My dreams imprint stronger than reality. This has the unfortunate effect of sometimes recalling memories as real, when in fact it was all a dream.

I have some memories that I know for a fact are wrong in a pretty particular way. They’ve either become attached to the wrong place or the wrong time.

Like I remember a good friend picking me up from my childhood home, yet I didn’t even know that person until I’d long moved out (many years) from that place.

For those getting locked out due to using an ad blocker: https://archive.ph/rPdSW

And the actual study: https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/36/7/bhag114/8758582

How much of this, I wonder, is a function of the fact that our circadian rhythms get less robust with aging. The circadian clock hugely influences learning and memory processes, gating when you can learn and how much, and shaping the storage and recall also.

We know that with age the amplitude of these rhythms can decrease, as can the synchrony between cells.

This kind of mid-management seems to have at least some circadian component, and it would have been great if they looked to see if the effects were equally bad at all times of day, and knew the chronotype of the participants to use as a reference. I’d love to see if every test participant was tested at their cognitive peak, too.

Anecdatum: I confidently told a woman that her son, who was looking for a research opportunity in Berne, Switzerland, was heading for the birthplace of the World Wide Web, which is actually a couple of hours west and south at CERN.

I feel that anyone who has cared for someone with progressive brain degeneration has seen this a million times.

My grandmother has dementia, and if you know her you can see exactly which events/memories she's erroneously combining.

Worth keeping in mind also is that memories are not a reliable facsimile of objective reality.

Instead, they are selective representations of parts of a subjective experience. It also means that memories aren’t static, but shift over time and can even be imagined.

Clearly the hash table is filling up so you get more hash collisions.

I feel like we didn't need a study to tell us this but its always nice when science confirms something we know to be true.