMS Neuroscience, 10(3), 255–268. https://doi.org/10.3934/neuroscience.2023020

Pardilla-Delgado, E., & Payne, J. D. (2017). The Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) task: a simple cognitive paradigm to investigate false memories in the laboratory. Journal of Visualized Experiments, 119. https://doi.org/10.3791/54793