How Many of Our Memories Are False? Surprising Facts About Memory

On a February day in 2011, seven researchers from the University of California sat across a long table from 50-year-old Frank Healy, taking turns asking him about his extraordinary memory. I recorded their conversation as one of the researchers randomly picked a date: December 17, 1999.

“Alright,” Healy replied, “on December 17, 1999, the great jazz musician Grover Washington Jr. died while performing at a concert.”

“What did you have for breakfast that morning?”

“Special K for breakfast. Liverwurst and cheese for lunch. And I remember the song ‘You’ve Got Personality’ playing on the radio when I arrived at work,” said Healy, one of only 50 confirmed people in the United States with highly superior autobiographical memory-a remarkable ability to recall dates and events.

“I remember walking into work, and one of the clients was humming a parody of ‘Jingle Bells.'”

These are the kinds of vivid details memoirists, historians, and journalists crave when they sift through people’s memories to present true stories to the world. But any such work comes with a warning: human memory is prone to error. Now, scientists have a clearer understanding of just how unreliable it can be-even people with extraordinary memories are susceptible to the phenomenon of “false memories.”

At the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning at the University of California, where Professor James McGaugh discovered the first person with highly superior autobiographical memory, Elizabeth Loftus has spent decades studying how false memories form-those instances when people vividly and confidently recall events that never happened. Loftus found that false memories can take root if someone is exposed to misinformation right after an event or if they’re asked leading questions about the past.

As our memories become more vulnerable to errors and distortions, how much can we trust the stories we’ve believed our whole lives?

Memory: A Reconstruction, Not a Recording

As McGaugh explains, all memory is colored by life experience. When people remember, “they reconstruct,” he says. “That doesn’t mean memories are complete fabrications, but it does mean people tell a story about themselves, combining what they truly remember in detail with what generally seems true.”

A study published in PNAS and led by Lawrence Patihis was the first to test people with highly superior autobiographical memory for false memories. These individuals can usually recall details from every day of their lives since childhood, and when these details are checked against diaries, videos, or other documentation, they’re accurate about 97% of the time.

In the study, 27 people with this kind of memory watched two slide shows: in one, a man stole a woman’s wallet by pretending to help her; in the other, a man broke into a car with a credit card and stole dollar bills and necklaces. Later, participants read two stories about the slideshows, each intentionally containing misinformation. When asked about the events, those with superior memory pointed to the false details as true just as often as people with average memory.

In another test, participants were told there was news footage of the United 93 plane crash in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, even though no such footage exists. When asked if they remembered seeing it, 20% of those with superior memory and 29% of those with average memory said “yes.”

“Even though this study focuses on people with exceptional memory, it should make everyone pause and think about their own memory,” says Patihis. “Gone are the days when we thought only 20, 30, or 40 percent of people were vulnerable to memory distortions.”

When Extraordinary Memory Isn’t Perfect

When I interviewed Frank Healy about his visit to the University of California two years and nine months earlier, he was right about many things-but not everything. He remembered that Wednesday, February 9, 2011, was a significant day for him. He was excited to participate in a memory study on campus. Since childhood, he’d made mental notes he could recall decades later, but Frank didn’t always know how to use his memory for something meaningful.

Sometimes, his memory felt more like a curse than a gift. His mind was so full of details that he’d miss information in class, or his parents would get upset when he didn’t hear them. Healy didn’t reveal his unique abilities to classmates until eighth grade, when he decided to show off his memory at a talent show.

As he got older, he realized that painful events from 20 or 30 years ago would always come back with the same emotional intensity as if he were reliving them. But he learned to live with negative memories, put a positive spin on them, and even wrote books about his experience living with phenomenal memory.

Recalling that day at the University of California, Healy told me he could picture McGaugh, whose left eyeglass lens was fogged up. He described the long table, the plain room, and me sitting to his left.

“The first thing they asked me to do was write a series of letters and numbers,” Healy said. He remembered entering the room and being asked to go to a green board, where he wrote with chalk, then was told to turn around and recall what he’d just written. He still remembered the numbers: 1, 9, 6, and 4.

According to my tape recorder, some of what he wrote that day were indeed the numbers 1, 9, 6, and 4, in that order. But the board was actually white, not green, and he used colored markers, not chalk. Also, Healy was asked to write on the board 46 minutes after answering a series of memory questions, not at the very beginning. I was sitting to his right, and there were seven people plus me in the room, not “15 or so” as he recalled.

Patihis and his colleagues noted in their PNAS study, “It seems puzzling why people with superior memory can recall trivial details like what they ate for lunch 10 years ago, but not a list of words or photos from a slideshow. The reason may be that people extract personal meaning from trivial details and weave them into the narrative of that particular day.”

Emotion, Memory, and Survival

This is true for everyone: the stronger the emotion tied to a moment, the more likely the memory centers in our brain will be activated. As McGaugh said, you won’t remember every commute to work, but if you witness a fatal accident during one, you probably won’t forget it. The memories that stay with us are colored by emotion. This is important for our survival: an animal goes to a stream, gets bitten by a tiger, but survives. Now it knows not to return to that stream.

Memory, Journalism, and the Search for Truth

At the end of the memory test, McGaugh asked Healy, “What would you like to ask us?” Healy wanted to know how the research results would be used.

“There are very few people in the world with this ability,” McGaugh replied. “We want to know what’s happening in your brain that allows you to do this.”

In 2012, researchers released a report based on interviews with Healy and others with superior memory, showing that compared to people with average memory, they have stronger white matter connecting the middle and front parts of the brain.

When I told Healy that the study he participated in found false memories even in people with exceptional memory, he was disappointed to learn his memory could be as malleable as anyone else’s.

All these discussions made me reflect on the journalism I practice and teach. Over the years, I’ve interviewed witnesses of the September 11 attacks and rushed to disaster scenes to get eyewitness accounts of catastrophic train wrecks or mass shootings. It seems logical that people I spoke with would remember these shocking, emotionally charged events well. But even they can be unreliable.

In 1977, Flying magazine interviewed 60 eyewitnesses to a plane crash that killed nine people, and their memories varied. One witness said the plane “was heading straight for the ground, straight down.” Yet photos showed the plane hit the ground at an almost flat angle.

For journalists, “faulty memory” is definitely a problem. But how can we guard against it?

There’s no absolute guarantee that everything in a nonfiction narrative is completely true, “but as a writer, you’re obligated to get as close to the truth as possible by gathering as much evidence as you can,” says Richard E. Meyer, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and essayist. He encourages anyone writing memoirs to share their stories with others and see how often they’re mistaken about what they remember.

The true story is always filtered through the storyteller’s perspective.

“The mind and its memory not only record and retrieve information and experience, but also infer, fill in gaps, and construct,” wrote literary scholar Brian Boyd in his book On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. “The inability of episodic memory to provide exact copies of experience seems not to be a limitation, but an adaptive design.”

Narrative gives meaning and order to our existence, which would otherwise be chaotic and filled with anxiety. This is a key takeaway for anyone reflecting on the intersection of stories and memory. There is harmony in both.