"The goal of memory is to leave you with a coherent story of what happened," says Mark Reinitz, a psychologist at the University of Puget Sound. And if the information is incomplete, he finds, the brain will do whatever it takes to assemble such a story— even generate false memories.
How did she fall? Your brain knows.
To explore this process, Reinitz and his colleague Sharon Hannigan showed 48 college students a series of slides depicting everyday activities containing one anomalous event, such as a trip to the supermarket in which the shopper passes a pile of fallen oranges. After 48 hours, the subjects saw the slides again, this time with an additional frame explaining how the event occurred— for instance, a photo showing a woman pulling an orange from the bottom of the stack. On second viewing, 68 percent of the students remembered seeing the explanatory image, even though ...
