Is your notion of who you are built on a mountain of narrative that may or may not be totally accurate. If somebody told you a totally false story about yourself, could you come to believe it? And what does this have to do with six people who spent over a decade in prison together for a crime they didn't commit but believed that they had. And what does any of this have to do with why you are physically a different person every seven years, but why you can't easily see the changes in yourself through time, or what the effective technology will be on our sense of self. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in these episodes we sailed deeply into our three pound universe to understand why, why, and how our lives look the way they do. Today's episode is part two in the story of our drifting memories. So last week we talked about memory and its inaccuracies. I talked about how medieval European painters struggled to accurately depict lions because they had never seen a real lion. They'd only seen versions painted by other people, and as these sequences of paintings moved forward through history, they became more and more distorted from the original lion that someone had seen at some point, and the lions served as a metaphor for us to discuss how memories, like messages in the game of Telephone, become distorted over time. If you heard the episode, you'll remember I talked about a strange Native American folk tale called the War of the Ghosts, and this was used by the psychologist Frederick Bartlett. He had people read the story and then reconstruct it from their memory at various time points later to understand how their memory changed. And what he found is that over time, your memory of a story becomes more coherent with your internal model of the world and also more aligned with whatever your cultural norms are. So we saw that memories are not static recordings, but instead they are stored in vast constellations of neurons that are interconnected and dynamic, and new experiences can alter these neural connections, leading to changes in how memories are recalled, for example, in the context of eyewitness testimony. This understanding of memory is massively important because things that people say to you after you've witnessed an event. Whether this is cowitnesses talking to you, or psychologists or investigators, these can all change your memory of what you believe you saw at the time of the event. It alters your memory, but generally it doesn't change your confidence in your memory. And finally, we also saw in the last episode that even flashbulb memories, which are these vivid, emotionally charged recollections of big significant events, even these sorts of recollections become less accurate over time, as we saw with a long term follow up study after the terrorist attacks of September eleventh, two thousand and one. So this week we're going to talk about not just your memory of something external like a story you read or an event you saw. Instead, we're going to zoom in on what happens when those memories are about you. How do memory distortions through time change your notion of your personal identity. So let's start with a basic reality. Our brains and our bodies change so much during our life that, like a clock's our hand, it's difficult to detect the changes. So every seven years, for example, every cell in your body has been replaced. Physically, you are not you anymore. But you're a new you. Fortunately, there's one constant that links all these different versions of you together, and that is memory. Perhaps memory can serve as the thread that makes me who I am. It sits at the core of our identity. It provides a single, continuous sense of self. But given what we talked about in the last episode, there might be a problem here because could the continuity of memory be an illusion? So imagine that you walk into a room room, and you meet your self at different ages in your life. So there you are at age seven, and there's you as a teenager, and over here it's you in your late twenties and mid fifties and early seventies and all the way through your final years. Imagine that you all sit together and you share the stories about your life, and you tease out this single thread of your identity. Would you be able to find a core version of you? Well, it's tough to say, because you all possess the same name and the same history. But the fact is that you're all somewhat different people at all these different ages. You have different values and goals. And what we're going to talk about today is that your life's memories might have less in common than expected. Your memory when you look back and ask yourself who you were at fifteen is different to who you actually were at fifteen. And your sixty year old self and your forty year old self will look back on an important event that happened to your twenty year old self, but they may have different recollections of exactly what happened and in what order and who is there. And the question is, if you don't all agree on the same memories, are you really the same person? So first, let's start from the point of view of the brain to think about self identity. There's no single region in the brain that underpins the self. It's a vastly distributed property. But we can point to some large players in the game, like the prefrontal cortex located just behind your forehead, which generally navigates your planning, your decision making, your self reflection. It helps you evaluate your action and give some narrative to your intention, and all this contributes to a coherent self concept and more generally, the prefrontal cortex is part of a broader coalition of areas that we summarize as the default mode network. Now, this is a network of brain regions that are active when you're at rest and not focused on something in the outside world. And this network seems to be involved in self referential thinking and daydreaming and reflecting on your own life and experiences, so it seems to be involved in maintaining a stable sense of self. And you have other areas involved, like the amygdala, which is involved in processing emotions and that influences how you react to your environment and shapes your emotional identity. But while we can point to all these brain areas as being involved, there's something else massively important. Your identity is fundamentally rooted in your memories. This tells you your whole life narrative. There are many types of memory, like short term and long term, and please listen to episode forty three to learn more about these different types. But the subtype we care about today is autobiographical memory, which is your memory of personal experiences and events. This type of memory plays an absolutely crucial role in shaping your identity. By recalling these memories and reflecting on these memories, you create this continuously changing narrative that defines who you are now. The reason that your memory is and your overarching narrative can always change is because of neuroplasticity, which is the brain's ability to adapt. Your brain is flexible. All the tens of billions of neurons in your head are always wiring and rewiring and disconnecting and seeking new partners and reconnecting, and they're doing this every moment of your life. I call this live wiring, and this, of course underlies the fluid nature of our identity. If you did didn't have this kind of flexibility in your brain, you would be stuck in time. You would never reorganize in response to new experiences, you would never learn, you would never change in response to trauma or education, or the relationships you have, or more generally, you wouldn't change from the politics and culture and the wider world around you. Now, if this were just a matter of the world getting poured into your nervous system as you mature, that's one thing. But the deeper, amazing issue that we're talking about today is that your past is not a faithful record. Instead, it's a reconstruction, and sometimes it borders on mythology. When we review our life memories, we should do so with the awareness that not all the details are accurate. Some of the details come from stories that people told us about ourselves. Others were filled in with what we think must have happened. Others are based on rewrites that make the overarching story more consistent. So if your answer to who you are is based simply on your memories, that makes your identity something of a strange, ongoing, mutable narrative. So how do our personal memories influence who we think we are? Let's return to the memory researcher Elizabeth Loftis. Last week I told you that in one of her experiments, she showed that the way questions are phrased influences people's memories. For example, if you ask people how fast a couple of cars are going when they hit each other, the people will give different speed estimates than if you ask them how fast the cars were going when they mashed into each other. The word smashed illicits higher speed estimates because it distorts something about people's memories. So, because Lostess was intrigued by the way that leading questions could contaminate memory, she decided to go further. She asked this question, would it be possible to implant entirely false memories into a person? So to find out, she recruited a bunch of participants and had her team contact their families to get information about events in their past, and then, armed with this information, the researcher team put together four stories about each participant's childhood. Three of the stories were true, and the fourth story contained plausible information, but it was entirely made up. This fourth story was about getting lost at a shopping mall as a child, being found by a kind elderly person, and finally being reunited with a parent. In a series of interviews, participants were told these four stories about their childhood, and at least a quarter of them claimed that they could remember the incident of being lost in the mall, even though it hadn't actually happened and it didn't stop there. Because, as Loftus describes it, the participant may start to feel like they remember a little bit about it, and then when they come back a week later, they're starting to remember more. Maybe they tell some details about the older woman who rescued them, and over time, more and more details creep into this false memory, like someone will say that the older woman had a particular hat that they remember, or they'll say they remember that they had their favorite toy with them, or they'll say they remember their mother was so mad or so glad when they were reunited. Only was it possible to implant false new memories in the brain, but people embraced and embellished those memories. They were unknowingly weaving fantasy into the fabric of their identity. Now we're all susceptible to this kind of memory manipulation, And it turns out this is true of even Elizabeth Loftus herself. So, when Elizabeth was a child, her mother had drowned in a swimming pool. And years later she was having a conversation with a relative, and that conversation brought out this extraordinary fact that Elizabeth had been the one to find her mother's body in the pool. Now that news came as a total shock to her because she hadn't known that, and in fact, she didn't believe it. But she describes, quote, I went home from that birthday and I started to think, maybe I did. I started to think about others. There are things that I did remember, like when the fireman came, they gave me oxygen. Maybe I needed the oxygen because I was so upset that I found the body. Now soon she was able to visualize finding her mother's body in the swimming pool. But then her relative called her up to say he'd made a mistake. It wasn't the young Elizabeth after all who had found the body. It had been Elizabeth's aunt. And that's how Loftus had the opportunity to experience what it was like to possess her own false memory, richly detailed and deeply felt. So your memories are not a faithful record. Instead, they are a constant reconstruction. Now it might feel to you almost inconceivable that you could somehow misremember your own life narrative. But this is precisely what happened in the small town of Beatrice, Nebraska, to multiple people in a way that that affected a combined seventy five years of their lives. So here is what happened. There was an elderly woman, a grandmother, named Helen Wilson, who was raped and murdered in her apartment in nineteen eighty five, and for four years the police searched, but they couldn't come up with who had done this. By nineteen eighty nine, they were looking for any suspects who seemed sexually unconventional because a profiler at the FBI suggested that's who they should be looking for. So they finally found two people, a man and a woman who fit that general description. He had been a pornographic filmmaker and she had met him in California where they filmed together, and the two of them had come back to Beatrice, Nebraska and started filming pornography again. So the police picked them up and interviewed them. Now, he denied that he had anything to do with this murder that he was being accused of. He was baffled, and he said, why am I a suspect in this case of murder? He said he didn't even know the victim they were talking about, or anything about this crime. But according to the transcripts, the detective said to him, you're having a hard time remembering. Maybe it's because you don't want to remember. Could that be it? Joe? He kept denying it, and the detectives kept telling him they would be able to prove his guilt. But that's not the mind blowing part of the story, which was taking place in the neighboring room where they were interviewing the woman. The detectives told her that she was at the apartment of this elderly woman that's grandmother, and they quote worked on bringing back little bits of memory to her. She didn't remember anything about this grandmother, or the apartment, or what the woman was wearing, or even why she would have been there or gone inside, but the police kept telling her, according to the transcript, quote, let me try and help you refresh your memory. They told her her memories were repressed because the whole event was so awful. With time, she ended up wholeheartedly believing that she had done the crime, and she confessed that she suffocated the woman with a pillow while the man had performed the rape. Now, this was a very manipulative interrogation and subsequent confession, and maybe it would have ended there. But the problem was that at the scene of the crime they had found type B blood, and neither of these two had type B blood. So the police felt that maybe the solution was that there were other people involved, and they kept pushing the woman to generate recollections. She ended up telling the police that she thought maybe there was another man with her during the crime, so they showed her a lineup of photographs and she ended up picking a high school friend of hers, who then got arrested too, and maybe it would have ended there, but he didn't have typebe blood either. Then a fourth suspect was arrested, another woman who tended to hang out with the group. She had a number of interviews with the police psychologist, and she was also brought around to the idea that she had committed this horrible crime and had repressed her memory, so she ended up giving a confession of guilt. Then she had a dream about this whole thing, and in her dream she saw a fifth man there. So he got arrested and also had interviews with the psychologist, and he eventually also came to the conclusion that his psyche had simply forgotten or repressed this whole terrible event. Then he and the second woman to be arrested each had a dream that there was another woman at the scene, and that woman was arrested. Now she was certain that she was doing laundry on the night of February fifth, nineteen eighty five, but a police psychologist told her that she had witnessed this murder but simply couldn't remember it. He said to her, have you ever had memory problems before? So she thought about it and insisted that she did not have any memory problems. He asked, how about something really terribly frightening, like something that really had an impact emotionally. So she kept denying this and felt quite certain that she couldn't possibly forget a rape and murder scene. She said, quote, I just don't understand. I mean, this isn't something I would not say anything about. I'm not saying I'm perfect here, and I've done my share of little sins, but we're talking about killing an old person. End quote. As it turned out she had type BE blood and so she got charged anyway. Now, there were six people charged for this crime, and they became known as the Beatrice Six. The first man pled innocence, two more pled no contest, but three of the six people pled guilty. They all went to jail for well over a decade of their lives, and the man who kept insisting on his innocence kept trying to get a DNA test done. But it was only in two thousand and seven that he was able to finally get the Nebraska Supreme Court to make it happen. And the incredible result is that he and his five co defendants were finally exonerated. They were all found to be innocent. Another DNA test revealed the actual perpetrator, a Beatrice resident who had died in nineteen ninety two, and it appears that he had acted alone in the rape and murder. So what this case represents is something so stunning about our memory and its stability and its manipulability. Although these six people all denied having ever been in that woman's apartment, much less committing this crime, several of them were able to be convinced that they had repressed the memory because it was so traumatic. The psychologist told them over and over that the memories of the murder would probably come back to them when they were thinking deeply about it or having a dream, but it might take a while. As it turns out, it didn't even take that long. Half the suspects ended up completely believing in their guilt, even though they were not there and had nothing to do with this. Now, as a side note, this whole notion about memory suppression was floating around in psychology circles at that time, and there were actually a whole bunch of convictions passed down based on this idea, Like maybe an adult who comes to believe, let's say, through hypnosis that twenty years earlier she was sexually abused by someone and that memory had been repressed and she had never remembered it until just this moment. And there was a window of time I am in the nineteen eighties and nineties when a number of people were convicted based on this kind of memory testimony. And while it's theoretically possible that someone could repress the memory for decades and then it pops up, essentially all these repressed memory cases were eventually overturned as strong evidence like DNA evidence got introduced into the court system, and many of these accusations were found to be totally false. But this case of the Beatrice six was especially amazing because here people who were innocent ended up believing, truly believing that they themselves were guilty for three of the six. They absolutely believed in their own guilt, and they suffered deep regret and shame. These new beliefs they had became just a new sedimentary layer in the history of their identity. So this is just like Elizabeth loftis receiving misinformation about finding her mother's body in the pool, and she came to have a memory of it. This is also like Lofts's experiments, where she plants false information into the narrative of participants in the laboratory. I'm going to link a New Yorker article about the Beatrice six in the show notes on Eagleman dot com slash podcast, and also an HBO documentary about this, so check it out there for more. But the point I want to make for now is that all these cases demonstrate the malleability and the manipulability of our memory, not only about an external story or picture or terrorist attack, but even when the memories are about our own lives. The writer John Dufresny once wrote that memory is a myth making machine. What we do is keep revising our past to keep it consistent with who we think we are. So think about the narrative of your own life. Which parts have you conveniently forgotten because they didn't mesh well with the overarching story. What parts have you told so many times that they've taken on a reality of their own, perhaps a little unanchored from what actually went down. Last week I told the story of a group of my colleagues who studied what happened with memories of nine to eleven. The bottom line was that memories drifted. People were given these detailed surveys one week after the attack, and then they were tracked down a year later and regiven the survey, and it was found that accuracy of recall was lower than expected, and it got even lower at three years after the event and then ten years after the event. But here's the important thing to surface. What drifted were the memories about the self. The factual memories like who is president at the time and how many planes there were? Those were essentially stable over time. Why is there some difference in the brain and the way they're stored. No, it's because those event facts were discussed endlessly in the media and in daily conversations, and so any misremembering got automatically corrected by the wider environment. In fact, as I mentioned last week, the researchers could predict the accuracy of memories just based on how much media attention and ensuing conversation there was around something. But if you have some flashball memory that is inconsistent, like exactly what you were thinking or feeling, or even where you were standing or what you saw, you're really likely to repeat that a lot over the next decade. Digging that story in but that's not likely to get corrected by anybody, So the canyon of that memory gets etched deep and deeper into the neural landscape, even if the river is not flowing in the right spot. So personal memories drift, but event memories get corrected back into place. And I was thinking about this the other day because now it's more than two decades after the nine to eleven attacks, and I'm fascinated by how our increasing technology might influence our personal memories. So when I think about my past, I have some handful of photographs that pin me down to reality, at least in particular moments when the shutter clicked. In other words, I can't misremember those moments in my life too much because there's some objective evidence of what I looked like, or what I wore, or what the house behind me looked like, or what my parents' car looked like. So these photos constrain my otherwise drifty memory. They tie my memory to some factual version that I can move too far from. What I've been wondering about lately is how memory will change and how it might become a little more accurate, not because our brains are getting any better, but instead because our technology is improving. So when I was growing up, we had photography, but to capture that moment you had to go down to the store and buy film and insert that correctly into the camera, And then after you had snapped some number of shots, then you needed to drive back to Walgreen's and get it developed and pick it up a few days later. So, as you can imagine, photographs were few and far between. So when I think back on my childhood, I really have only a few spots that are really pinned it down. But my kids are the subjects of a gajillion photographs, And in fact, we have an Alexa in our kitchen that cycles through these on its screen, So they're constantly seeing documentation of their lives from when they were one year old, two years older, three or four. And what that means is that they are far more pinned to their real historical trajectory than I was. The technology binds them to reality. By the way, it's a side note, I have no idea if this is a good or bad thing. Presumably they have fewer delusions about their history, but that also means they are less free from it. It's difficult to predict the consequences of that. In any case, the technology they are surrounded by gives them a much tighter relationship with their history. And by the time they have kids, who knows what technology is going to exist. Maybe my grandkid's bedroom will be wallpapered with dynamic movies from their past year. Maybe the movies are going to be captured by twenty four to seven three hundred and sixty degrees surround view cameras that they wear on themselves all the time. And maybe it won't even be on the walls, but instead it'll be holograms, such that they're always surrounding by three dimensional scenes of their past. Their recent paths are distant past. Maybe they're always going to be living in a community with themselves in time and therefore pinned down to a more accurate story of who they recently were. Whatever the case is, and I presume we can't possibly imagine it correctly, they will have a different relationship with their history. It's going to be more tightly bound to reality and less like the telephone game. Nonetheless, so much of our lives are not tracked, and this will be true even for them. Our emotional reactions are small transgressions that go uncaught and unrecorded, the contents of the dreams we have at night, the thousands of thoughts we have that go unexpressed. And so even for the next generation, they still face the challenge of building a coherent narrative that sometimes conflicts with other people's narratives about them, and all those narratives their own and others are likely to drift quite a bit from what actually happened. All these considerations led me to write a short story years ago in my novel sum So, in closing today's episode, I want to redo this literary thought experiment about what would happen if we were actually challenged to put the narrative of our personal identity to the test. The story is called reversal. There is no afterlife, but that doesn't mean we don't get to live a second time. At some point, the expansion of the universe will slow down, stop and begin to contract, And at that moment the earrow of time will reverse. Everything that happened on the way out will happen again, but backwards. In this way, our life neither eyes nor disintegrates, but rewins. In this reverse life, you are born of the ground at funeral ceremonies. We dig you up from the earth and transport you grandly to the mortuary where the birth makeup is removed. You are then taken to the hospital, where, surrounded by doctors, you open your eyes for the first time in your daily life. Broken vases reassemble, melt water freezes into Snowmen broken hearts find love. Rivers flow uphill, marriages re ride rocky roads, and eventually end in erotic dating. The pleasures of a lifetime of intercourse are relived, culminating in kisses instead of sleep. Bearded men become smooth faced children who are sent to schools to gently strip away The original sins of knowledge, reading, writing, and mathematics are expunged. After this diseducation, graduates shrink and crawl and lose their teeth, achieving the purity of the highest state of the infant. On their last day, howling because it is the end of their lives, Babies climb back into the wombs of their mothers, who eventually shrink and climb back into the wombs of their mothers, and so on, like concentric Russian dolls. In this reverse life, you have blissful expectations about what will come next. As you experience your story backward, at the moment of reversal, you are genuinely happy for while life must be lived forward the first time, you suspect it will really be understood only upon replay, but you have a painful surprise in store. You discover that your memory has spent a lifetime manufacturing small myths to keep your life flat story consistent with who you thought you were. You have committed to a coherent narrative, misremembering little details and decisions and sequences of events. On the way back, the cloth of that storyline unravels, reversing through the corridors of your life. You are battered and bruised in the collisions between reminiscence and reality. By the time you enter the womb again, you understand as little about yourself as you did your first time here. Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading. Send me an email at podcast at eagleman dot com with questions or discussion, and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments. Until next time. I'm David Eagleman, and we have been drifting together in the inner cosmos,

Is your notion of who you are built on a mountain of narrative that may or may not be totally accurate. If somebody told you a totally false story about yourself, could you come to believe it? And what does this have to do with six people who spent over a decade in prison together for a crime they didn't commit but believed that they had. And what does any of this have to do with why you are physically a different person every seven years, but why you can't easily see the changes in yourself through time, or what the effective technology will be on our sense of self. Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in these episodes we sailed deeply into our three pound universe to understand why, why, and how our lives look the way they do. Today's episode is part two in the story of our drifting memories. So last week we talked about memory and its inaccuracies. I talked about how medieval European painters struggled to accurately depict lions because they had never seen a real lion. They'd only seen versions painted by other people, and as these sequences of paintings moved forward through history, they became more and more distorted from the original lion that someone had seen at some point, and the lions served as a metaphor for us to discuss how memories, like messages in the game of Telephone, become distorted over time. If you heard the episode, you'll remember I talked about a strange Native American folk tale called the War of the Ghosts, and this was used by the psychologist Frederick Bartlett. He had people read the story and then reconstruct it from their memory at various time points later to understand how their memory changed. And what he found is that over time, your memory of a story becomes more coherent with your internal model of the world and also more aligned with whatever your cultural norms are. So we saw that memories are not static recordings, but instead they are stored in vast constellations of neurons that are interconnected and dynamic, and new experiences can alter these neural connections, leading to changes in how memories are recalled, for example, in the context of eyewitness testimony. This understanding of memory is massively important because things that people say to you after you've witnessed an event. Whether this is cowitnesses talking to you, or psychologists or investigators, these can all change your memory of what you believe you saw at the time of the event. It alters your memory, but generally it doesn't change your confidence in your memory. And finally, we also saw in the last episode that even flashbulb memories, which are these vivid, emotionally charged recollections of big significant events, even these sorts of recollections become less accurate over time, as we saw with a long term follow up study after the terrorist attacks of September eleventh, two thousand and one. So this week we're going to talk about not just your memory of something external like a story you read or an event you saw. Instead, we're going to zoom in on what happens when those memories are about you. How do memory distortions through time change your notion of your personal identity. So let's start with a basic reality. Our brains and our bodies change so much during our life that, like a clock's our hand, it's difficult to detect the changes. So every seven years, for example, every cell in your body has been replaced. Physically, you are not you anymore. But you're a new you. Fortunately, there's one constant that links all these different versions of you together, and that is memory. Perhaps memory can serve as the thread that makes me who I am. It sits at the core of our identity. It provides a single, continuous sense of self. But given what we talked about in the last episode, there might be a problem here because could the continuity of memory be an illusion? So imagine that you walk into a room room, and you meet your self at different ages in your life. So there you are at age seven, and there's you as a teenager, and over here it's you in your late twenties and mid fifties and early seventies and all the way through your final years. Imagine that you all sit together and you share the stories about your life, and you tease out this single thread of your identity. Would you be able to find a core version of you? Well, it's tough to say, because you all possess the same name and the same history. But the fact is that you're all somewhat different people at all these different ages. You have different values and goals. And what we're going to talk about today is that your life's memories might have less in common than expected. Your memory when you look back and ask yourself who you were at fifteen is different to who you actually were at fifteen. And your sixty year old self and your forty year old self will look back on an important event that happened to your twenty year old self, but they may have different recollections of exactly what happened and in what order and who is there. And the question is, if you don't all agree on the same memories, are you really the same person? So first, let's start from the point of view of the brain to think about self identity. There's no single region in the brain that underpins the self. It's a vastly distributed property. But we can point to some large players in the game, like the prefrontal cortex located just behind your forehead, which generally navigates your planning, your decision making, your self reflection. It helps you evaluate your action and give some narrative to your intention, and all this contributes to a coherent self concept and more generally, the prefrontal cortex is part of a broader coalition of areas that we summarize as the default mode network. Now, this is a network of brain regions that are active when you're at rest and not focused on something in the outside world. And this network seems to be involved in self referential thinking and daydreaming and reflecting on your own life and experiences, so it seems to be involved in maintaining a stable sense of self. And you have other areas involved, like the amygdala, which is involved in processing emotions and that influences how you react to your environment and shapes your emotional identity. But while we can point to all these brain areas as being involved, there's something else massively important. Your identity is fundamentally rooted in your memories. This tells you your whole life narrative. There are many types of memory, like short term and long term, and please listen to episode forty three to learn more about these different types. But the subtype we care about today is autobiographical memory, which is your memory of personal experiences and events. This type of memory plays an absolutely crucial role in shaping your identity. By recalling these memories and reflecting on these memories, you create this continuously changing narrative that defines who you are now. The reason that your memory is and your overarching narrative can always change is because of neuroplasticity, which is the brain's ability to adapt. Your brain is flexible. All the tens of billions of neurons in your head are always wiring and rewiring and disconnecting and seeking new partners and reconnecting, and they're doing this every moment of your life. I call this live wiring, and this, of course underlies the fluid nature of our identity. If you did didn't have this kind of flexibility in your brain, you would be stuck in time. You would never reorganize in response to new experiences, you would never learn, you would never change in response to trauma or education, or the relationships you have, or more generally, you wouldn't change from the politics and culture and the wider world around you. Now, if this were just a matter of the world getting poured into your nervous system as you mature, that's one thing. But the deeper, amazing issue that we're talking about today is that your past is not a faithful record. Instead, it's a reconstruction, and sometimes it borders on mythology. When we review our life memories, we should do so with the awareness that not all the details are accurate. Some of the details come from stories that people told us about ourselves. Others were filled in with what we think must have happened. Others are based on rewrites that make the overarching story more consistent. So if your answer to who you are is based simply on your memories, that makes your identity something of a strange, ongoing, mutable narrative. So how do our personal memories influence who we think we are? Let's return to the memory researcher Elizabeth Loftis. Last week I told you that in one of her experiments, she showed that the way questions are phrased influences people's memories. For example, if you ask people how fast a couple of cars are going when they hit each other, the people will give different speed estimates than if you ask them how fast the cars were going when they mashed into each other. The word smashed illicits higher speed estimates because it distorts something about people's memories. So, because Lostess was intrigued by the way that leading questions could contaminate memory, she decided to go further. She asked this question, would it be possible to implant entirely false memories into a person? So to find out, she recruited a bunch of participants and had her team contact their families to get information about events in their past, and then, armed with this information, the researcher team put together four stories about each participant's childhood. Three of the stories were true, and the fourth story contained plausible information, but it was entirely made up. This fourth story was about getting lost at a shopping mall as a child, being found by a kind elderly person, and finally being reunited with a parent. In a series of interviews, participants were told these four stories about their childhood, and at least a quarter of them claimed that they could remember the incident of being lost in the mall, even though it hadn't actually happened and it didn't stop there. Because, as Loftus describes it, the participant may start to feel like they remember a little bit about it, and then when they come back a week later, they're starting to remember more. Maybe they tell some details about the older woman who rescued them, and over time, more and more details creep into this false memory, like someone will say that the older woman had a particular hat that they remember, or they'll say they remember that they had their favorite toy with them, or they'll say they remember their mother was so mad or so glad when they were reunited. Only was it possible to implant false new memories in the brain, but people embraced and embellished those memories. They were unknowingly weaving fantasy into the fabric of their identity. Now we're all susceptible to this kind of memory manipulation, And it turns out this is true of even Elizabeth Loftus herself. So, when Elizabeth was a child, her mother had drowned in a swimming pool. And years later she was having a conversation with a relative, and that conversation brought out this extraordinary fact that Elizabeth had been the one to find her mother's body in the pool. Now that news came as a total shock to her because she hadn't known that, and in fact, she didn't believe it. But she describes, quote, I went home from that birthday and I started to think, maybe I did. I started to think about others. There are things that I did remember, like when the fireman came, they gave me oxygen. Maybe I needed the oxygen because I was so upset that I found the body. Now soon she was able to visualize finding her mother's body in the swimming pool. But then her relative called her up to say he'd made a mistake. It wasn't the young Elizabeth after all who had found the body. It had been Elizabeth's aunt. And that's how Loftus had the opportunity to experience what it was like to possess her own false memory, richly detailed and deeply felt. So your memories are not a faithful record. Instead, they are a constant reconstruction. Now it might feel to you almost inconceivable that you could somehow misremember your own life narrative. But this is precisely what happened in the small town of Beatrice, Nebraska, to multiple people in a way that that affected a combined seventy five years of their lives. So here is what happened. There was an elderly woman, a grandmother, named Helen Wilson, who was raped and murdered in her apartment in nineteen eighty five, and for four years the police searched, but they couldn't come up with who had done this. By nineteen eighty nine, they were looking for any suspects who seemed sexually unconventional because a profiler at the FBI suggested that's who they should be looking for. So they finally found two people, a man and a woman who fit that general description. He had been a pornographic filmmaker and she had met him in California where they filmed together, and the two of them had come back to Beatrice, Nebraska and started filming pornography again. So the police picked them up and interviewed them. Now, he denied that he had anything to do with this murder that he was being accused of. He was baffled, and he said, why am I a suspect in this case of murder? He said he didn't even know the victim they were talking about, or anything about this crime. But according to the transcripts, the detective said to him, you're having a hard time remembering. Maybe it's because you don't want to remember. Could that be it? Joe? He kept denying it, and the detectives kept telling him they would be able to prove his guilt. But that's not the mind blowing part of the story, which was taking place in the neighboring room where they were interviewing the woman. The detectives told her that she was at the apartment of this elderly woman that's grandmother, and they quote worked on bringing back little bits of memory to her. She didn't remember anything about this grandmother, or the apartment, or what the woman was wearing, or even why she would have been there or gone inside, but the police kept telling her, according to the transcript, quote, let me try and help you refresh your memory. They told her her memories were repressed because the whole event was so awful. With time, she ended up wholeheartedly believing that she had done the crime, and she confessed that she suffocated the woman with a pillow while the man had performed the rape. Now, this was a very manipulative interrogation and subsequent confession, and maybe it would have ended there. But the problem was that at the scene of the crime they had found type B blood, and neither of these two had type B blood. So the police felt that maybe the solution was that there were other people involved, and they kept pushing the woman to generate recollections. She ended up telling the police that she thought maybe there was another man with her during the crime, so they showed her a lineup of photographs and she ended up picking a high school friend of hers, who then got arrested too, and maybe it would have ended there, but he didn't have typebe blood either. Then a fourth suspect was arrested, another woman who tended to hang out with the group. She had a number of interviews with the police psychologist, and she was also brought around to the idea that she had committed this horrible crime and had repressed her memory, so she ended up giving a confession of guilt. Then she had a dream about this whole thing, and in her dream she saw a fifth man there. So he got arrested and also had interviews with the psychologist, and he eventually also came to the conclusion that his psyche had simply forgotten or repressed this whole terrible event. Then he and the second woman to be arrested each had a dream that there was another woman at the scene, and that woman was arrested. Now she was certain that she was doing laundry on the night of February fifth, nineteen eighty five, but a police psychologist told her that she had witnessed this murder but simply couldn't remember it. He said to her, have you ever had memory problems before? So she thought about it and insisted that she did not have any memory problems. He asked, how about something really terribly frightening, like something that really had an impact emotionally. So she kept denying this and felt quite certain that she couldn't possibly forget a rape and murder scene. She said, quote, I just don't understand. I mean, this isn't something I would not say anything about. I'm not saying I'm perfect here, and I've done my share of little sins, but we're talking about killing an old person. End quote. As it turned out she had type BE blood and so she got charged anyway. Now, there were six people charged for this crime, and they became known as the Beatrice Six. The first man pled innocence, two more pled no contest, but three of the six people pled guilty. They all went to jail for well over a decade of their lives, and the man who kept insisting on his innocence kept trying to get a DNA test done. But it was only in two thousand and seven that he was able to finally get the Nebraska Supreme Court to make it happen. And the incredible result is that he and his five co defendants were finally exonerated. They were all found to be innocent. Another DNA test revealed the actual perpetrator, a Beatrice resident who had died in nineteen ninety two, and it appears that he had acted alone in the rape and murder. So what this case represents is something so stunning about our memory and its stability and its manipulability. Although these six people all denied having ever been in that woman's apartment, much less committing this crime, several of them were able to be convinced that they had repressed the memory because it was so traumatic. The psychologist told them over and over that the memories of the murder would probably come back to them when they were thinking deeply about it or having a dream, but it might take a while. As it turns out, it didn't even take that long. Half the suspects ended up completely believing in their guilt, even though they were not there and had nothing to do with this. Now, as a side note, this whole notion about memory suppression was floating around in psychology circles at that time, and there were actually a whole bunch of convictions passed down based on this idea, Like maybe an adult who comes to believe, let's say, through hypnosis that twenty years earlier she was sexually abused by someone and that memory had been repressed and she had never remembered it until just this moment. And there was a window of time I am in the nineteen eighties and nineties when a number of people were convicted based on this kind of memory testimony. And while it's theoretically possible that someone could repress the memory for decades and then it pops up, essentially all these repressed memory cases were eventually overturned as strong evidence like DNA evidence got introduced into the court system, and many of these accusations were found to be totally false. But this case of the Beatrice six was especially amazing because here people who were innocent ended up believing, truly believing that they themselves were guilty for three of the six. They absolutely believed in their own guilt, and they suffered deep regret and shame. These new beliefs they had became just a new sedimentary layer in the history of their identity. So this is just like Elizabeth loftis receiving misinformation about finding her mother's body in the pool, and she came to have a memory of it. This is also like Lofts's experiments, where she plants false information into the narrative of participants in the laboratory. I'm going to link a New Yorker article about the Beatrice six in the show notes on Eagleman dot com slash podcast, and also an HBO documentary about this, so check it out there for more. But the point I want to make for now is that all these cases demonstrate the malleability and the manipulability of our memory, not only about an external story or picture or terrorist attack, but even when the memories are about our own lives. The writer John Dufresny once wrote that memory is a myth making machine. What we do is keep revising our past to keep it consistent with who we think we are. So think about the narrative of your own life. Which parts have you conveniently forgotten because they didn't mesh well with the overarching story. What parts have you told so many times that they've taken on a reality of their own, perhaps a little unanchored from what actually went down. Last week I told the story of a group of my colleagues who studied what happened with memories of nine to eleven. The bottom line was that memories drifted. People were given these detailed surveys one week after the attack, and then they were tracked down a year later and regiven the survey, and it was found that accuracy of recall was lower than expected, and it got even lower at three years after the event and then ten years after the event. But here's the important thing to surface. What drifted were the memories about the self. The factual memories like who is president at the time and how many planes there were? Those were essentially stable over time. Why is there some difference in the brain and the way they're stored. No, it's because those event facts were discussed endlessly in the media and in daily conversations, and so any misremembering got automatically corrected by the wider environment. In fact, as I mentioned last week, the researchers could predict the accuracy of memories just based on how much media attention and ensuing conversation there was around something. But if you have some flashball memory that is inconsistent, like exactly what you were thinking or feeling, or even where you were standing or what you saw, you're really likely to repeat that a lot over the next decade. Digging that story in but that's not likely to get corrected by anybody, So the canyon of that memory gets etched deep and deeper into the neural landscape, even if the river is not flowing in the right spot. So personal memories drift, but event memories get corrected back into place. And I was thinking about this the other day because now it's more than two decades after the nine to eleven attacks, and I'm fascinated by how our increasing technology might influence our personal memories. So when I think about my past, I have some handful of photographs that pin me down to reality, at least in particular moments when the shutter clicked. In other words, I can't misremember those moments in my life too much because there's some objective evidence of what I looked like, or what I wore, or what the house behind me looked like, or what my parents' car looked like. So these photos constrain my otherwise drifty memory. They tie my memory to some factual version that I can move too far from. What I've been wondering about lately is how memory will change and how it might become a little more accurate, not because our brains are getting any better, but instead because our technology is improving. So when I was growing up, we had photography, but to capture that moment you had to go down to the store and buy film and insert that correctly into the camera, And then after you had snapped some number of shots, then you needed to drive back to Walgreen's and get it developed and pick it up a few days later. So, as you can imagine, photographs were few and far between. So when I think back on my childhood, I really have only a few spots that are really pinned it down. But my kids are the subjects of a gajillion photographs, And in fact, we have an Alexa in our kitchen that cycles through these on its screen, So they're constantly seeing documentation of their lives from when they were one year old, two years older, three or four. And what that means is that they are far more pinned to their real historical trajectory than I was. The technology binds them to reality. By the way, it's a side note, I have no idea if this is a good or bad thing. Presumably they have fewer delusions about their history, but that also means they are less free from it. It's difficult to predict the consequences of that. In any case, the technology they are surrounded by gives them a much tighter relationship with their history. And by the time they have kids, who knows what technology is going to exist. Maybe my grandkid's bedroom will be wallpapered with dynamic movies from their past year. Maybe the movies are going to be captured by twenty four to seven three hundred and sixty degrees surround view cameras that they wear on themselves all the time. And maybe it won't even be on the walls, but instead it'll be holograms, such that they're always surrounding by three dimensional scenes of their past. Their recent paths are distant past. Maybe they're always going to be living in a community with themselves in time and therefore pinned down to a more accurate story of who they recently were. Whatever the case is, and I presume we can't possibly imagine it correctly, they will have a different relationship with their history. It's going to be more tightly bound to reality and less like the telephone game. Nonetheless, so much of our lives are not tracked, and this will be true even for them. Our emotional reactions are small transgressions that go uncaught and unrecorded, the contents of the dreams we have at night, the thousands of thoughts we have that go unexpressed. And so even for the next generation, they still face the challenge of building a coherent narrative that sometimes conflicts with other people's narratives about them, and all those narratives their own and others are likely to drift quite a bit from what actually happened. All these considerations led me to write a short story years ago in my novel sum So, in closing today's episode, I want to redo this literary thought experiment about what would happen if we were actually challenged to put the narrative of our personal identity to the test. The story is called reversal. There is no afterlife, but that doesn't mean we don't get to live a second time. At some point, the expansion of the universe will slow down, stop and begin to contract, And at that moment the earrow of time will reverse. Everything that happened on the way out will happen again, but backwards. In this way, our life neither eyes nor disintegrates, but rewins. In this reverse life, you are born of the ground at funeral ceremonies. We dig you up from the earth and transport you grandly to the mortuary where the birth makeup is removed. You are then taken to the hospital, where, surrounded by doctors, you open your eyes for the first time in your daily life. Broken vases reassemble, melt water freezes into Snowmen broken hearts find love. Rivers flow uphill, marriages re ride rocky roads, and eventually end in erotic dating. The pleasures of a lifetime of intercourse are relived, culminating in kisses instead of sleep. Bearded men become smooth faced children who are sent to schools to gently strip away The original sins of knowledge, reading, writing, and mathematics are expunged. After this diseducation, graduates shrink and crawl and lose their teeth, achieving the purity of the highest state of the infant. On their last day, howling because it is the end of their lives, Babies climb back into the wombs of their mothers, who eventually shrink and climb back into the wombs of their mothers, and so on, like concentric Russian dolls. In this reverse life, you have blissful expectations about what will come next. As you experience your story backward, at the moment of reversal, you are genuinely happy for while life must be lived forward the first time, you suspect it will really be understood only upon replay, but you have a painful surprise in store. You discover that your memory has spent a lifetime manufacturing small myths to keep your life flat story consistent with who you thought you were. You have committed to a coherent narrative, misremembering little details and decisions and sequences of events. On the way back, the cloth of that storyline unravels, reversing through the corridors of your life. You are battered and bruised in the collisions between reminiscence and reality. By the time you enter the womb again, you understand as little about yourself as you did your first time here. Go to Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to find further reading. Send me an email at podcast at eagleman dot com with questions or discussion, and check out and subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments. Until next time. I'm David Eagleman, and we have been drifting together in the inner cosmos,