Do we, and why, have fake memories?

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I remember reading in a school textbook many years ago about a woman who was given a picture of a soldier and was told to remember it well. A month later, she was shown that same picture, but she insisted that it was not the same picture: the soldier in the first pic was prettier and of a higher rank.

People I spoke to claim that I’m wrong about this and that I must have misremembered something, but wouldn’t that prove my point?

Anyway, do we have fake memories? And why?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

You’re thinking of the work of Beth Loftus. Here’s one example. [TED](https://blog.ted.com/elizabeth-loftus-on-embedding-false-memories-in-u-s-soldiers/). The very ELI5 reason for this is basically that our memories aren’t like a computer where they’re written and you access them. They’re malleable and can change and basically it’s an active process of reconstruction. One early example from her work is she used different words to describe a car crash participants were in (smashed vs hit), it changed their estimates of how fast they were going.

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