What’s a false memory? Psychologists explain how your brain can lie.
T-shirt moguls Fruit of the Loom are both makers of functional, printable T-shirts and unwitting originators of long-standing misinformation about memory.
The distinctive Fruit of the Loom logo features a delicious assortment of fruits. Some people, including the reality-questioning posters on the r/Retconned subreddit, will swear to all they hold that the logo once also included a bowl of horns called a cornucopia.
A recent Snopes article summed up this confusion, explaining that misremembering around the logo dates back decades. The imaginary cornucopia is just one example of the Mandela Effect, named after the once-widespread misconception that the South African civil rights leader died in prison in the 1980s, when in reality he died at the age of 95 in 2013.
The Mandela Effect is a common example of false memory. False memories are memories of events that did not happen or facts that are not real. This is a particularly serious type of memory error, and some researchers say it is impossible to distinguish between false and true memories. But shared false memories of world events are just one small example of the larger phenomenon of false memories.
Scholars have hotly debated how common these memories are, but everyone agrees that they do occur. In this story, we’ll explore what false memories are, why they occur, and what experts still don’t understand about them.
There are two types of memory: episodic and semantic
Our memory can be roughly divided into two subtypes: episodic and semantic. Episodic memory is about autobiographical events that happened to us: think about going to Disneyland, eating dessert last Wednesday, or feeling sick after eating too much dessert last Wednesday.
Semantic memories are memories of facts or general knowledge. There are more well-known examples of false community memories, or the Mandela effect, for semantic memories. This is probably because there are few shared autobiographical experiences that could create a common semantic memory – only a limited number of people will remember your fifth birthday party, for example.
That said, false memories occur in episodic personal memory. In one study, researchers used manipulated images to present volunteers with false evidence that they had taken a hot air balloon ride as children. Some participants later said they remembered the excursion, which never took place, very well and described it in detail.
False memories have also emerged in court cases where testimony from survivors of childhood abuse has been considered potentially false. Researchers acting as expert witnesses in these cases have engaged in a fierce debate over the likelihood of trauma survivors developing false memories of abuse that never occurred.
Bad memory v. a false memory
Our memories are not set in stone. Instead, they are built on shifting sands. Processes such as re-encoding can update old memories over time, and the memories may differ slightly each time we retrieve them.
“Our memories are really like a filtered version of the original experience,” said Wilma Bainbridge, a psychologist at the University of Chicago who studies memory. “When you bring back that memory, you bring back that compressed version.”
Additionally, our brains cannot store all the details of our lives. Instead, they often add missing details based on what we might expect from a given memory. We might add a set of umbrellas to a vacation scene from our childhood, because of how often the two appear together elsewhere.
There is no hard line between a false memory and a simple mistaken memory of where you put your keys. But, usually, false memories are completely made up rather than a small memory error. In the beach example above, misremembering that there were umbrellas does not make the entire memory false.
How are false memories formed?
A classic psychological study that tests how false memories can be formed is the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) test. Volunteers will be presented with a list of words – for example, student, class, exam, teacher – which all have a key semantic “lure” word. The researchers will then test whether the participant misremembers the original list containing the lure – in this case, the word “school.”
Fuzzy trace theory (FTT) suggests that this confusion occurs because we store two forms of memory. One is a direct representation of the original memory and the other is based on a rough “preview” of the memory. Researchers believe that false memories exploit the “gist” version of memory, particularly when textual information is lacking.
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An alternative theory, called activation monitoring theory (AMT), suggests that when a person studies a list of words, they activate a memory that “spreads over” to related words, such as the lure word.
When the lure is closely enough related to the words in the list, researchers believe that the memory of looking at the list and the memory of the lure word become intertwined, which explains why people taking the DRM test often swear that they remember seeing the lure word in the original list. Psychologists also believe that repetition, age and lack of sleep can influence the likelihood of false memories being formed.
Some false memories remain a mystery
Bainbridge’s own research into the Mandela effect failed to find a single satisfactory explanation for how the effect forms, but it did identify that some images are simply more difficult to remember accurately than others.
“We think it’s about how this image fits into the map of all the images we’ve seen or how our brain understands the visual world,” Bainbridge said.
Regardless of how false memories are formed, Bainbridge says they are a natural part of the human experience and that forgetting things, especially traumatic memories, can be helpful. If false memories worry you, remember one thing: Although we often have fuzzy or unclear memories, complete false memories of events that never happened don’t happen very often.
“False memories are still very rare,” Bainbridge said. “But that’s why, when we encounter these false memories in nature, like the Mandela effect, that’s why they seem so shocking to us.”
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