Social recall: factors that can affect false memory

The brain can be as creative as it is inaccurate when it comes to memory, working to turn made-up stories and childhood emotions into remembered fact

The fallibility of human memory is one of the most well established findings in psychology. There have been thousands of demonstrations of the unreliability of eyewitness testimony under well-controlled conditions dating back to the very earliest years of the discipline. Relatively recently, it was discovered that some apparent memories are not just distorted memories of witnessed events: they are false memories for events that simply never took place at all.

Psychologists have developed several reliable methods for implanting false memories in a sizeable proportion of experimental participants. It is only in the last few years, however, that scientists have begun to systematically investigate the phenomenon of non-believed memories. These are subjectively vivid memories of personal experiences that an individual once believed were accurate but now accepts are not based upon real events.