The Psychology of False Memories

How can we be so confidently wrong?

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

I’ve never been up in a hot air balloon. But could you convince me I had?

In 2002, psychologist Kimberly Wade and her colleagues ran an experiment where researchers did exactly that. They told participants they were testing memory retrieval techniques. What they didn’t say was that one of the childhood photos in each set had been doctored — placing the participant as a child in situations that had never happened.

One man was asked about a photo of himself in a hot air balloon with his father. He didn’t remember it, which isn’t surprising, because he had never been in a hot air balloon.

Over three interviews across two weeks, the researcher asked him to close his eyes and try to picture it, using guided imagery and gentle leading questions. Eventually, he reported being in the basket with his father, filling in details that hadn’t been in the photo at all.

Half of Wade’s participants — 10 of 20 — produced false memories of the balloon ride by the end of the study. Some hesitantly, some with vivid detail.

Wade’s work built on Elizabeth Loftus’s famous “Lost in the Mall” research (Loftus & Pickrell, 1995), which had already shown that suggestion, and a few corroborating family details, could implant a childhood memory of getting lost in a shopping mall in about a quarter of participants. Adding the photograph was the next step — an image feels harder to argue with.

We tend to believe that our recollection of events is accurate — like a recording, or a photograph. But how can that be true if we can become convinced of false memories?

How does the brain sincerely remember things that didn’t happen?

This is a Hold Up!

Rather than a clear recording of events, our memory is more of a reconstruction. It’s shaped by the context, by our emotions at the time, by outside suggestion, and by the way we repeat it in our minds.

Long, long ago (1998), I was working as a bank teller. One day, a man slid a note across the counter between another teller and me, demanding money. He said he had a gun in his pocket and would shoot us if we didn’t comply.

He walked out with a few thousand dollars. Our still-frame security cameras were outdated. Worse yet, they malfunctioned, and we didn’t get any photos.

When police arrived, they instructed us not to discuss anything before we individually wrote down everything we remembered. It’s a good technique considering the malleable nature of memories.

To my surprise, the other teller and I had different recollections of the robber’s appearance. I thought his head was completely bald. She described him with a buzz cut. Perhaps our perceptions were shaped by the emotional intensity of the moment, or by our unique angle and the lighting. If we had discussed his appearance before writing it down, one of us might have reconstructed the image in our mind based on the power of suggestion.

Two people standing a few feet apart during the same event can walk away with genuinely different records of it. Our view is shaped by our angle, our prior experiences, and what our attention happened to be doing in that moment. Neither of us was lying. Neither of us had full information.

Luckily, he did get caught after a string of ten bank robberies.

The key point is that our memory isn’t as reliable as we’d like to believe. Even if it were as clear as a video recording, it still wouldn’t be perfect — a recording only captures what a single camera can see from one angle.

The Neuroscience

Several brain systems work together to create, store, and retrieve a memory. They don’t operate in isolation — the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and amygdala are interacting continuously as an event is happening and every time we recall it afterward. It’s worth taking each in turn, then looking at how they coordinate.

The Hippocampus

We all have a little structure in our brains that helps us form memories by taking information from our short-term memory and moving it into our long-term memory (learning). The hippocampus is located within the temporal lobe, with one on each side — think of it as sitting just above each ear.

This part of your brain links images, emotions, sensory information, and bits of the story together. A bit of caution, though: the hippocampus helps assemble the story, but it isn’t a fact-checker. If it feels coherent, we experience it as real.

The Prefrontal Cortex

While the hippocampus is stitching the moment together, the prefrontal cortex is deciding what matters and how to file it.

The prefrontal cortex sits at the front of the brain, just behind your forehead, and acts as the control center for memory. It holds information long enough to work with it (working memory), evaluates and organizes what’s coming in, and combines new input with existing knowledge.

We become more susceptible to suggestion when this system isn’t at full strength. Acute stress, intense emotion, a brain that’s still developing, or one that’s beginning to slow with age — all of these can reduce the prefrontal cortex’s capacity to sort and filter what’s happening to us.

If you think about a person in therapy, or being interviewed by a researcher, or being questioned by police — these are emotionally charged situations where the prefrontal cortex isn’t operating at its best.

Cue the suggestibility.

The Amygdala

If you’ve studied PTSD, you may be thinking that emotions make our memories stick. While it’s true that emotional arousal (panic, fear) strengthens memory encoding, it doesn’t mean those memories will be organized rationally or coherently.

The amygdala sits deep in the temporal lobe on each side of the brain, between the temples and the ears. It triggers the fight-or-flight response and helps process emotion.

Unconsciously, our brains try to fill in the blanks when we are flooded with emotionally charged data. We want to make sense of scattered bits that may not have been filed away in an orderly way under stress. We’re not intentionally creating false memories — our brains are trying to help us understand fragments.

The amygdala’s role in emotional processing can create a feeling of absolute confidence even when the memory isn’t accurate.

Repetition

Have you ever felt like you remember remembering an event?

I used to be able to remember learning to whistle as a young child, maybe four or five years old. I was standing in the doorway of an old school bus my parents had converted to a moving van for our journey from Iowa to California. My dad was nearby, and I finally produced a clear note, the way he often did.

Over the years, I realized that I was remembering rehearsing that story in my mind, but I couldn’t connect to the original moment anymore. I remembered that I could remember, but had lost the actual experience.

In many emotionally charged events, we replay the memory in our minds over and over. How many times have I replayed being held up at the bank and wondered whether he was bald or buzz-cut?

This mental imagery activates the same neural pathways as the real experience. Over time, our brains can lose track of the source of the memory — just like mine did about learning to whistle.

Source Monitoring Errors

As we replay events in our mind, we can lose track of where the information came from. Was it our own experience? Did we hear it from a friend? Did we see it on TV?

Source monitoring errors can introduce outside information into our perception of an autobiographical memory. This ties back to the opening story about the man who became convinced he had been on a hot air balloon with his father.

The interviewers — an authority figure — introduced new information as he closed his eyes and imagined being on a hot air balloon. With time and repetition, the external narrative started to feel real, as if it had happened to him.

It was a recipe for false memories.

Other People in the Room

As humans, we are social beings. We learn from each other, and we calibrate what we remember partly against what others remember. When information comes from a trusted source or an authority figure, we tend to believe it. Social confirmation goes a long way.

In my experience at the bank, the police immediately separated me from the other teller, and we weren’t to discuss the event before writing down the details we remembered. That protocol exists for a reason. Anything one of us said out loud in the other’s hearing was potentially now part of what the other one remembered.

The same process plays out in slower motion in families. I’m one of six siblings. When we get together, we routinely discover that the same childhood events sit differently in each of our heads. Who was present for a particular trip? Whether a moment was funny or tense. Who said what. Sometimes one of us remembers being present for an event we couldn’t have been present for — the story got told often enough around a table that it took root as experience.

This isn’t just a family-memory problem. It shows up everywhere in the research on what psychologists call flashbulb memories — the vivid, confident recall people have of where they were during major events. The morning after the Challenger explosion in 1986, Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch asked their students to write down exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. Two and a half years later, they asked the same students again. The accounts had shifted substantially — locations, companions, activities — but the students reported high confidence in the new, now-inaccurate versions. Replications after 9/11 found the same pattern.

The feeling of vivid, unshakable recall does not correlate well with accuracy. And the more we repeat a story in a social setting, the more the social version of it becomes the one the brain hands back when we reach for it.

False memories feel just as real as true ones. Imaging studies have shown that largely overlapping neural networks activate whether we’re reviewing an imagined narrative or an actual event.

What this Means

The brain isn’t storing memories or emotions in files labeled true or false. It hands us a coherent story and lets us feel sure.

Which means certainty isn’t a reliable signal — not about our own past, and not about the certainty of the people who remember the same events differently than we do.

There’s something unsettling about that, and something gentler. A memory we’re sure of can still be wrong. A sibling, a partner, or a parent may hold a memory that conflicts with ours. Isn’t necessarily a lie. It may be the same reconstructive work our own brain does, aimed at a different version of the story.

When I finally went in for the FBI lineup, the robber had buzzed hair. Not bald. I’d have sworn he was bald. I’d have been wrong. Or maybe his hair had grown out since the robbery?

He pleaded out. There was no trial, no courtroom where my version of him would have been tested against the other teller’s. But I remember the small recalibration in that FBI office — not doubt about what had happened to me, but something useful learned about the person doing the remembering.

Hold your own memory firmly enough to act on it. Loosely enough to update it. Extend the same grace to the people whose memories don’t match yours.

We are all of us working from reconstructions.