Memory is fragile, and our mischievous brain is capable of making false memories as meaningful as the real ones. A trap that can also be a benefit…
I remember, therefore I know who I am. What might be more solid than our intimate memories, tidy in the back of our brain? What might be surer than these lived scenes, which can be recalled to the present at any time? Warning, trap. Not so reliable, our memory conceals formidable traps, disguised elements, impossible to unmask: false memories. In his recent collective book Memoirs of our mothersauthor Laurence Campa talks regarding her Vietnamese grandmother. “I believed for a long time that, in his Parisian living room, there was a huge altar to the ancestorsshe says. When I went to Vietnam, smelling the incense burning in the temples, I recognized the smell of my grandmother’s living room. But my aunt explained to me that this altar had never existed, and that my asthmatic grandmother did not burn incense…”
How can intruders slip into our memories? Professor Pascal Roullet, neurobiologist at Paul-Sabatier University in Toulouse, explains how to use them: “When you record information, it spends a few minutes in short-term memory, before memory consolidation is activated. This mechanism, which lasts ten to twelve hours, fixes the memory. Once stable, it passes into long-term memory, managed by the hippocampus, in the temporal lobe. It remains there for three to four years, then the anterior cingulate cortex takes over, for very long-term memory. » In the few minutes before consolidation, the memory under construction is « fragile, labile »it can be altered by an interruption, other information, a feeling, etc.
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