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MEMORY

Why a False Memory Is Better Than None at All

ON OCTOBER 14, 1994, Tom Rutherford’s world collapsed. He was forced to resign from his career as a minister in the Assemblies of God church because his daughter accused him of sexual assault. The twenty-one-year-old daughter credibly asserted that she had been abused multiple times between the ages of seven and fourteen. She claimed that she got pregnant and was forced by her father to have an abortion with a clothes hanger while her mother looked on. Just imagine! Rutherford lost his job, his friends shunned him, and he had to piece his life together with whatever jobs he could find. One year later a new truth was revealed: his daughter was a virgin. Her vivid memories of abuse only surfaced when she had begun visiting a talk therapist for the purpose of stress management. Over the course of more than sixty sessions and through a question and answer game, Beth Rutherford developed a false memory that had never before existed. The situation was not necessarily deliberate, but was undertaken with the best intentions to help the young woman work on past stress factors. However, at some point, she was unable to distinguish her rampant fantasy world from reality. It was only when a gynecological report left no doubt as to her virginity that Tom Rutherford’s daughter recanted her statements. She subsequently sued her therapist for a million dollars in order to raise public awareness of the danger of false memories.¹

I’ll admit—the Rutherford situation is an extreme case. However, three-fourths of judicial errors can be traced back to false testimonies.² People make claims of having become pregnant under satanic rituals, although they never were pregnant.³ An accused person can remain behind bars for decades due to witness claims that they were spotted at a murder scene until a DNA test finally shows that someone else was the perpetrator.⁴ These scenarios all represent a nightmare that is nonetheless reality, since most of the prosecution witnesses in question were not aware that their memories had gotten out of hand. A classic lying test would not have been able to detect such false memories because, for the witnesses, their statements did not feel false. This is one reason why eyewitness accounts should be handled with utmost caution.

Not only judges, but historians also have their jobs cut out for them in assessing the truth behind the claims of contemporary witnesses. There is still a raging debate about whether or not low-flying fighter planes shot at civilians during the bombing of Dresden, Germany, in 1945. Dozens of Dresdeners claim to remember such scenes from their youth. However, in the firestorm of the bombardment, low-flying maneuvers were hardly feasible over Dresden and were also not recorded in any military reports. The case pits living narratives against dry deployment reports. Who are you going to believe?

Evidently, we are prone to distorting our memories. “That wouldn’t happen to me!” you might say. “I am perfectly aware of what happened.” But it’s not that clear-cut. Take this example: Do you roughly remember the list from the previous chapter? Don’t flip back and cheat! Now, I am going to give you four words but only one of them was in the original list. Which was it?

Sleep

Phenoxyethanol

Blueberry

Submarine

Okay. We can rule out submarine. And phenoxyethanol. What about the other two words? Think about it, try to picture the list. Which one do you pick: sleep or blueberry?

You are naturally clever enough to realize that none of the words were in the original list. But most people would spend some time going back and forth between sleep and blueberry, or else decide with absolute certainty that it was blueberry. The word seems to be the best fit.

I’ll admit that I knowingly led you astray, as I falsely informed you, firstly by stating that one of the words was in the original list. On top of that, the original list had a few key words (dream, night, strawberry, raspberry) that could cause you to draw associations between the target words “sleep” or “blueberry.” And to add insult to injury, the two contrasting words (phenoxyethanol and submarine) made the remaining words seem more plausible. Perhaps these factors influenced you to create a false memory and believe you could remember the word blueberry on the list. But don’t kick yourself too hard. In the following pages, we are going to learn why this is not such a bad thing, but is instead another one of the brain’s strengths.

The memory chapel

AT THIS POINT, I would like to appeal to your memory of the previous chapter (this time without any ploys or gimmicks). Namely, that information and our brain’s memory content are not static but rather malleable components. We don’t go around recording our minute-by-minute experience of the world with a video camera and then save the film for the rest of our lives. It is much more likely that we are continuously tinkering with our memory, which is itself a dynamic construct.

Memory is dynamic because it can change quickly. Let me return one last time to the orchestra comparison from the last chapter. In the same way that a piece of music can be varied by how it is played by an orchestra, a piece of information in the brain can also be changed. In addition, an orchestra might have fewer or more musicians playing (or neurons, in the case of the brain), in which case the basic concept of the piece of music (the information) remains the same, but the sound would change.

Our memory is a construct because we do not, strictly speaking, call up a single memory when we remember something. Instead, we recreate it new each time, the way that an orchestra plays the same piece of music again but always somewhat differently than before. Each concert—each recollection—is a unique experience. Once our neurons have stopped activating the corresponding memory, the specific memory is gone though it is still saved in our memory. In an orchestra, this memory would be like the ability of orchestral musicians to listen to each other, to play their instruments at precisely the right moment, and thereby be attuned together. In the brain, information is stored among the neural contact spots so that it can be triggered and recreated again in the future. A memory is thus the ability of the neural network to generate a state of activity (corresponding to a piece of information, a thought, or a memory).

In order for an orchestra to play a new piece of music, or for a neural network to save a new piece of information, three steps must be taken. First, the musicians play the new song for the first time, then they practice it, thereby improving their coordination with each other so that they can finally be ready to play it at a concert. Of course, it is important that the orchestra plays the notes with as few mistakes as possible. And this is where a brain is different from an orchestra. A brain doesn’t play the order of notes as they are written on the score but instead alters the melody a little bit each time it practices. The brain’s goal is not to play (or to activate) something that has been predefined because there is no conductor. It is much more important that the brain plays in such a way that the song flows and that it provides a coherent overall feel while at the same time saving as much cell energy as possible. What this means, however, is that the information changes over time, and the more often it is worked on, the more it will change. Our memory is thus contestable at every step: when it records, when it consolidates, and when it recalls past memories.

The vulnerability of memory

IT IS POSSIBLE for a memory to be altered right from the moment when we are learning and saving a piece of information. This is often due to the fact that information is more easily processed when it can take up as many areas of the brain as possible. In order to better solidify a memory, you will often come up with a few pieces of additional information for the brain. It’s like the technique that memory experts recommend, of imagining images or stories to correspond with words or phrases in order not to forget them. Something similar occurs automatically in our brain—and sometimes it goes a little too far.

If you want to research human memory errors under standardized scientific conditions, you somehow have to create these errors artificially. One tried and tested method of choice is a test named after its developers, Deese-Roediger-McDermott, or DRM for short. Test subjects are first shown a selection of terms, which they are asked to memorize quickly. For example, read the following list two or three times thoroughly:

Truck, street, drive, key, garage, SUV, freeway, accelerate, gas station, bus, station wagon, steering wheel, DMV, motor, pass

DRM researchers do this with several lists and then give the test subjects time to think or else distract them with a different focused exercise. In order to do this with you, I will simply continue writing this sentence, adding in an unnecessary clause here, and putting something completely unimportant (irrelevant) into parenthesis over there, all in order to move you a bit further away from the list. Don’t look back! Please move on to the top of the next page!

Your task: which of the following word(s) did you see in the previous list?

Steering wheel, car, seat, motorcycle, inspection

Alternatively, I could ask you to write down which words you remember and then compare the lists to see which words match and which words you may have added. By now you have realized that this is a simple variation of the puzzle that I gave you at the start of the chapter. Interestingly, by setting up a carefully devised experiment (one that is not as limited as I necessarily am in the confines of this book), it is possible for researchers to get 80 percent of test subjects to claim that they “recognize” false words, or to put it another way, to facilitate the production of false memories.⁵

The reason behind this weakness of memory lies in the manner in which information is integrated into the brain from the very beginning. When you read a word, you first receive it in the image-processing region of your brain, which is located in your neck area. However, in order to grasp the contents of the word, it must be semantically processed—that is, to relate the new word’s meaning to other words with similar meanings. This takes place in the frontal cortex, or more specifically, in the front and side area of your frontal lobe (for those who must know exactly: the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex). Studies show that both true and false memories are generated in an almost identical fashion. Although true memories do tend to show increased activity in the image processing region—since one is closer to the raw information from one’s surrounding environment—the further processing stages in the brain are more or less the same for false memories.⁶ Or, to put it another way, not only do we perceive a list of words, we shape the perceived truth. We endow it with a meaning and pack the concepts into a mental box.

In chapter 11, we will explore the consequences of excessive inside-the-box thinking or pigeonholing, but for now, allow me to make one remark: invented memories are created in the same way as true memories. Of course, false memories cannot boast the same level of “real” sensory experience, but they are nonetheless integrated into the exact same network. Once this has happened, even if only a single time, it’s too late. The brain can no longer distinguish the false memory from the true one. From that moment on, it doesn’t make any difference to the brain what is fantasy and what is reality. Or, to quote the neuroscience film classic The Matrix, “Your mind makes it real.” Regardless of whether or not the experience ever really took place. In principle, our memories live in a dream world of our own creation.

Before we slide down the rabbit hole of a fundamental philosophical-epistemological debate, let’s return to the brain’s process of memory formation. A process which is not only influenced by our habit of arranging new information in patterns and boxes but also by our emotions and by fellow human beings.

The emotional traps

We are not only prone to making mistakes when trying to recall lists of words; we also err when we need to put them into a social context. At the end of the day, a piece of information by itself is not the important factor. It also matters to whom, what, when, where, why, how it was said. Researchers have studied this by showing test participants various videos. In one video, a person speaks directly to the participants, and indirectly in the other video, by looking off to the side of the camera lens. This has an apparent effect on participants’ memories—not of the contents of the words spoken (which they are able to recall well under both circumstances)—but of the conversational situation. Most participants falsely recall having been directly addressed in the video, even when they were shown the video with the person speaking indirectly.⁷ While the hippocampus (if you recall, the memory center of the brain) was busy saving the contents correctly, a neighboring region of the brain, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), was responsible for the incorrect memories of the conversation and was excessively active in creating the false memories. We seem to take in information subjectively which we also do not save objectively.

To add insult to injury, emotions can lead to memory distortions as well, even in a simple DRM test. For example, if study participants are placed under emotional stress, such as giving a speech in front of an audience or having to take a terrible math test before they are instructed to memorize a list of words, they end up generating a large number of false memories.⁸

However, not all emotions have the effect of misleading our memories. Those types of emotions particularly predisposed to distort our memories tend to have two traits in common: the emotions are intense, and they also appear to match the information that we are supposed to remember. So, if we are in a good mood, we are more prone to falsely remember words from positive vocabulary lists. If we are in a bad mood and stressed out, it’s more likely that we will confuse lists of negative words.⁹ The best option would be to always be in a good mood when driving a car because this would enable us to be the perfect witness to traffic accidents. Although . . . research has pretty clearly shown that no one makes for a very good witness to an accident. This is due to another memory-related weakness of the brain.

The perfect memory crime

NOT ONLY DOES our brain have problems saving information, it also struggles to consolidate and retrieve the information from memory since it is susceptible to all kinds of misinformation, which it gladly accepts and adds to the previously existing memory. Our memory is thereby no longer true, though it may seem more coherent.

Just imagine, for example, that you are sauntering down the street when you suddenly hear the sound of squealing tires! You can only guess where the noise is coming from and you turn to look just in time to see two cars crashing into each other. Naturally, you voluntarily offer yourself as a witness to the scene, and this is where the problems start. You only really “half” experienced the crash. You believe you saw how the cars drove into one another, but you aren’t quite certain. It all happened so quickly. The brain really dislikes being in a condition of uncertainty (experts call this “cognitive dissonance”), and it is always trying to create a coherent overall picture. If what you perceived is fragmented, the brain will substitute in the rest of the information without you even noticing. Incidentally, this is the same brain that both generates a seamless consciousness and recalls false memories, so you also won’t be able to trace the origins of the false memories. In other words, it is the perfect memory crime story—in which the perpetrator (your brain) and the detective (your brain) are one and the same. Both players have very little interest in an explanation, meaning you won’t even think twice about the false memory.

Imagination is learning too

OKAY. SO, IF this is true, how should our brain be able to figure out which memories are true? Because the brain does not have any “criteria for truth,” it uses a trick in which it only classifies information as real if it activates a large portion of the brain. In other words, if something really did happen, it must have left large tracks of activity across the network. This is true in principle since authentic experiences trigger particularly intensive brain activity. If we merely imagine a photograph, the image processing areas of our brain are not as strongly active as they would be if we had the physical photo in our hands and were looking at it. The only problem is that these tracks of imagined memory activity are enlarged retrospectively until they artificially grow to be as big in our memory as real-life stories.

This phenomenon has been studied by showing test participants a series of different photographs from daily life situations.¹⁰ On the following day, the participants were reminded about the photos from the previous day by being told brief descriptions. What they didn’t realize, however, was that some of the descriptions were deceptive and falsely described the photos. Misled in this way, some of the participants formed false memories of the original photos and were no longer able to select the correct (original) images from a selection of photos. Some of the participants even claimed to have seen a manipulated version of an earlier photo. At this point, the level of brain activity triggered was very similar for true and false memories, with one decisive difference: the image processing area became more active with the correct memories (since the participants had, after all, really seen these photos). On the other hand, if a participant incorrectly recalled an image, the audio area of the brain was more active (because they mixed up the new deceptive information that they had been given verbally with their actual memory). In other words, if the total amount of activity covers enough area and is integrated into the brain, the memory is accepted as true, even if it is not.

This study significantly illustrates that memories are by no means static but, on the contrary, may be altered retroactively—and that this takes place every single time you bring them out and dust them off. Whenever a memory is in this state (of being hauled out and dusted off), it is particularly vulnerable to external influences. One elegant experiment was able to demonstrate this effect. Participants were first asked to memorize a list of words and then received a new list the next day. Before being given the new list on the second day, half of the participants were asked to try to remember the first list. On the third day, all of the participants were tested on their memories. Some participants who were once again asked to try to remember the very first list got it mixed up with the second list—but only if they had also been asked to remember the first list on the second day. Those who only concentrated on the second list on the second day (and were not asked about the first list) were able to separately recall both the first and second lists.¹¹ The conclusion: a memory that is in the process of being recalled is in a fragile state and susceptible to corruption by new information.

Peer pressure memory falsification

AS IF IT wasn’t enough that we can make mistakes when saving information, as well as altering our memories each time we pull them out, we are also hardly able to defend our memories from being actively manipulated by external factors. Even if we are aware of this, we are powerless and continue to indulge in memory falsification. Peer pressure—the obligation to adapt our memories to those of other people—actively influences our memories.

In order to demonstrate this concretely, participants were shown a two minute documentary film and then asked a series of questions about the video.¹² Directly after viewing the videos, participants made few errors in their responses and were correctly able to recall the details. Four days later, they could still remember the details and didn’t allow their memories to be swayed by any false information about the film. This changed, however, when participants were shown fake responses about the film made by other participants. Upon seeing the incorrect answers of others, participants were also drawn toward the wrong answers themselves. Even after they found out that the other answers had been contrived and didn’t have anything to do with the documentary, it was too late. The participants were no longer able to distinguish between truth and fiction. They had already modified their memories to fit the group. Interestingly, this peer pressure effect is conveyed through a brain region that neighbors the hippocampus, called the amygdala. This almond-shaped, dice-sized region showed a flurry of activity, particularly whenever the fake responses were shown along with a photograph of the other participants and not merely in writing. A human face increases the feeling of peer pressure and leads our memory further astray toward false conclusions.

It is now possible to list all the ingredients needed to concoct a false memory: an emotional event, a dash of peer pressure, and a habit of frequently recalling a memory, which gives it the opportunity to become further distorted. When this happens, it is nearly impossible to distinguish false memories from true ones. If you would like to cause someone to generate a false memory, it would be best to do it in steps. First, confront the person in question with a distinct (but falsified) memory scenario—for example, that he or she once lost their parents in a store as a small child or that they got into trouble with the police as a teenager. Reinforce this with the fake claim that relatives would be able to back up this situation. Ask your test subject to imagine the event in question and then to think about it for a few days. Then grill them once more with questions, appeal again to their imagination, pressing them for details. Usually by the second sitting, detailed but false memories start to emerge. In this way, it’s not only possible to get a twelve-year-old to contrive absurd stories (for example, that he or she was abducted by a UFO¹³), it’s also possible to convince 70 percent of adult participants that they had once committed a crime, even if such a claim was completely fabricated.¹⁴

The start of this chapter showed what can happen if one spends weeks, or even months, performing such imagination exercises for false memories, and this very important point cannot be emphasized enough: don’t depend on your memory! It is never one hundred percent correct, and it has more likely than not been embellished, distorted, or partially erased by your own brain. You have been influenced by other people, and you are subsequently unable to tell a false memory from a true one. Even the brain is no longer anatomically able to distinguish one from the other since the activity patterns of true and false memories are nearly identical. There are, however, two small but fine exceptions. First: correct memories trigger more activity in the hippocampus and in the image processing regions (since one experienced the true memories, after all). And second: fake memories result in increased activity in the frontal cortex (presumably because the brain must exert itself somewhat in order to come up with an artificial memory image).¹⁵ However, the neural network is so similarly and expansively activated for both types of memories that it becomes impossible for you to be able to tell the difference anymore. As I mentioned earlier, at this point it no longer even matters whether you know that you have been falsely informed. Once an incorrect memory has fallen down into the well and been absorbed, it becomes as authentic as a true memory. Reality and truth are thus two wholly different things.

Memory rescue

BY NOW YOU are probably wondering what you can possibly do to save your true memory from being taken in by a fake one. In principle, there’s not much you can do because this memory system is quite robust and is going to go on leading you around by the nose. However, neuroscience has a few findings that show it’s possible, under certain conditions, for our memories to become even more robust.

Possibility 1: You grow older. Specifically, memory improves and people are less prone to develop false memories when, for example, they are warned about the pitfalls of false memories before taking a DRM test. If I were to have you repeat the same test that you took at the start of this chapter, you should have learned by now that you are sometimes going to fall into a habit of mental pigeonholing that you formed while you were saving information. Interestingly, this tendency to be cautious becomes more pronounced the older one gets. This is why it is possible for a sixty-six-year-old person to effectively shield themselves from new false memories if they have been duly warned on that topic before taking a memorization test. Younger people (ranging from eighteen to twenty-three years old) who receive the same warning still fall prey to false memories.¹⁶ Their brains are apparently more eager to go about constructing mental boxes, which serve to obscure the facts. Older brains, by contrast, feature more control mechanisms (or, to state it in a negative sense: they are already stuck in their own ways and are therefore less vulnerable).

Possibility 2: You take birth control pills. Women who use hormonal contraception perform just as poorly on the DRM test as women who are not on birth control. But they are less susceptible to any later misinformation. If you show them photographs from daily life scenarios and then later mention that the scenes appeared differently (for example, that a person is standing in front of a tree instead of a door), they will not incorporate this false information into their memories.¹⁷ The reason is presumably due to the fact that female sex hormones decrease one’s receptivity to minor details (especially when they are spoken about rather than seen). To put it another way: a woman on hormonal birth control leaves you not with a poem but with a photographic impression. Dear male readers, please keep this in mind when you decide to offer a gift to the woman of your heart or think that she won’t mind if you offer a lyrical description of yourself in place of a dashing photo. And one more warning, before you dope up your next testimony witness with oral contraceptives: whether the same outcome is true for men has never been studied. This is most likely due to a lack of willing male test subjects.

Possibility 3: Be aware of your memory’s weaknesses—preferably in the very moment that you are experiencing a new bit of information for the first time and then committing it to memory. Do not underestimate the fact that you often tinker with your memory and constantly distort it. When it comes to recalling something as precisely as possible, it may be harmful to try imagining it so intensely. Often the first (and the most likely unfalsified) memory is the best and most objective one, and witness testimonies can benefit from allowing witnesses to assess their level of certainty right off the bat. If your goal is to retain the original memory, less feedback is more.¹⁸ The more often we compare our memory with the comments, assessments, and perspectives of others, the more we distort it. This may sound awful, but there is an important underlying principle to it.

Why false is sometimes better

AT THIS POINT in the chapter you have learned—if nothing else—just how shoddy your memory is, at least, from the perspective of accuracy. At the same time, our brain has always been capable of saving information with exact precision. But it doesn’t. The reason is because a smidgen of false memory can have enormous advantages.

One advantage of this particular memory weakness is obvious: it saves time and mental effort if we don’t have to remember all of the details from a list of words or an event but only remember the corresponding context. If you see fifteen words that fit the category “car,” you might easily add an extra word from the same car-related category, but you will not add a word having to do with hobby gardening. In other words, it’s generally much more important for the brain to recognize the big picture than to hone in on the details. We don’t draw detailed information from our surroundings in order to piece it back together again like a puzzle. Instead, we tend to use individual bits of information (words, images, objects) as cues to which we then invent a matching framework of meaning. This allows us to navigate very quickly instead of getting bogged down processing a gigantic pile of details and information from our surroundings. This is why we are able to locate objects much more quickly if they seem to fit their setting¹⁹ (i.e., a pan in the kitchen instead of in the bathroom). It’s a mental shortcut of sorts that saves us energy, though unfortunately with a little less precision.

Imagine that you are tasked with understanding a situation by quickly and intuitively piecing together words or objects. For example, cross out two words that don’t fit into the following list:

House, tree, bush, cabin, apartment

What has to happen in order for you to be able to extract “tree” and “bush” from the other words? Concentrating on the particulars of each word is not as important as seeing their semantic characteristics (their meaning) in relation to the other objects. It doesn’t matter if, three days later, you can’t remember whether it was house, cabin, and apartment, or home, cabin, and apartment. The main point is that you still have the concept of “shelter” in mind. Interestingly, the brain region that processes meaning is identical for both true and false memories (the lateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the frontal cortex that is also involved in processing the meaning of words). This may be one reason why people who are particularly prone to forming fake memories tend to perform very well on association tests.²⁰

Seen from this angle, it’s possible to interpret such over-exuberant false memories somewhat differently, as an especially creative strength of the brain. If our brain were to always function with precision and perfect replicability, like a computer that is able to open up a saved photo with the same quality, we would never have the opportunity to use our memory for new thoughts. Astonishingly, the formation of false memories goes hand in hand with the formation of new ideas and problem solving.²¹ Test subjects were particularly spontaneous and intuitive in coming up with umbrella terms for groups of words if they had first been stimulated to create false memories. The ability to think associatively, to draw correlations, or invent them is only possible if we free ourselves from rigid forms of memory and recollection. Errant memories are a necessary by-product of the way in which we think—namely, that we are not so much fixated on data or details as on meaning and stories.

It’s not true, but it sure rings true

MEMORIES HAVE TWO main functions for us. We use them to construct an identity with our past and to learn from our experiences in order to improve going forward. For both of these functions, our memories need to be flexible, not static. The caveat is that flexibility also implies vulnerability.

The more we remember, the more we embellish our recollections and thereby distort our memories. However, in order to plan for future events, this is precisely the trait that we need. A what-would-happen-if thought experiment only works if we aren’t clinging too fiercely to specific details of the past but, instead, let ourselves go a teensy bit mad. This madness occurs spread across a collection of about half a dozen brain regions that are predominantly concentrated in the frontal and parietal lobes (and in the hippocampus network). It doesn’t matter too much which specific regions these are. What matters is that these regions are as much involved in simulating future events as in “recalling” things that already happened.²² In other words, in order to be able to imagine something happening later on, we have to deconstruct that which has already taken place and to creatively glue it back together again, like a collage. Of course, this pushes against our desire for a dependable memory and—admittedly—can possibly lead to a mismatched or falsified memory in the end. However, the advantage is much greater; namely, we are able to imagine virtually any possible future (even one that is impossible). It is only by accepting our memory failures that we are able to have and entertain new ideas.

And if you’re worried that we forget a lot of things or remember them falsely, please don’t forget that memories are not obligated to explain the world as it is. We use memories much more to help us feel comfortable in the here and now. Studies have shown that people very deliberately (though not necessarily consciously) falsify memories of their past in order to generate a harmonious state in the present. For example, if one asks a group of students to recall their abilities “only a short time ago” at the beginning of the semester, they evaluate themselves as having been similarly capable and experienced as in the present moment when they are being questioned. But if a second group of students is asked to remember how they began their semester “back then, quite a while ago,” they estimate their earlier selves as being more naive and immature—even when the start of the semester is no further in the past than it was with the first group of students.²³ The more you were a blithering idiot in the past, the better you appear today. Our past self is a fabulous scapegoat because it can’t defend itself. This is how we can excuse the negative and persuade ourselves of the positive, twisting the past in order to construct a consistent image of ourselves.

In general, every one of our memories is false and, each time we recall one, it becomes even more false. But if this wasn’t the case, and if our memories were imprinted once and for all at the moment when they occur, we would never be able to go in afterwards to “update” and expand these memories later on. This kind of unmodifiable, static memory prison is not a very nice state to imagine, especially because you would then be too inflexible to imagine much of anything anymore. It is thus a good thing that we often make so many mistakes when we are remembering things. Maybe our memories are not quite as true, but they certainly ring true.