Julia Shaw

This is memories of experiences, things that you've lived in some way.

And of those autobiographical memories, basically every single autobiographical memory you have is false.

The question isn't whether it's false.

The question is how false.

You're despairing over there.

No, that's not what I'm saying.

Okay.

I'm just saying that everything has a degree of falsehood to it.

And this is where sometimes I'll get accused of being like, oh, but does that mean we can never use witness statements?

I'm not saying we can't use any witness statements.

I'm just saying that we need to be careful because even if people say things with confidence, it doesn't necessarily mean they're true.

Or if they have multisensory details, they're describing in very specific detail what they smelled, what they heard, whatever.

It doesn't mean it's necessarily true.

Most of the time, our autobiographical memories are good enough to

And that's where memory scientists talk about this as gist memory.

Our gist memory for events, much like for text, you get the gist of it, right?

You're good enough.

You generally remember accurately, approximately what happened.

But it's when you get to the so-called verbatim details, the specific details of memories, that you find people are often really bad.

Now, most of the time, that doesn't really matter because you remember you hung out with a friend.