La ilusión de la memoria

Memories are our most precious possessions. We trust them for every day of our lives, they make us who we are. But the reality is that they are far from being an accurate record of the past: we have all experienced small memory lapses, we have forgotten what we wanted when entering a room or we have been unable to remember the name of someone we have already seen dozens of times. . None of this scares us, but what if we knew that the mind is so malleable as to allow manipulation and even the creation of false memories? In this essay, psychologist and researcher Julia Shaw demonstrates the astonishing variety of ways in which our minds can be fooled: how we can end up believing that other people's memories are our own and how we are not that far from confessing a crime that we have not committed. The illusion of memory teaches us to distrust the human mind while revealing that only by assuming its instability can we understand its virtues.