False memories sometimes serve a useful purpose

I dunno... my gut feeling is that false memories are much more accidental than adaptive.

Such contagious suggestibility can lead to mass delusions, as became clear when Nelson Mandela died in 2013 and many people admitted they thought he’d died in prison during the 1980s and could even remember his funeral – a phenomenon now dubbed the Mandela Effect. Rather less sombrely, there’s the strange case of Walkers crisps packets. Many people are convinced (wrongly) that the green and blue colours for, respectively, the Salt & Vinegar and Cheese & Onion flavours used to be reversed.

I reckon that one is because Walker's use the opposite colours to most other crisp manufacturers.

Some cognitive scientists think that cognition works to prepare us for imagined future scenarios: if I do this, then that will happen. The process relies on gathering and retaining information about how the environment responds to our actions. In this case, sometimes a plausible guess, expressed mentally as a false memory of what happened last time, is better than having no clue at all. In this way, a false memory can suggest alternative scenarios for decision-making, priming the mind to be better at problem solving. After all, these ‘memories’ might not be wrong about what would happen in a given situation, but only about our imagined past role in such a case.

Over the past several years, Howe and his colleagues have demonstrated cognitive benefits of false memories in tests where participants were presented with lists of words (brush, gum, paste) that were all related to a non-presented word or ‘critical lure’ (in this case, tooth). When this critical lure was falsely remembered as having been present on the list, performance was enhanced on a subsequent problem-solving task where the lure word was the solution – as if the mind were saying to itself “Ah, I know this one because I saw the word on the last list.” Howe and his colleagues also found that false memories could give the same performance boost in tests on lists of words linked by analogy (‘tooth is to brush, as hair is to wash’). The effect works for all ages, from children to older adults.

But surely if the lure word had been inaccurate then false memories wouldn't help.

Memory illusions might do more than assist factual cognition. For example, they may play a socially adaptive role: we can sometimes unknowingly edit our memories, Howe says, to match what others think or feel, helping us feel more connected to them.

“Distortions of our past can serve to nurture social relationships by facilitating empathy and intimacy with others,” he says. In this vein, Nash says that his father remembered spending time with his grandfather, even though the grandfather was dead before the grandson was born.

In other words, rose-tinted glasses aren’t always a bad thing. “If we see our past in a more positive light than we did initially, that gives us a more positive image of ourselves, leading to a greater likelihood of interacting with others and maintaining social relationships,” says Howe. And such illusions can increase confidence to good effect: if you remember that you solved a problem easily last time, you’re more likely to do that this time – even if the truth is that last time you actually struggled like mad. For the brain, a false sense of confidence could be a risk worth taking.

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