Memory feels like a mental video archive, but psychologists have shown it behaves more like a creative editor, constantly rewriting the script. That is why people can be absolutely certain they ...

There isn’t a hard line differentiating a false memory and simply misremembering where you put your keys. But, in general, false memories are completely made up rather than a small memory error. In ...

Close-up of a neuron on a black background that is firing (as shown by yellow glowing dots) with interconnected neurons in the background Your brain activity changes depending on whether you're ...

Lawyers are often suspicious of so-called "eye-witness accounts" and rightly so. Hundreds of scientific studies in the past few decades have shown that the memories of people who observe complex ...

Beyond the distinction between true and false memories, researchers predicted that activity in the hippocampus would reflect the degree of similarity between the correct and false memory. They indeed ...

Thus widespread incorrect information can subtly influence individual memories, giving rise to conspiracy theories and harmful false beliefs. Incorrect beliefs about the death of Nelson Mandela are ...

The Mandela effect refers to the experience of a false memory that is shared by many people. In 2010, researcher Fiona Broome coined the term when she discovered that many people believed, as she did, ...

Source: Matthew Baxter, used with permission. In the recent court case of British former socialite and convicted sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell, her legal team called in a false memory expert. False ...

It’s easy enough to explain why we remember things: multiple regions of the brain — particularly the hippocampus — are devoted to the job. It’s easy to understand why we forget stuff too: there’s only ...