Why do brains sometimes make things up?

Your brain occasionally cooks up falsehoods that you believe entirely, but why does this confabulation happen, and how frequently? What does this tell us about memory, truth-telling, and your life as a story that drifts? And what does this have to do with a paralyzed Supreme Court judge, a blind person who insists she can see, whether Nelson Mandela did or did not die in the 1980s, or whether Curious George had a tail?

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More Information:

Prasad D, Bainbridge WA. The Visual Mandela Effect as evidence for shared and specific false memories across people. Psychological Science. 2022 Dec;33(12):1971-88.

Liv N, Greenbaum D. Deep fakes and memory malleability: False memories in the service of fake news. AJOB neuroscience. 2020 Apr 2;11(2):96-104.

Gazzaniga MS. Forty-five years of split-brain research and still going strong. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 2005 Aug;6(8):653-9.

Ramirez S, Liu X, Lin PA, Suh J, Pignatelli M, Redondo RL, Ryan TJ, Tonegawa S. Creating a false memory in the hippocampus. Science. 2013 Jul 26;341(6144):387-91.

Roy DS, Tonegawa S. Manipulating memory in space and time. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences. 2017 Oct 1;17:1-6.

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