Long-term memory

A baby mobile above a cribImage: TobinCStudio (Shutterstock)A 2018 study, for instance, found that many people’s first memories likely never happened as remembered. Specifically, around 40% of people in the study recalled their first memory occurring before the age of two, while 15% recalled it before the age of one. But experts generally agree that our brains simply don’t form long-term memories before the age of three, at least ones that we can remember as adults.These implausible childhood memories, as the study…

Human memory might be even more unreliable than currently thought. In a new study, scientists found that it’s possible for people to form false memories of an event within seconds of it occurring. This almost-immediate misremembering seems to be shaped by our expectations of what should happen, the team says.Over the past few decades, it’s become clear that our process of rememberingis deeply flawed. Studies time and again have shown that our memory is routinely inaccurate, while others have found that you can easily…