Why your childhood memories may not actually have happened.

[Xithras]

130. Most people don't understand what memories really are.

A photograph is an exact copy of a circumstance that once occurred. A video is a series of photographs recording the exact circumstances of an event. Most people mistakenly think that their memory is like a photograph, or a video, but it's nothing like that at all.

When you remember something, you're not actually remembering the event, but creating a mental reconstruction of the event in real time. One part of your brain stores "places", and data related to those places. Another part of your brain stores faces. Another part of your brain stores information. Another part of your brain stores voices. And then yet another part of your brain stores "memories".

But a memory is actually just a "description" of an event. It's something like "I was in Place X, with Person Y, and Z occurred." When you try to actually remember an event, your brain calls all of that information and combines it using the same centers used to process fiction and hallucinations. It is essentially rebuilding an event based on all of the data it has available, and filling in the gaps it has with related data and assumptions based on similar data bits.

"False memories" tend to occur when the brain tries to access information without having all of it. For example, I have a very clear childhood memory of one of my sisters falling from the back of my dad's boat when we were little, and then floating face down in the lake until my dad jumped in to get her. The thing is, that never happened. I did go on my dads boat a lot with my sister when I was little, and a DIFFERENT sister did once fall in our pool and floated face down until my dad jumped in to get her, but they were completely different events. My brain somehow found the two memory fragments, connected them, and I can remember it clear as day today. As another example, I was molested for years as a child, but I can actually only remember two events. The events themselves were so long and varied that they couldn't possibly have happened in two events, so it looks like my brain just connected all of the events together into a single memory. My brain knew that "X happened", but it couldn't apply any sort of timeline or context to it, so it simply combined all of the X events into one. It filled in the gaps to try and make the memory make as much sense as it could.

And yes, dreams do sometimes create memory fragments that can create false memories. So can nightmares. So can suggestion. If you can establish even one part of a memory fragment, the human brain will do the best it can to assemble that fragment into a comprehensive memory.