Misremembering: How Our Brains Lie to Us [Videos]

Our friends at the World Science Festival, who gave us those awesome geek jobs we talked about earlier this month, sent in their newest video from The Unbearable Lightness of Memory, an ongoing series which shines light on memory from a molecular, psychological, and emotional perspective. This particular video, “The Fiction in Our Identity”, discusses misattribution and false memories.

Have you ever remembered something so clearly that you were 100% positive in its retelling, only to second-guess yourself as soon as a contradiction surfaces? This phenomenon—memory misattribution—happens all the time; to all of us. We like to think of our memories as drawers full of files or bytes on a computer hard drive, but in reality they’re much more malleable. To illustrate this point, author Jonah Lehrer and psychologist Daniel Schacter share two stories of mixed-up memories, and their sometimes dire consequences.

If you think you’re not subject to faulty memories, you should take the test to find out just how susceptible you are:

The series is fascinating in its entirety–check out all of the videos in the Unbearable Lightness of Memory series on World Science Festival’s WSFtv.