Scientists have named the main “trick” of the brain: how it deceives a person

A new study finds that people can generate false memories of events in just

a few seconds after they happened. 

The phenomenon, which researchers called "illusionsshort-term memory,” shows how easily and quickly people reinterpret events to fit our preconceptions, rather than accurately “recording” what happens.

“It appears that short-term memory does not always accurately reflect what just happened,” the study authors wrote. “Instead, memory is shaped by what we expected to see.”

To test the accuracy of short-term memory,The researchers recruited 534 volunteers to participate in a series of four experiments, each of which was aimed at memorizing a sequence of letters of the Latin alphabet.

When participants were asked to remember what theysaw after just half a second, they were wrong just under 20% of the time, and that error rate jumped to 30% when they were asked after three seconds. For example, people saw “Ɔ” and remembered “S”.

To confirm their findings, the researchersrepeated the tests in three similar experiments with a group of 348 people not included in the original analysis. Scientists have concluded that the human brain records experience based on preset beliefs that allow us to generate more accurate predictions about the world by cutting out features that do not fit those preconceptions.

"These illusions of memory appear to bethe result of knowledge of the world, and not visual similarity, write the authors of the study. “Taken together, the results suggest that knowledge of the world can shape memory, even when memories have just been formed.”

Details about the experiment itself were published in the journal PLOS One.

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