How do false memories form?
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I’ll start off by saying … we’re not entirely sure. However, below was the prevailing theory as I learned it circa 2005 in grad school. Ideas may have changed, so I’ll be interested if anyone corrects me on this.
How does your brain tell the difference between memory, dream, imagination, plain information, and ideas? Well, it labels them. Have you ever remembered something that happened in a dream and had to think for a moment of whether it was real or a dream? That’s the label getting mixed up. (Not everyone experiences this, but many do, particularly in preadolescent childhood. Personally, I still experience this, but mostly because many of my dreams start with me waking up in bed.)
False memories can form by someone taking information in, coding it to memory, and mislabeling it as real memory. This can happen when a person is remembering something in a state of elevated suggestibilty (meaning, relaxed and trusting whoever they are talking to).
Horrifyingly, back in the 1970s and 80s there was a rash of people for whom psychologists created awful false memories, often via hypnosis therapy (a relaxed and trusting state), because the psychologists at the time didn’t even know this was possible. These people were led to believe terrible things had been done to them, often by their loved ones, and suffered the trauma of abuse that never even happened.
On a less dramatic scale that you are more likely to personally experience: Every memory you have is recoded from scratch each time you access it and “put it away”. And each time it is recoded, new or edited information can enter the memory. This can be useful if you are telling a story to friends, and the one friend who was there reminds you of a detail you forgot to mention, so your recoded memory incorporates that information for next time you tell the story, even though that part of the memory is “false”. And that new information will be retrieved the next time you conjure the memory. This happens automatically, usually without you noticing, and it is part of the mechanism those psychologists accidentally triggered.
Most commonly for fully crafted false memories, you may have a story from your early childhood that you remember happening. This would be a story your parents like to tell from when you were three to five years old. Maybe you got lost at a mall. Or you fell off your bike. Whatever the story is, chances are, the memory is false. What you are remembering is the imagery your brain created in one (or more) of your parents’ early tellings of that story, and every time the story was retold, you accessed that created memory and edited with more detail. In the end, you end up with a memory of something that happened before you were coding to long-term narrative memory.
Adults are more resilient to false memory creation (better at maintaining those labels I mentioned first), and children are particularly vulnerable to careless psychologists, so there is extensive warning given during education and training of psychologists and therapists to try to prevent what happened during the 70s and 80s.
If you’re unsure of a memory, take heart. They are all false memories, really.
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