Everybody will tell you that memory can't be trusted. When they say that, of course, what they mean is that other people's memories can't be trusted. We don't like to think that everything we know about the world is based on an unreliable storage system designed by that angry drunk known as "evolution." But it is, and we're not just talking about being bad at matching faces with names here. Science has found that your memory is basically a pathological liar, frantically making things up as it goes along ...

5 Your Memory Can Be Fooled By Manipulated Images

Here's a photo you've seen a million times, unless you're behind China's censorship filters:

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A guy standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square, as the tanks roll in to break up the massive demonstrations there. If we hadn't shown you that image, you probably could have drawn it from memory -- the line of tanks, the lone guy who had emerged from the crowd to oppose them, etc. We'll come back to that in a a second.

The problem with memory is that it's not etched onto an unchangeable physical medium. Your brain operates on vague notions and occasional sharp details that stick in your mind, somgetimes for no apparent reason (like how you can never forget your third-grade teacher's weird earlobes, but can't remember what grade you got). The problem with that system is that it is incredibly easy to manipulate. If someone offers your brain a reminder of those fuzzy details -- say, a photograph, or just a very convincing person telling the story -- it will latch onto it and make you remember things that way.

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All that matters is that the version you're given is similar to something that could have happened, or even better, seems like it should have happened. Like that famous photo with the tanks, and the guy, and the crowd of protesters. See, there actually wasn't a crowd. It was photoshopped in.

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Experiments found that when showing people the crowd photo, they were much more likely to remember seeing crowds in their memories of watching it on television. Keep in mind, for people of a certain age, we're talking about an image they may have seen 5,000 times at various points in their life. One plausible piece of doctored evidence, and all those memories were rewritten. So your brain is less like a hard drive and more like a sandy beach people write shit on with their fingers.