Yes, false memories are a real thing.
Walking into a new room actually makes you forget what you went in there for.
Ever go into a room and then completely forget what you went in there for? Turns out it's an actual thing scientists have studied.
In a study published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology , researchers found that new memory episodes are created when you leave one room and enter another, making it harder to recall information from the previous episode – like exactly what you went into that room for. It's almost like your brain is working against you.
In fact, just imagining walking through doors can make you forget.
Just last month a new study of 51 students found that just imagining walking through a door can make you forget.
The researchers say this fits with the "Event Horizon Model" of short term memory – that we separate memories into chapters, that crossing a boundary (such as a doorway) triggers a new chapter, and that we are more likely to forget across event boundaries.
Your autobiographical memory is divided into chapters.
Channel 4
Yup, your brain is literally writing the story of your life, chapter by chapter.
In one study on this, 23 people read six stories on a screen and later were given a test to see how much they remembered from the narratives. Christian Jarrett at the British Psychological Society's Research Digest blog explains:
The key finding here was that the participants were poorer at recalling a sentence that came after a temporal boundary. It's as if information within an episode was somehow bound together, whereas a memory divide was placed between information spanning two episodes.
("Temporal boundary" just means the sentence began with something like "A while after that..." to indicate the passing of time.)
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