An experiment of the Telefonica Foundation collects many real testimonials from people who share their first memory, some with little more than a year of age. However, scientists claim that it is impossible to have memories before the age of three. “What it can be is that they have not told a story from when we were little and we have turned it into an experience that we believe is ours,” explains José Ángel Morales García, a neurobiologist at the Complutense University of Madrid.

Our brain is like a large photographic archive, filled with corridors of filing cabinets full of images. A recent study reveals that insert a false memory into it it’s as simple as ‘putting’ it in the corresponding filing cabinet and saying that it was always there.

At the University of Oslo, in 2023, they introduced a doctored photograph of a Viking ship among other real ones from the childhood of the volunteers they interviewed and 40% really believed they had been there. Something similar was done in New Zealand 20 years earlier, and then it was 50% who assumed this false memory.

This happens because in our brain imagination and memory are activated in a similar way. That is why the psychologist Elisabeth Loftus also managed to convince 25% of her interviewees that they had gotten lost in a small shopping center. laSexta Noticias carries out its own verification and interviews some visitors, who claim to remember the day they got lost in a large supermarket.