MicroFactzzz#0033 · 🧬 Human Glitch
Every Time You Remember Something, Your Brain Quietly Rewrites It
Human memory doesn't work like a video recording — every time you recall a memory, you slightly distort it and save over the original.
Most people treat memories like a video file saved permanently in their head. The reality is a lot more unsettling.
When you recall a memory, your brain doesn't "play it back" — it reconstructs it from scratch, stitching together fragments scattered across different parts of the cortex. This process is called reconsolidation.
Worse still, during that reconstruction the memory becomes temporarily vulnerable to change — new information, other people's suggestions, or your own emotions can bleed into it, and the next time you recall it, that altered version gets saved as the original.
The result: the more often you revisit a memory, the more it can diverge from what actually happened — even as it subjectively feels more and more certain.
Sources
- General knowledge / encyclopedic sources
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Krulicza Nora
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