Some people wake up and can tell you exactly what they ate, watched, and worried about on a random Tuesday fifteen years ago. For researchers, this rare ability – often called highly superior autobiographical memory – poses a riveting puzzle: how can recall be so rich for personal days yet mostly ordinary for everything else? ...
You probably trust your memories more than you trust most people, yet neuroscience has spent the past few decades quietly showing how slippery they really are. In labs and hospital wards, researchers have watched people lose decades of their past in seconds, only to discover that much of what makes them “them” stubbornly remains. ...
We like to think of memory as a mental video archive, faithfully storing everything we experience, ready to be replayed on demand. But the last few decades of neuroscience have demolished that comforting idea and replaced it with something far stranger, and far more unsettling. Our memories are not passive files; they are living ...
