At the moment we experience something, the brain records the event according to what it receives through the senses. But human memory does not store the event as an exact copy of what happened; rather, it functions as a very subjective reconstruction. When recalling a memory from the past, the brain reconstructs it through fragments of images, emotions, and our own interpretation of the facts, also transformed by the passage of time, to create a new version of what occurred.
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“Human memory is not a faithful record of what we saw or what happened. It does not work like a hard drive. It is a recreation that the mind makes based on associations in which, every time you remember something, the neurons recall that scenario again,” explains Jesús Molero, director of Balance Psicología and @psisuki on social media, with 60,900 followers on X. For him, memory is nowhere fixed; rather, every time it is recalled, it is regenerated.
One of the most relevant factors in the subjectivity of memories is the importance of the emotions, sensations, or meanings we give to those scenes: “The same event can be remembered very differently depending on how different people felt at that moment and the sensations that recalling those images brings them,” says Beatriz Martínez, clinical psychologist and director of Alumbra Psicología Burgos.
Another reason for the recreation of memories is that the brain hates empty memories and fills them with imagination, the psychologist adds: “When we remember it for the first time, we do so much more vividly, like a dinner with a friend at a restaurant, the food, the flavors, or the conversations. As time passes, some information is lost.” The hippocampus is the area of the brain responsible for recording images, smells, and details, that is, more objective information. However, over time, that information is lost because the hippocampus cannot retain it for so long, but a more emotional concept remains. “Memory is not just objective data, but it is reconstructed and influenced by our personal values, identity, emotions, and tastes,” Martínez elaborates, citing the song Memória by Rosalía to talk about reconstructive memory and the memories we reimagine according to “the different versions of ourselves that we are over time.”
Molero also highlights the importance of emotions in false memories: “Memory is adaptive. The brain reconstructs them according to what you might need at that moment on an adaptive level. It is trying to take you to that zone of control, protection, and returning to the familiar, as well as avoiding uncertainty and rejection.” Likewise, the psychologist explains that memory works by reconsolidation, so each time we remember, it is modified a little more according to the present situation.
“One of the most powerful memories is the one associated with emotion. Memory works by associations. Neurons associate moments with images, emotions, and sensations. Emotions, due to an evolutionary role, have the greatest capacity to make us remember,” continues Molero, noting that more emotional people tend to remember events better in general: “It would not be unreasonable to say that a person’s emotionality can be a factor that interacts based on the importance of emotions,” he points out.
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According to a study published in Frontiers in Psychology, emotions can alter which parts of an event a person remembers and which they forget. And a report published in Scientific Reports from Nature indicates that the formation of false memories is related to different memory systems: those with greater semantic memory capacities (related to using prior knowledge and retaining the general idea of what was learned) tend to generate more false memories, while a stronger episodic memory (related to recalling more precisely what has been experienced or studied) reduces those errors.
The brain suffers whenever it finds empty gaps in a memory and looks for ways to fill them: “False memories exist. Imagination is a tool that helps us complete that missing information and is generated in different ways, such as external factors,” the psychologist says. “Sometimes we repeatedly imagine something that happened, like a vacation with your parents that you don’t remember, but you see images of that place and imagine yourself there as a child so many times that you have a false memory. In search of coherence, the mind mixes things that are real with that imagined part,” she maintains.
In the field of false memories, the role of interference also stands out: “If a person has been made to believe something a lot or has been talked to a lot or has thought about it a lot, it is easy over time to mix and have interference between reality and fiction. But it can also happen between realities, that is, many times we take two experiences and mix them,” Molero points out.
The fact of believing that something was one way, but in reality it was another than what is remembered, can harm one’s identity and personal security: “Memories do affect us, but they do not determine us. Our identity is a narrative we have created based on comments we have been told. The problem is not having one type of memory or another, but how we relate to them,” Martínez argues. “Fusion is the way in which people can identify with memories or emotions they feel. We cannot change memories, but we can change how we relate to them, which have led to ideas about ourselves,” she adds.
“One of the great functions of false memories is to maintain people’s identity, and that is why they are modified according to the context being experienced,” Molero summarizes. The psychologist also defines the principle of congruence, according to which people want to have a congruent and stable identity: “A large part of the function of modifying memories is an adaptive function, and this has to do with identity, congruence, and feeling comfortable.”
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