Synthetic memory
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Synthetic memory, sometimes called "false memory" or "false memory syndrome" is a type of failure of the memory recall system of the human brain. The memory recall mechanism of the brain reconstructs information by taking fragments of information that actually happened which are reliable and filling in the missing pieces with its best guess about what should go there. Typically, these "best guesses" are nothing more than vivid imagination, the brain interpolating between the fragments of memory that it does have with its best guess about what information actually belongs in the gaps. Because of the vividness of fake information, these filled in memories have a tendency to give "life" to memories, making things that never happened seem quite vivid and real. The brain does this bizarre thing to create an illusion of time continuity and create an illusion of memory infallibility.
The notions of the false memory syndrome and misinformation effect have been made famous in many court cases by Elizabeth Loftus.
This phenomenon is quite familiar to police officers who have to interview many witnesses about events that happened. Many people who witness the same thing recall it very differently with absolute "certainty" because their minds fill in the blanks between key components of events, and leave no clue whatsoever that the filled in parts are synthetic.
Many people have been convicted of crimes, and even wound up on death row because of the testimony of people who have later been found have testified solely on the basis of unreliable memory. In many cases DNA evidence frees such people after many years.
Attempting to recall something and creating false memories about what actually happened is a pathological problem of the architecture of the human brain.
