False Recollections

I have vivid and fond memories of having dinner with a certain friend at Olive Garden. I remember him teasing me for the drink I got and us laughing about the dessert options.  I have another equally vivid memory of being in my apartment in college and a different friend and I discussing a professor who was fired.

Here's the thing. I know, for certain, neither of these events EVER happened. I've never been to Olive Garden with the first friend. The second friend was never in my apartment. These memories, both quite detailed and linked to emotions, are false.

I know that most of these events did occur, but in the first case, all of them were with different people. In the second case, that conversation did happen, but not in that apartment. I really don't know why these memories are all jumbled together, but they are.

While this last season of Drag Race was on, I watched Katya's recaps of the episodes. She talked about how memory is really tricky because there are a lot of things we remember that may or may not happened, but there is no way to even prove them because all record of it is gone. In one episode, she mentioned that she clearly remembered having a fist fight with a neighbor boy when she was a kid, but knows for certain that this never really happened. The memory is there, but there is no truth to it.

This kind of thing drives me crazy. After all, these aren't memories implanted by aliens or evil therapists. They're memories I came up with all on my own. These are memories I would think about on occasion and just go on with my day . . . until it occurred to me that facts did not line up with either memory.

Our brains do such spooky things.