The surprising link between false memories and imagination

In his memoir Uncle Tungsten, British neurologist Oliver Sacks described two bombing incidents from his childhood during the Blitz. One involved a bomb that landed near his family’s home but failed to explode. The other involved a thermite bomb that fell behind the house, which Sacks remembered in vivid detail.

A few months after the book came out, Sacks mentioned the incidents to his older brother Michael. Michael confirmed the first memory. But when Sacks brought up the thermite bomb, his brother told him, “You never saw it. You weren’t there.”

Sacks had been away at boarding school. Their older brother had written them a vivid letter describing what happened, and Sacks had apparently turned that description into a memory of his own. And even after learning this, the memory still felt completely real to him.

When I read this story, I couldn’t help but wonder: What happened here?

We tend to think about memory as a recording system. But when you remember an event, your brain reconstructs it from pieces: people, places, sensations, emotions, general knowledge, and so on.

The same machinery can take those pieces and recombine them into something that never happened, such as a hypothetical situation or a creative idea. Scientists call this the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis. The hippocampus seems to play an important role in this process. It helps bind separate elements of experience into coherent episodes, and research shows that it is involved both when we remember past experiences and when we imagine new ones.

In short, remembering the past and imagining possibilities partly rely on the same constructive process: Both involve assembling fragments of stored experience into a coherent scene.

That flexibility is useful for creativity, but it also creates opportunities for memory errors. The brain can sometimes lose track of where a particular piece of information came from. Something imagined can become familiar or detailed enough that it later feels remembered. Experiments have repeatedly demonstrated this effect, known as “imagination inflation,” where imagining an event can increase your later confidence that it actually happened.

This sounds like a flaw, but some of the same processes may also support creativity. Laboratory studies have found correlations between divergent thinking and certain kinds of false memory. Researchers have proposed that both may partly depend on broad associative activation: the ability to access information flexibly and recombine it in new ways.

False memories and creativity

That doesn’t mean having a bad memory makes you automatically more creative. It means that some of the features that make memory fallible may also make imagination possible. And you can use that constructive tendency more deliberately.

Here are three exercises you can experiment with to leverage false memories in your creative projects:

1. The discrepancy prompt. Pick an event from a few years ago: a vacation, a dinner, your first day at a job. Write down the scene from memory, including as much detail as you can. Then look at photos, messages, calendars, or other records, and notice any details you wrote confidently that don’t seem to match the evidence. Pick one discrepancy and use it as a prompt: What story could explain why I remember it this way?

2. The autobiographical remix. Take a location from one memory, a person from another, a problem from a third, and an emotion from a fourth. Then, construct an event in which they all belong together. You can do this through writing or with a visual collage — it’s a simple way to force your brain to recombine familiar material into something new.

3. The ideation warmup. Before brainstorming, spend a few minutes remembering one recent event in detail. Think about the spatial layout, sequence of actions, objects, sounds, people, and other specific features. Then immediately switch to generating ideas. Research suggests this kind of exercise increases divergent thinking by activating detailed memories before asking your brain to recombine them.

Sacks’s false memory is an extreme example, but it points to something fascinating about human imagination. In theory, a perfectly literal memory system might be excellent at preserving the past. But it would be less useful for taking pieces of the past and asking: What else could these become?

This article is featured on Big Think.