Julia Shaw

You remember you were at this university.

You remember approximately what your favorite cafe was.

You remember this important negative or positive event.

Fine.

You don't actually need to know exactly what you were wearing and drinking and saying.

But in a criminal justice setting, you do need to remember exactly what you were drinking and saying and doing, right?

And so that's where we have this need to break down this human capacity for memory to this level of detail that is just not made for.

Right, and if that particular detail is someone's face, then that's a really big problem.

And it can also be an entire false memory.

So this is where, in my research and in research like mine, we've implanted memories, what we call memories or false memories, of experiences that never happened at all.

So while most things are modifications of real memories, false memories, complete false memories, are when you think you experienced something that you didn't.

And we all have them.

We all have some memories that can't be true.

And we usually realize them, for example, when we talk to our parents about our childhood or when we talk to friends and we say, remember that time we did this?

And your friend will go, that happened to me.

That didn't happen to you.

Mm-hmm.

And you become what is known in research as a memory thief, where you've stolen somebody else's memory and you've accepted it or your brain has accepted it as your own.

And that's possibly because the other person told it in such vivid detail that you could imagine it.

And basically your brain was like, well, this feels real now.