How your brain makes up memories | with Prof. Matthew Mundy

In this episode of Let’s Talk Health, host Natalie Cook speaks to Prof. Matthew Mundy about the intriguing phenomenon of false memories. Can our brains make up memories? Are our recollections truly accurate? Matthew explains how our minds can trick us and why we sometimes remember things that didn’t happen.

They discuss how false memories form, the role of source confusion, and the mechanisms that make memory both powerful and unreliable. This snackable episode offers a thought-provoking glimpse into why we can’t always trust what we remember.

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Transcript

Introduction: 0:08

Hello and welcome back to Let's Talk Health. In this episode, our hosts, Natalie Cook, Director of Innovation, Industry and Employability, and Matt Mundy, Executive Dean of Health and Education at Torrens University Australia, are diving deeper into how memories work and how our brains can trick us into creating false ones.

Natalie Cook: 0:28

Back to this concept of memories. Are they always accurate?

Prof. Matthew Mundy: 0:35

I would argue that they're almost always inaccurate.

Natalie Cook: 0:39

Wow, okay.

Prof. Matthew Mundy: 0:40

And that's because you know our brain is finite, our cognitive abilities are finite, and that the way in which we remember the world around us is through a series of shortcuts. So I described earlier how our brain is almost like a library and it's trying to create connections and build structures and so on. The way in which it does that is by noticing things that are similar and grouping them together and making assumptions about them, well, that's similar to that previous group, it must be part of it, so that all goes in that bucket. And if you can imagine that's happening every second of the day with every piece of information that's entering your brain, your memory is making shortcuts about all of those things all of the time. Great example would be driving to work. We might drive to work every day. Do we remember every single time we've driven to work? Absolutely not. Um do you remember the details of the trip you took to work this morning? Almost certainly not. Whereas you can recall your trip to work, right? You know you got here, you know how you got here, you might recall some of the details about it. Um, but I would argue that memory is probably 90% cobbled together from previous memories, all the other times you've done it, and maybe if something unique happened today, that that might be stronger than some of the other rest of the pieces, but it might not. Um and what can happen is a memory forms out of bits of old memories of similar items, the new information that's then added in associated with it, it feels like a brand new standalone memory, but it is in fact a composition of the knowledge you already had and some of the new information your brain thought might be useful to keep a hold of.

Natalie Cook: 2:29

And so this notion of you know, colloquially, you might say, Oh, I was on autopilot, I just did that without thinking. That's a thing, I think, is what you're saying.

Prof. Matthew Mundy: 2:38

That's a thing, and again, that trip to work, right? If there was nothing particularly unusual or unique about it, well, your brain will go, that's not useful new information. I'm not going to encode any of it into memory. Um, yet obviously you're here at work, you got here somehow, and so what can happen is you kind of just make it up with that uh not consciously so, but your brain can invent an entire memory for you, and you're okay. Yeah, I drove to work today, I remember that. But it's not real, it's a set of assumptions that your brain sort of just put in there for you to fill in the gap.

Natalie Cook: 3:13

Yeah, wow. Is there a link at all? Like I just in exponentially, we're exposed to more and more information every day, visually, auditory, all of the different sorts of ways of accessing it. And I'm thinking about movies and social media and you're seeing so many other people's lives, so many other things have happening. Does that blur the lines?

Prof. Matthew Mundy: 3:36

It can, it really can. And it it's uh I'm trying to think of the phrase for it, it's it's uh source confusion is one example, right? So it you have a memory of something, but you don't quite remember where you got that memory from. Um, the classic example would be for introverts like myself who sometimes practice conversations they're gonna have with people before you have them. Um that can also then create a memory of having had the conversation with the person when you actually haven't had the conversation yet because you thought it through beforehand. No different to remembering a holiday that you had a few years ago, and broadly speaking, yeah, you might have gone to France and you went to see the Eiffel Tower, but that activity that happened whilst you were there was in fact something you just saw in a film on the way there, and you've incorporated that into your memory because you haven't quite got the source correct. Your brain's remembered something and it's made some of those assumptions that I was talking about, and it's connected the wrong thing with the wrong outcome, and all of a sudden you've got what we call a false memory, that then um you know that the more you remember that, the worse it becomes, and it just becomes part of how you remember that holiday.

Natalie Cook: 4:50

And a disclaimer the information discussed in this podcast is for general information purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. The content should not be relied on as a substitute for professional health care, and if you have any concerns about your health, please do consult a qualified healthcare professional.