How do false memories form?
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Memories stored not like books on a shelf. Each “part” of a memory is stored separately in related parts of a brain.
Like you remember your mother kiss – feeling of a kiss would be stored in part of brain that is responsible for sensory information (S1), her smell would be stored in a nasal brain part (N1), “funny feeling in your stomach” stored somewhere else P1, etc, etc.
So memory is a chain of different interconnected parts – S1-N1-P1-Z1. And things become tricky, because mother smell (N1) is a part of many other memories you have about your mother. For example when you fall and she hug you – it would be another chain of hug+her_smell+you_crying+pain = F3-N1-T6-P11. As you could see, same “smell memory” is now part of two different chains and two different memories.
False memories happen when your connections are mixed and it become S1-N5-P5-Z2 – smell of someone else mixed in and your “memory” went on other rails, because N5 is connected to other “memory lane”.
**TLDR:** Our memories not monolithic and more like LEGO figures that are build from small bricks. You brain could take bricks from different LEGO figures and build completely new one that didn’t exist before.
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