False Memory

[AndAnotherNewOne]

Please, this not not about Andrew or the court case.

My Dad's grandmother was a "handsome, dark haired woman" who he had very fond memories of. She died, he thought, when he was still very young but he had a few clear memories of her and of events.

I started to research my family history and found out that she died before my dad was born. He could hardly believe it. There was a photo of her on his parents' wall, which is why he could describe her accurately, and we assume the events happened with another relative. But if he hadn't seen the cert he would not have believed he was wrong.

I have a few "clear" memories from early childhood that I now know to be wrong and some I'm not sure if I remember or if I've heard the tale so often that I believe it is a memory.

I have a childhood friend who "remembers" a lot of things, mostly good, that happened when we were young but they are not familiar to me at all. We were talking about this last night.

She thinks she just has a better memory but I think a lot of her memories just didn't happen, or I would remember them. We lived in each other's pockets until we went to university, so there are a lot of shared memories.

Is it possible to have really clear memories of things that just didn't happen like my Dad did?

I read that you don't remember events, you remember the last time you remember them.
I can picture things in my head from the past then if I see a photo for example I'll see I remembered it wrong.
I imagine it's why hypnosis doesn't hold up legally because you can really believe something different from the truth

Thanks, that makes perfect sense.

Yes - your mind can conflate things, including imagined things, and over time the thoughts are repeated often enough to seem like a memory.

This is a really mundane example - apologies - but I was once trying to remember the name of a TV series I enjoyed, and was Googling it putting in the year I thought it had been on. I had a very clear recollection of myself watching it in the living room of a house I'd only lived in for a couple of years - I could see myself in an armchair with the laptop I had at the time balanced on the arm of it, on a dark winter night - crystal clear 'photo' in my head.

I eventually found it and discovered it had been made some years after I'd lived in that house. I must have watched it somewhere completely different. The whole picture in my head was made up.

Must be something weird going on, I've never made perfect sense before

I read that if you see yourself in the memory, it's probably not real, it's from a photo or someone telling you it happened. A genuine memory is what you saw through your own eyes.

@Clawdy

I read that if you see yourself in the memory, it's probably not real, it's from a photo or someone telling you it happened. A genuine memory is what you saw through your own eyes.

That's very useful. Thanks.