Julia Shaw

So it's both juicy and really troubling.

But you don't even need that.

So this is what we find in investigative interviewing, which is police interviewing of witnesses and suspects, is that all you need is a leading question or a suggestive piece of information in a short interaction.

Most police officers don't spend a long time and they have no memory of this person's past.

They know basically nothing about them except for things related to the crime.

And yet we know that within that very short, maybe half hour, one hour interaction, people's stories can change fundamentally.

And the problem is that if you create, if you have a memory of something that when you pull it up,

In that social interaction, it's sort of live.

It's like active.

And when you then finish that interaction, it sets back down.

And the thing is that if you put it back in a different way, what's going to happen is the next time you're going to remember the latest version and you might not realize that it's shifted.

And so over time it can shift and you don't realize it and that's your truth.

And that's where even just short interactions can have a profound impact on the human mind.

We do all the time in experiments.

We know that false memories are common, that they're a feature of a normal, healthy brain.

They're not this glitch.

They are a feature.

And we know that false memories are incredibly common in terms of if you think about basically any memory.

Now, I'm interested in autobiographical memories.

This isn't memories of facts.