Under the influence of an unusual disease, false memories are born in Matthew's brain - so vivid that they cannot be distinguished from real ones. BBC Future columnist tells the story of a man whose past is as uncertain as the future.
A few months after undergoing brain surgery, Matthew returned to his job as a programmer. He knew that it would be difficult for him: he had to explain to his superiors that the consequences of a head injury would remain with him for life.
“However, at that meeting, my employers asked, 'How can I help you get back to work and get back on your feet?” Says Matthew.
“That's exactly what they said. But the next day I remembered only one thing: they were going to fire me - they could not take me back to work."
According to him, this memory was very vivid - the same as the memory of real events. But, nevertheless, it was false.
Now Matthew knows that this was one of the first signs of confabulation, which he developed as a result of traumatic brain injury.
People with this memory disorder do not lie or try to confuse others, but they have serious difficulty processing memories, which often prevents them from separating facts from fiction, generated by them unconsciously.
The revelation came as another hard blow for Matthew (name has been changed): "I was terribly scared - it occurred to me that I could not be sure of how things really were."
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Matthew's misfortune can help us understand the weaknesses of our memory and how our minds create its own version of real events.
Today Matthew volunteers for Headway East London, a charity that helps people with head injuries.
I met him when he was speaking during a fundraising campaign in London. Interested in his experience, I asked him for an interview.
He talks about his past in good faith, without false pathos, often turning to his colleague Ben Graham for confirmation, who was with him for almost all ten years after the operation.
Even before his injury, Matthew was very ambitious and not afraid of difficulties. He was born in the UK, in the city of Birmingham, but spent most of his childhood abroad, and when he was 17 he moved to his relatives in London. However, a month later he was kicked out the door.
He lived on the street, and then settled with a Franciscan monk. He went to college during the day and worked in the evenings and weekends to pay for his upkeep.
He managed to enter the University College London at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, and after graduating from college - get a job as a programmer.
It seemed that the time had come to reap the fruits of his hard work, but after working in a new place for only a few months, he began to notice that something strange was happening to his body.
The sensitivity of the fingertips disappeared, excruciating headaches began, and my eyes began to double. Often he had to work all day with one eye closed.
As shown by a computed tomogram, the cause of the malaise was rooted at the inlet of one of the ventricles of the brain - the cavities that promote the circulation of cerebrospinal fluid along the nerve fibers.
A colloid cyst formed in Matthew's brain - a small tumor that grew and blocked the entrance to the ventricle, preventing the outflow of cerebrospinal fluid.
“Pressure builds up in this region of the brain and fluid begins to push the brain back to the bones of the skull,” explains Vaughn Bell, a neuroscientist at University College London, who talked about Matthew's illness during a fundraiser.
In addition, the swollen ventricle pressed on the optic nerve, which made the young man see double in his eyes.
The surgeons performed an emergency operation: they made a hole in the skull at the hairline, removed part of the cyst and pumped out excess fluid.
Recovering from the surgery at the hospital, Matthew realized that the disease had caused a memory disorder.
He forgot that he saw people entering and leaving the room: it seemed as if they had somehow teleported right in front of him.
“I only remembered how people appeared in my field of vision and disappeared,” he says.
According to Bell, this may be the result of damage to the mastoid bodies - two small, rounded paired formations (hence the name) on tissue that are known to be involved in the memory process.
However, our minds seem to abhor emptiness, and as he rehabilitated, Matthew's memory began to creatively fill in the gaps left by amnesia.
For example, he once emailed an angry letter to his neuropsychiatrist asking why he was being discharged. “I assure you, I am not yet healthy, something is clearly wrong with me,” he wrote.
And only later did I find out that he decided to write himself out - no one made such a decision. Nevertheless, he clearly remembered how the medical staff had informed him of his discharge.
Noticing this tendency towards confabulation in himself, Matthew was greatly alarmed - it was like finding out that his brain was no longer his.
“The brain is not just a machine that generates reality,” says Matthew. "There is a difference between what you perceive and those images generated by the brain, based on which you interpret the world around you."
False memories are often built on assumptions about the turn of events that might have taken.
For example, when Matthew returned to work, he was very worried that the authorities would not show sympathy for his difficulties.
“I knew that my employers are serious businessmen, quite tough and very strict in everything related to work. So my brain categorized them in advance and formed specific expectations about their reactions.”
Due to amnesia, the young man could not remember the details of the meeting, so his brain filled the voids as expected.
In a sense, this process of "building up" can be considered a hypertrophied way of remembering.
When we try to remember the past, our brain, as it were, reconstructs events, picking up the most likely details.
“Behind the scenes, the brain does a tremendous job of selecting and testing information,” he says. “The brain tests how strong each of these memories is and suppresses the irrelevant ones.”
None of us are able to remember anything with absolute certainty; we can accidentally give the brain the wrong information, forming false memories of something that never happened.
In fact, such false memories are surprisingly easy to impose on even a healthy brain.
As an experiment, psychologists from New Zealand and Canada secretly made fake photographs of the study participants, in which they were captured during a balloon flight.
When subjects were asked about these photographs, 50% of them made up a story about how they actually flew, sincerely believing that it was true.
We most often remember important details correctly, but due to trauma, Matthew’s verification of events for reality is malfunctioning, so he formed many more false memories - although this is by no means the most difficult case of those that were encountered in Bell's practice.
“Some people 'remember' the impossible - they can say, 'I built a spaceship and flew around the moon.'
One of the visitors to the Headway East London charity center woke up from a coma with the firm belief that he and his bride should have twins.
He vividly remembered seeing the ultrasound results and photographing his girlfriend's belly - but in fact, the woman had never been pregnant.
“I remembered it as if it were my childhood, for me there is literally no difference between these memories,” he says.
Now Matthew keeps a diary that helps him remember factual details - where he was, what he ate, what other people said. These records serve as the basis for recalling the events of the day.
But false memories still find a way to enter his mind. "Confabulation often starts when Matthew is worried about something and false memories take the form of what worries him," says Ben Graham, who works with Matthew at the charity.
When they spend time together, Matthew often checks facts with Graham.
This is a delicate task - Graham realizes that in his own words he can inadvertently plant seeds, from which then a false memory will bloom: "You can [accidentally] impose a thought on him, so you need to be careful."
Despite these ongoing difficulties, Matthew argues that this is not amnesia, and confabulation worries him no more than the constant fatigue that accompanies him throughout the years since the operation.
“When I don’t feel tired, I’m doing well and I can deal with my memory lapses,” he says.
Since the predictions about the development of his disease are still vague, he has to be content with the little joys of life.
When Matthew is feeling well, he enjoys taking long bike rides. He would have liked to return to full-time work as a programmer, but he has learned not to take the future for granted and live in the present.
“The present is beautiful and that's all we have,” he says.