Elizabeth Loftus showed participants footage of a car accident in 1974, then asked how fast the vehicles were going when they "smashed" into each other. A separate group got the word "hit" instead. The smashed group estimated higher speeds. A week later, they were also more likely to remember broken glass at the scene. There was no broken glass.

That experiment is nearly fifty years old now, and nothing about its conclusion has softened. Memory does not record. It reconstructs — and it reconstructs according to whatever pressures happen to be present at the moment of recall. A leading question. An emotional state. A conversation with someone who remembers the same event differently. Each retrieval is an act of editing. Steve Ramirez at Boston University describes it plainly: every time you recall something, you are hitting "save as" on a file and updating it with new information. The version you remember today is not the version you remembered last year.

What unsettles me is not that memory is inaccurate. I can accept inaccuracy. What unsettles me is that memory feels accurate — feels like retrieval rather than reconstruction. The confidence is the problem. I have memories I would defend in court, memories that feel as solid as furniture, and I know from Loftus's work that solidity means almost nothing. The vividness of a memory has no reliable relationship to its truth.

Negative experiences make this worse. Research into emotional valence and false recall shows that negatively charged events produce higher rates of false memory than neutral ones. The things that hurt you are the things most likely to be rewritten. Not erased — rewritten. The pain stays. The facts shift underneath it.

I keep returning to Ramirez's framing because it is the only one that does not pretend this is a flaw. Memory updates because a mind locked permanently in the past would be useless. The editing is the point. It just happens to make accuracy a casualty.

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