Gemma Spike

speaker

12,680 appearances 27 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 4d ago

Gemma Spike’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 27 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 8.

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The Psychology of your 20s · 457. The psychology of 'false' memories · 12 Sep 2026 podcast

Somebody says it happened another way. matched

Both people deeply believe that they are correct. matched

And it's not that either of them are lying or willfully making things up. matched

These are genuinely stored moments or memories in our mind. matched

Sometimes they just actually didn't happen. matched

They are memories that have been morphed and moved and reconstructed so that they are a little bit off what they used to be. matched

The reason this happens is because our memories aren't perfect and they don't store things in this like categorized, beautiful, library-esque physical way that we imagine they do. matched

Human memory cannot and does not preserve a perfect file of events that we can just play anywhere. matched

and replay exactly the same every single time. matched

Instead, every time we access a memory, our brain rebuilds an account using fragments of different things. matched

So it brings together sensory information along with emotion, matched

general knowledge expectations things that felt prominent and meaningful at the time things that didn't feel prominent and meaningful so get excluded and we also jump to conclusions and we fill in gaps with what we think should be there well our brain does it for us unconsciously so that we get what feels like a perfectly normal perfectly rounded memory and matched

There is a very famous study that shows how this happens. matched

The study was done in 1995 and the researchers gave people a list of words, a list of related words actually in a sequence. matched

And these words included things like bed, rest, awake, tired, dream, blanket, those sort of things. matched

The word sleep was not shown in that list. matched

However, when people were asked to recall the words that they saw, a lot of participants included words like sleep, like pillow, like, you know, words that weren't there, but felt like they should have been. matched

And they really did believe that they were there because our brain said, well, I'm going to follow this pattern and I'm going to fill in the rest. matched

I'm going to just, I'm going to add a few things in. matched

It might actually be helpful, whether it's true or not. matched

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