Nowadays it is very common to come across stories of false memories. For example, a person remembers an incident from childhood that all his relatives deny. Or he comes to his hometown, looks for a house or a tree that he saw as a child, and he is told that there has never been a house in this place or the tree has never grown.
Perhaps some of these stories are fiction "for the sake of a word," but obviously not all. Many are published anonymously and with no purpose to mislead anyone - people just want to share what they cannot understand …
From the point of view of classical science and psychology, such cases are nothing more than a wild imagination or bad memory. But, in my opinion, everything is not so simple here. I will try to state my view on this interesting phenomenon.
To begin with, human perception of reality is a very complex mechanism. If we try to describe it as briefly as possible, then we perceive a very small part of what actually exists. I'm not talking about that huge mass of everyday events and details that we miss because we are focused on something else, although this is also a large "layer" of information.
Now I'm a little about something else … Let's start with the fact that everything that has ever happened to us, is or will be - these are records in the information field. Our memory is not information stored somewhere in the brain, but the ability of consciousness to access this common "database". We are arranged in such a way that we read data most clearly from the information field of the present, worse - from the past, especially the distant one, and all other databases are closed to us.
However, this is not the case for everyone. People with extrasensory abilities can clearly "see" their own and someone else's future, in the form of vivid pictures with emotions and sensations. Yes, and each of us is familiar with such a phenomenon as a presentiment - the feeling that some event is about to happen.
However, besides the past, present and future, there is another very interesting area - alternatives. Any action usually has several potential consequences, one option is implemented, while others remain "unfulfilled". For such events, there are also areas in the information field, but since they did not happen to us, our memory cannot go there.
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But, like any other system, memory can "fail" from time to time. And false memories can serve as an excellent illustration of this breakdown. Instead of referring to its "working" database, that is, those events that happened to a person, consciousness begins to "read" memories from another source - alternative options.
For the person himself, these memories are no less real than ordinary ones, because the mechanism of their occurrence is the same. It's like downloading two different books to your computer - even though the content and authors are different, the download follows the same principle.
If we go back to the research of false memories in psychology and psychiatry, then the following experiments were carried out more than once - a person was inspired for a long time that a certain story happened to him, which in reality did not exist. As a rule, after a while the subject began to believe in her so much that he considered it absolutely true and even supplemented it with his own details. Thus, the experimenters drew conclusions that consciousness is easy to manipulate and that all memories cannot be trusted.
But we will draw from the above a few more conclusions, no less interesting.
Firstly, since all potential variants of events are recorded in the information fields, the situations that were suggested to the subjects (and these were usually everyday stories) were undoubtedly there. Consequently, under the pressure of experimenters, the human memory sooner or later found the necessary alternative.
Further, the consciousness "rewrote" its chain of past events and added there the suggested memories. By the way, in almost all experiments, false memories were overgrown with details, each person had his own, due to the fact that the "databases" were different for everyone.
Secondly, those false memories that arose on their own are of the same nature as those suggested. The only difference here is that in this case, in the first case, the consciousness itself "looked in the wrong direction" and in the second it was forced to do it.
And thirdly, the division of memories into true and false is very arbitrary. Within the framework of our world, it is undoubtedly true, but if you look more globally, then alternative options are also "lived" by our soul.
Our everyday consciousness sees only the main branch of events and blocks the rest, but the subconscious mind can access all files from the global "library". And false memories are just a random glance into this dark and closed area from our eyes.