USA TODAY: Every time you pull up a memory – say of your first kiss – your mind reinterprets it for the present day, new research suggests. If you’re in the middle of an ugly divorce, for example, you might recall it differently than if you’re happily married and life is going well.
This makes your memory quite unlike the video camera you may imagine it to be. But new research in the Journal of Neuroscience suggests it’s very effective for helping us adapt to our environments, said co-author Joel Voss, a researcher at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.
Voss’ findings build on others and may also explain why we can be thoroughly convinced that something happened when it didn’t, and why eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable… (more)
Old news. Psychologists and law enforcement have known this for at least 40 years and why the death penalty concerns so many of us.