False Memories are Exactly What You Need

Why our imperfect memory system is a feature, not a bug

I was 12 when my mum suggested it was time I learned how to drive.

In Australia, we can’t legally drive until we’re 16, but we had a long driveway, and Mum likes us to be prepared.

At the time, Mum owned a little red Mini. It had holes in the floor, and I was barely tall enough to see over the steering wheel, but that didn’t matter to me at all — I was learning to drive! Like a big person!

I grated the gears more times than Mum’s patience should have allowed. And there was that one incident where I backed into Dad’s utility trailer. But I eventually grew up (at least in age...), earned my driver’s licence... and then moved to Los Angeles.

In Australia, we drive on the left side of the road, with the steering wheel on the right side of the car. That’s just the way we do things down here.

But apart from one embarrassing moment at LAX where I tried to get into the driver’s side of my taxi service (much to the driver’s amusement), the transition to driving on the right side of the road was surprisingly smooth.

For ten years, I navigated the infamous 405 and 101 freeways, joining the daily crawl that is LA traffic.

I have wonderful memories of living in the US.

But those memories are wrong.

Even though I spent countless hours on those California roads and highways, and despite knowing that I must have been driving on the right side of the road while I lived there — I cannot recall it that way. When I recall any memory of driving on American roads, those memories stubbornly have me driving on the left side of the road, the steering wheel on the right side of the car.

These are false memories. And I know they are false.

This isn’t just a quirk of my memory — false memories are remarkably common. And while this might seem like a flaw in how our brains work, some scientists argue that our imperfect memory system may be a feature that helps us adapt and survive.

This week, we’re asking two questions:

1. How easily are false memories created? and,

2. Could false memories be a feature rather than a bug?

Q1: How Easily Are False Memories Created?

You may have heard about some of the famous false memory studies by psychologist Elizabeth Loftus. She has spent decades showing just how unreliable our memories can be.

In one experiment, she had people come into the lab, and she told them, ‘We’ve talked to your parents and learned some things about your childhood.’ She’d start with some true stories that really happened — like that time they fell off their bike or their tenth birthday party. And then, somewhere in the middle of all these true memories, she’d slip in a completely made-up story.

The made-up story was the same for every participant in the study. When you were five or six, you got lost in a shopping mall. You were scared, crying, and couldn’t find your family anywhere. But then this elderly person found you and helped reunite you with your parents.

Of course, none of this ever happened. But about a quarter of the people in the study believed that it did. They took bits of real memories — their local mall and their family members — and built an entirely false experience.

But Loftus didn’t stop at lost-in-the-mall memories. She showed that people could be convinced they had nearly drowned as children or been attacked by an animal. In one particularly striking study, she was able to convince people they had met Bugs Bunny at Disneyland — something that would have been impossible since Bugs Bunny is a Warner Bros. character, not a Disney one.¹

And it wasn’t just childhood memories that proved malleable. In other experiments, she showed that recent memories are easily altered, too.

Two groups of participants watched footage of a car accident.² After watching the crash, she asked the first group, ‘How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?’ And she asked the second group, ‘How fast were the cars going when they hit each other’?

Participants who heard the word smashed estimated the car was travelling at much higher speeds than the group who heard the word hit. Some people in the ‘smashed’ group even remembered seeing broken glass in the video — even though there wasn’t any. Just that one difference — smashed versus hit — was enough to influence how people remembered the event.

Q2: Could False Memories Be a Feature Rather Than a Bug?

When we think about false memories, it’s usually in the context of trying to remind us how terrible we are at remembering things. We forget things that happened, and we remember things that didn’t happen.

The faith we place in the accuracy of our memories can have serious consequences. When stakes are high — like in a courtroom — we treat memories like facts. But we know that eyewitnesses make mistakes. Memory can be affected by many things, including the very questioning that is meant to reveal our memories.³

But even when we know that our memory is not always entirely accurate, we continue to convince ourselves that each specific memory is entirely accurate.

Read any book or listen to any podcast on memory, and you will be reminded of this fact — our memory is unreliability. And it’s an important thing to be reminded of.

But by looking at memory through a lens that magnifies our flaws, we risk missing the brilliance of our highly useful memory system.

Think about what it would mean to have perfect memory. To remember every detail of every experience exactly as it happened. Every conversation. Every meal. Every commute to work. Every leaf on every tree you’ve ever walked past. Every body movement, every breath, every heartbeat, every neuron firing, and even every cell division.

A memory like that might sound amazing, but it would be incredibly costly. Your brain would need massive amounts of energy and time to remember all of that information. And for what? Do you really need to remember every single heartbeat you’ve ever had or exactly what you had for lunch three Thursdays ago?

Instead of storing all the inputs that bombard our system, our brain does something kind of clever. It compresses the input to form groups or categories. This way, when we see a new object — let’s say a coffee cup — our brain doesn’t have to store every possible view under every possible lighting, in every possible situation, for us to recognise it as a cup.

The new coffee cup belongs in the coffee cup group, so when we remember it later on, we draw on that grouping (which we have built through experience) to reconstruct the details based on the situation we are in. We create a hypothesis (or a prediction) about what probably happened based on the compressed input and (crucially) on what matters to us now.

This second point — memories are based on what matters to us now — is a commonly held view among memory researchers.⁴ So, let’s pause here for a bit.

We know our memories aren’t like computer files that preserve the past exactly as it was. And we know our memories are reconstructed every time we remember.

So, we might wonder — why? Why would we have a memory that is not entirely accurate and changes each time we recall it?

Why don’t we have perfect memory?

Well… because most of the time, perfect memory is not what we need.

What matters more? Remembering every exact detail of what happened, or remembering the bits that are actually useful to us right now?

Most of the time, we need our memories to help us deal with whatever’s in front of us — our current goals, needs, and situations.⁵ Having a flexible memory lets us take what we’ve learned and apply it broadly.⁶ It helps us adapt to new situations by focusing on what’s important rather than getting bogged down in irrelevant details. In fact, having a perfect, unchanging record of the past might actually work against us — we’d be trying to make sense of today’s new situation while being distracted by yesterday’s specifics.⁷

This is why my memories of driving in Los Angeles stubbornly place me on the left side of the road. My brain isn’t concerned with historical accuracy — it’s concerned with making sense of my experiences in a way that’s useful to me now, as someone who now lives in Australia and, so, drives on the left.

A memory system that focuses on what’s useful right now (rather than storing everything perfectly) gives us an incredible advantage. It’s not a perfect system, of course — sometimes we remember things we’d rather forget, or our memories change in ways that aren’t particularly helpful. But on the whole, this flexible approach to memory lets us learn fast and adapt quickly as our needs change — and it does this without needing massive amounts of storage, time and energy.

In fact, our imperfect memory might be the very thing that makes us so intelligent.⁸ Instead of being slowed down by the need to store every detail, we can quickly adapt to most things our complex world throws at us.

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1. Loftus, E. F. (2004). Memories of Things Unseen. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13(4), 145-147. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004.00294.x

2. Loftus, E. F., & Palmer, J. C. (1974). Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13(5), 585–589. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(74)80011-3

3. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2014). Identifying the culprit: Assessing eyewitness identification. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/18891

4. Researchers such as Elizabeth Loftus, Daniel Schacter, Antonio Damasio, and Michael Levin.

5. Conway, M. A., & Pleydell-Pearce, C. W. (2000). The construction of autobiographical memories in the self-memory system. Psychological Review, 107(2), 261–288. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.107.2.261

6. Schacter, D. L. (1999). The seven sins of memory: Insights from psychology and cognitive neuroscience. American Psychologist, 54(3), 182–203. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.54.3.182

7. Nørby, S. (2015). Why forget? On the adaptive value of memory loss. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(5), 551–578. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691615596787

8. Richards, B. A., & Frankland, P. W. (2017). The persistence and transience of memory. Neuron, 94(6), 1071–1084. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2017.04.037