“Is Your Brain Lying to You?” The strange science of false memories and how your mind makes things up

What if our most vivid memory never actually happened? The question is haunting. I know you are probably thinking back to one of your childhood memories and wondering if you made it all up. I remember when anyone asked me when my first kiss was, I always told them a story of a boy and me at elementary school. In my mind, I was confident that this happened, but when I think back, maybe it was just a made-up story, something my brain constructed to save me from the embarrassing idea of having to tell another boy that I had never been kissed. So I think that one of the reasons why our brain manufactures false memories is to somewhat shield us from emotional damage, similarly to why we suppress the memory of trauma, to prevent us from reliving what we experienced, which would cause emotional distress. It doesn’t even have to be something as serious as that, but simple things. On a daily basis, I would swear to God that I did something (put my bottle in the car, open the gate, or even said something to a friend), but reality is contradicting that. Let’s unpack it:

What Are False Memories?

A false memory is a fabricated or distorted recollection of an event. These memories may be entirely imaginary, or some parts may be factual. As said before, this phenomenon can range from simple things, such as incorrectly recalling that you locked the front door, to much more serious things, such as recalling an incident you witnessed.

False memories can be differentiated from simple memory errors. We are all prone to memory issues, but a false memory is not just a simple mistake; it involves a level of certainty in the fact that this event did happen.

Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus showed how easily this can happen. In one famous study, she planted a fake memory in people’s minds, making them believe they had been lost in a shopping mall as a child. Shockingly, about 25% of participants believed it actually happened. Loftus' research proved that memory is not like a video recording — it's flexible, editable, and can be influenced by suggestions, emotions, or even casual comments. This helps explain why people can be completely confident in memories that aren’t real.

What Happens in the Brain During Memory Formation?

At its core, memory is the brain’s way of encoding, storing, and retrieving information. The brain’s ability to store memories is a dynamic process that involves several regions working together, most notably the hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex.

1. Encoding – Taking In Information

Encoding is the first step, where your senses (like sight, sound, or smell) send information to your brain. The hippocampus helps turn this sensory input into a form that your brain can store as a memory. Emotional experiences activate the amygdala, which can make those memories more intense and memorable.

2. Storage – Strengthening the Memory

Once encoded, memories are stored by strengthening the connections between neurons, which is called synaptic plasticity. The more you use or think about a memory, the stronger those connections get, making the memory easier to retrieve later.

3. Retrieval – Bringing It Back

Retrieving a memory means reactivating the same neural pathway used when it was first made. The prefrontal cortex helps bring the memory into your conscious mind and sort through what's real and what’s imagined, though it’s not always perfect.

Why Does the Brain Create False Memories?

Your brain doesn’t want to forget. But it also doesn’t like confusion. When details are fuzzy or missing, it fills in the blanks, like AI generating a guess. For you to get a better understanding, I will use the idea of the blind spot in the eye.

The blind spot is the area in our eyes that doesn't contain any photoreceptors, and thus is unable to capture the light from a certain place in our visual field. No light captured, no visual information received, the brain cannot see that place. But we all know that we see the world as a smooth, continuous, coherent picture and not a picture with a part missing. Why? Because a part of the visual cortex fills in the blanks. The brain assumes what should be in the blind spot and fills it in. It interpolates, so to speak, and this is the same with memory. If a moment is fuzzy or confusing, your brain fills in the gaps using emotions, imagination, or things others say. Over time, these guesses can feel just as real as the truth.

The Mandela Effect: Shared False Memories

The Mandela Effect is a social phenomenon in which a group of people incorrectly remember very specific details about a person, place, situation, or event as if it were a reality.

The term was coined by paranormal researcher Fiona Broome, who shared in 2009 that she had a clear memory of former South African president Nelson Mandela dying while in prison. But what she remembered wasn’t true. Mandela didn’t die in prison. Instead, he served a 27-year prison sentence and was released in 1990. But surprisingly, Broome discovered she wasn’t alone in her vivid recollection of Mandela’s death in the ‘80s. Many others online also remembered Mandela’s death incorrectly and believed he died many years before his actual death.

What is the cause of this, you might ask? lack of attention, especially to detail. “Very often when we’re processing information, we see things as we think they are, rather than as they actually are,” says Dr. Neil Dagnall, a cognitive psychology researcher.“With the Mandela Effect, people are often remembering things the way they think they should be because we just process things very quickly in everyday life.”

Our brains like shortcuts. We fill in blanks, assume patterns, and move fast. That’s helpful most of the time but it also means we can confidently believe in things that never really happened.

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Thank you for reading. My sources are listed below

Clinic, C. (2025, June 17). The Mandela Effect: How false memories trick your brain into believing. Cleveland Clinic. https://health.clevelandclinic.org/mandela-effect

Goodyer, J. (2025, March 3). We all have false memories. Here’s how yours are made. BBC Science Focus Magazine. https://www.sciencefocus.com/comment/false-memories-spot

Herath, E. M. (2018, November 19). Brain tells you a story: A Neuroscience/Psychological analysis of how we perceive our world (Part 01). https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/brain-tells-you-story-neurosciencepsychological-analysis-herath

Lost-in-the-Mall-Misrepresentations-and-Misunderstandings.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Elizabeth-Loftus/publication/11693702_Lost_in_the_Mall_Misrepresentations_and_Misunderstandings/links/0fcfd50d9dcac0f22f000000/Lost-in-the-Mall-Misrepresentations-and-Misunderstandings.pdf

MSEd, K. C. (2025, February 27). How and Why False Memories Are Formed in Your Brain. Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-false-memory-2795193

Prisco, J. (2023, September 18). The ‘Mandela Effect’ describes the false memories many of us share. But why can’t scientists explain it? CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/18/world/mandela-effect-collective-false-memory-scn

Schincariol, A., Otgaar, H., Greene, C. M., Murphy, G., Riesthuis, P., Mangiulli, I., & Battista, F. (2024). Fake memories: A meta-analysis on the effect of fake news on the creation of false memories and false beliefs. Memory Mind & Media, 3. https://doi.org/10.1017/mem.2024.14