Stop for a moment and think about your first job interview. Can you remember it? Now, try to remember your first day of kindergarten. Or where you were on 9/11. Or the day of your wedding.

Those thoughts, those memories, popping into your head — they’re probably flawed. And you might’ve even made some of them up.

So says Julia Shaw, a Canadian researcher and “memory hacker.”

As a forensic psychologist and memory expert, Shaw is capable of creating false memories in the minds of average people about events that never actually happened, be it that they committed a terrible crime or were attacked by a dog. Horrifying? Yup. Totally fascinating? That too.

“Normally, you do this unintentionally,” Shaw tells me. “You’re talking to family and friends, sharing memories, picking up details. But researchers like me, we hijack that process.”

Shaw’s eyes light up as she explains her thought-provoking memory research at a recent pit-stop in Toronto to promote her new book, The Memory Illusion, which explores the science behind false memories, self-deception and how our memory system really works.

Your brain is “incredibly malleable and adaptive,” according to Shaw, a senior lecturer in criminology at London South Bank University.

Neurons — cells in our brain — connect with one another to develop meaningful networks, which change according to our experiences, Shaw writes.

She likens it to a Wikipedia page, where you can modify things — and so can other people. “It’s fluid, with all sorts of inputs, where memories can be readily deleted,” Shaw says.

Imagine being at a dinner party where friends are all recounting a high school memory. Everyone offers a tidbit, which reshapes your recollection of the event — and, in the end, it’s impossible to know which parts are your memories or those of other people, and if certain parts of the story even happened at all.

Our attention span also comes into play in memory formation, since we can only truly focus on one thing at a time, Shaw notes. It’s like what happens at speed dating or a networking event: Despite your best efforts, you’re likely going to forget people’s names as your brain filters through information about their appearance, their voice, their personality.

“We often don’t process someone’s name because we’re so busy processing them as a whole,” says Shaw.

The “neuronal plasticity” of our brains is the reason we’re able to form memories, but it also means we’re capable of these memory mistakes.

And there’s where memory hacking comes in.

“I get people to confuse their imagination with their memory, by getting them to repeatedly picture an event happening, and adding multi-sensory details like what they’re hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting,” Shaw tells me. “Over time, that can become indistinguishable in the brain from a real memory.”

In other words: Shaw can make you truly believe you did something that never actually happened.

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Think you wouldn’t be fooled? Don’t bet on it. In Shaw’s research, 70 per cent of individuals were classified as having these false memories.

Her work, and that of other researchers in the memory field, offers a wake-up call to the justice system, highlighting how law enforcement agencies can be capable of eliciting false confessions.

It’s something fans of the popular Netflix true-crime show Making a Murderer are familiar with. A major plot point in the first season involved an elaborate confession from 16-year-old Brendan Dassey, who admitted to raping and killing a 25-year-old woman with his uncle, Steven Avery — a Wisconsin man who previously served jail time for a crime he didn’t commit.

Recently, Dassey’s conviction was overturned, with a judge saying his confession was “coerced by investigators.”

“It’s so obvious to people watching it that something went wrong with the case,” says Shaw, who wrote about the show for Scientific American back in January.

“The viewer only has the information presented by the documentary crew, but even just that small piece, combined with the new ruling, strongly points to police conduct, and leading questions, and taking advantage of a vulnerable individual who didn’t have the intellectual capacity to say no,” she adds.

Shaw says Dassey is a “classic case of a coerced compliant false confession,” where someone is telling police what they want to hear. Her own research goes one step further by getting people to truly believe their false memories.

“Brendan Dassey retracted his confession — other people don’t,” she says. “And that’s when it gets really messy. It’s terrifying.”

But Shaw’s ultimate message isn’t one of fear. Our brains are wired this way for a reason, and false memories are just the byproduct of how our malleable minds work.

“Our reality is a personal construction, and the flexibility of our memories allows us to learn, update information and make connections. Without that, we would have nothing,” Shaw says.

“We wouldn’t be able to think, we wouldn’t be able to behave. I’m okay with it — it makes us human.”