EP 56: Your Memory Is Lying to You (And That's Actually Good News)

Here's something slightly inconvenient that neuroscience has to say about your past: your memory is not nearly as reliable as you think it is. In this solo episode, Jamie is getting into one of the most fascinating (and quietly life-changing) things she learned through her neuroscience training. Your brain isn't storing your memories like videos you can press play on. Every time you remember something, your brain is reconstructing it. And that changes everything about how we understand our past, our stories, and what we've decided those stories mean about us. In this episode, we talk about: ✨ Why memory is reconstruction, not playback, and what's actually happening in your brain every time you recall a past experience ✨ Why two people can live through the exact same moment and remember it completely differently, and why both of them might be completely convinced they're right ✨ How the mood you're in when you're remembering something can change what comes back, and why you can look at the same period of your life and see it completely differently depending on the day ✨ The moment something that happened to you becomes the story of who you are, and why those two things are not actually the same ✨ How your brain uses old memories as evidence to predict what's going to happen next, and what that means for the risks you're not taking ✨ Reconsolidation: why recalling a memory can make it temporarily flexible, and how that means we're never stuck interpreting our entire lives through the same lens we were using when things first happened ✨ The difference between changing what happened and changing what you decided it meant about you, and why one of those is actually possible This one is fascinating, a little bit freeing, and only mildly inconvenient if you've been winning arguments about things that happened 15 years ago. Connect with me on Instagram: @vandercreativeco @itsjamievander