Eli5: Since we can miss-remember the past, how do our brains build these false memories? Sometimes our memories can be completely made up.

Question

Eli5: Since we can miss-remember the past, how do our brains build these false memories? Sometimes our memories can be completely made up.

In: Biology

Answer 1

This happens for our brains the same it does for hard drives or cassette tapes. The more we access a memory, the more we overwrite the data. For tapes and hard drives this causes the medium to degrade and lose quality eventually wear out but our brains are pretty tough so what happens is as the memory fragments, it is repaired with false information which leaks in filling the gap with other experiences.

Essentially our memories become a huge library of books patched with pieces of other books, and each time we open one we find a missing page or couple of words and then replace them with something similar until the book eventually isn’t the same book.