The human brain can generate false memories in just a few seconds.

It has been known for a long time that human memory is extremely misleading. Although it is known that the human brain is not always correct in recalling past memories, a new study shows that the brain has difficulties remembering not only old memories, but even memories from a few seconds ago.

Much of the research on false recall has focused on long-term memory with an emphasis on childhood events that happened long ago, but scientists in the Netherlands, England and Canada conducted an extensive experiment to take a closer look at the potential fallacy of short-term memory.

The human brain has trouble remembering even seconds ago

In the study published in PLOS One, the test results of hundreds of volunteers are presented. During the four experiments, the volunteers were shown a series of letters and asked to remember the highlighted letter. In addition, some of the highlighted letters were mirrored upside down and volunteers were asked to remember this as well.

Lead author Marte Otten, a neuroscientist at the University of Amsterdam, said: “This study is unique to us in two respects. First, it explores memory for events that took place 0.3 to 3 seconds ago. Intuitively, we think these memories are quite reliable. Second, as a unique feature.” , we openly asked people if they thought their memories were reliable—that is, how sure are they of their answers?”

In the experiments, it was observed that the participants regularly and specifically misremembered the letters. People were generally good at remembering when a typical letter was shown, with error rates hovering around 10 percent. However, they were pretty bad at remembering a projected letter (like c to ↄ), with inaccuracy rates as high as 40 percent in some experiments. Interestingly, the longer the time, the higher the error coefficient. However, this increase is not on the scale of minutes, but between half a second and three seconds. Therefore, it is revealed that the human brain has difficulty even remembering what we have just seen in just a few seconds.

According to Marte Otten, the published findings show that our memory begins to be shaped by our biases almost instantly. On the other hand, it is reported that short-term memory should be tested in different ways for the accuracy of the study. Letters are the things we have been accustomed to since our childhood and most of the time we do not have a judgment against letters. According to Otten, short-term memory needs to be investigated and to what extent the judgments shape the memory should be examined on subjects where we have judgments such as voices, human faces and facial expressions.