The science of memory: dreams and false events

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Ever had a dream that felt so real that years later you were convinced it must have really happened? Or do you remember a childhood event with perfect clarity only to discover later you had all the facts wrong? Wherever your memories come from: dreams, actual events, or false memories deliberately planted in your mind, your brain treats them the same, as fact.

Some people remember their dreams with great clarity and others barely at all. Healthline.com posits that this could be due to the personality of the individual during their waking hours. “Overall, such people are prone to daydreaming, creative thinking, and introspection. At the same time, those who are more practical and focused on what is outside themselves tend to have difficulty remembering their dreams.” Some dreams are whimsical and disjointed, and upon waking clearly imagination. But others can be startingly real and make you question yourself.

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False memories are commonplace when trying to recall, for example, childhood memories. Over time, new memories can distort the facts and your brain takes the new interpretation as fact. Psychology Today explains, “strong evidence suggests that memories are quite complex, highly subject to change, and often simply unreliable. Memories of past events can be reconstructed as people age or as their worldview changes. People regularly recall childhood events falsely, and through effective suggestions and other methods, it's been proven that they can even create new false memories.”

The malleable memory can be problematic “particularly in legal settings when children are used as eyewitnesses.” Children are “especially susceptible to the implanting of false memories by parents or other authority figures.” If a case “involves alleged sexual abuse or relies on the correct identification of a suspect by a child,” they could give false information causing unfair imprisonment.

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Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California at Irvine, “notes that everyone embellishes or adds to their memories during recall or recounting. Over time those changes, accurate or not, become part of the memory in the mind. Loftus warns that human memory is not a recording device, but more like a Wikipedia page: You can change it, but others can, too.”

George Orwell in his classic novel 1984 demonstrated how easily humans will accept misinformation as fact. True to his literary prediction, recent events in our culture, “have proven that memory can become weaponized… quite effectively. Once misinformation has taken hold in a target's mind, that new, false recollection hinders his or her ability to make informed decisions about policy and politicians. Fake news drives social discord and character assassination, and even corrupts crucial personal choices about health and well-being.”

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Not all manipulation of the mind is harmful though. The Cleveland Clinic outlines the benefits of hypnosis and that it “allows you to be more open to suggestions to making healthful changes in your perceptions, sensations, emotions, memories, thoughts or behaviors.”

It can be unsettling to realize your memories can be altered by new inputs, but used correctly this can be helpful to rewrite traumatic events in your brain to recover from PTSD or change your perspective to live more peacefully.