For anyone who doesn’t know what it is: “This involves mistakenly recalling events or experiences that have not occurred, or distortion of existing memories.”
Like remembering “Looney Toons”, but it was always “Looney Tunes”.
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Basically, your brain actually remembers a lot less than you think. It is just good at filling in the gaps with its best guess, or whatever it’s been told recently. Most of the time, this works. But sometimes it messes up.
If someone tells you “Hey, it was spelled Looney Toons when we were kids, right?” your brain doesn’t actually think back to the details of the title screens of cartoons you watched decades ago, because why would your brain store unimportant yet detailed information like that for decades? Instead, it takes the suggestion you were just given, and constructs a memory around that.
Even if you aren’t given a suggestion, your brain will take a guess and then form a memory based on the guess. If someone asks you how the Berenstain Bears were spelled, your brain doesn’t have the exact letter sequence S-T-E-I-N stored, it just goes “hmm, Frankenstein, Einstein, everything is spelled -stein, must be -stein.” So, it creates a false memory with -stein.
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