Julia Shaw

And so the next time you thought about that, maybe, maybe not the next time, but maybe after a couple of times of thinking about it, you started going, this happened to me, right?

And then you integrated into your autobiography.

Not hard.

It's very easy to distort memories or to insert small false memories.

It's harder to convince people of entire events, especially specific events.

And this is widely debated, exactly how easy it is to implant a specific false memory.

It's also one of the big debates around my own research is that when I was writing The Memory Illusion, which was my first book,

And the research that was in line with that, there was a huge debate between me and a couple of other academics about what it means for something to be a false memory and how we should talk about the ease with which they're implanted.

And that is still one of the biggest scientific debates in our field.

And to me, I think that's so the coding stuff is about the difference between what some people call a false belief and a false memory.

So I think this thing happened or I remember this thing happened.

And that is a really difficult differentiation often because all we have as social psychologists is what you're telling me.

And I can ask you, do you think it really happened or not?

Do you believe it really happened?

But ultimately,

It's really hard to differentiate.

And so I've always thought that you need to ask people about the specifics, like how confident are you in this memory?

Do you feel things in this memory?

Does it feel like other kinds of memory?

Describe the nature of this experience rather than being like, do you think this is a real memory?