Your memories ARE A LIE
NEW SERIES :
YOUR CHEATING BRAIN
YOUR life is a hallucination, your memories are partly fiction, and you cannot control your own thoughts. Scientists are discovering how our brains deceive us all the time.
Memory
Senses
Logic
Free will
FALSE MEMORY
COUNTERMEASURE
DETECTION
Here’s a little memory test. Read the following 10 words slowly, but only once: bed, rest, tired, dream, duvet, doze, snore, slumber, nap, sleepy.
All good? You don’t need to think about them continuously – we’ll get back to them later – but they play an important role in one classic experiment of brain research, the DRM test. In the 1950s, this test gave scientists some of the first scientific indication that our memory is not only inaccurate, it can actually be downright deceitful.
In recent years, the revelations of the DRM test have been backed by other experiments which show that the brain inserts fictional elements into our memories, and that even your most stable memories can be manipulated. And of course unreliable memory has
