The surprising link between false memories and imagination

our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed ky / Chris Weiher / Unsplash / Sarah Soryal Mind and BehaviorCreativityCognitive NeuroscienceMemory SystemsBrain Imaging In his memoir _Uncle Tungsten_, British neurologist Oliver Sacks described two bombing incidents from his childhood during the Blitz. One involved a bomb that landed near his family’s home but failed to explode. The other involved a thermite bomb that fell behind the house, which Sacks remembered in vivid detail.

A few months after the book came out, Sacks mentioned the incidents to his older brother Michael. Michael confirmed the first memory. But when Sacks brought up the thermite bomb, his brother told him, “You never saw it.

You weren’t there.” Sacks had been away at boarding school. Their older brother had written them a vivid letter describing what happened, and Sacks had apparently turned that description into a memory of his own. And even after learning this, the memory still felt completely real to him.

When I read this story, I couldn’t help but wonder: What happened here? We tend to think about memory as a recording system. But when you remember an event, your brain reconstructs it from pieces: people, places, sensations, emotions, general knowledge, and so on.

The same machinery can take those pieces and recombine them into something that never happened, such as a hypothetical situation or a creative idea. Scientists call this the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis. The hippocampus seems to play an important role in this process.

It helps bind separate elements of experience into coherent episodes, and research shows that it is involved both when we remember past experiences and when we imagine new ones. Get the fall print issue, shipping in October, to members only. In short, remembering the past and imagining possibilities partly rely on the same constructive process: Both involve assembling fragments of stored experience into a coherent scene.