The Meaning of Memory

Understanding the Fallible Mind

From the world’s leading memory researcher, a provocative answer to an existential question: How far can we trust our own memories?

Most of us think memories are like a tidy archive of high-definition video footage, a faithful recording of our most meaningful experiences. Our memories define us and make us who we are. But over the course of decades of research, psychologist and memory expert Elizabeth Loftus has come to an unsettling conclusion: our recollections are fragile, malleable constructions, altered every time we access them.

Through her own personal story of how memory has shaped her life – starting with the traumatic death of her mother when she was a child – and the pathbreaking research that has defined her expansive career, Loftus reveals the truth of just how manipulable our minds can be. Weaving fascinating studies with unbelievably gripping stories of her time as expert witness for some of the most infamous court cases of our times, including Ted Bundy and Harvey Weinstein, The Meaning of Memory shows how simple 'phrasing changes' in police questioning can alter our recall; how easy it is to plant a false memory; and how scientifically unreliable memories recovered through therapy and hypnosis are.

The Meaning of Memory, like Loftus herself, fearlessly questions the popular narratives on memory today, and challenges one of our most fundamental, deeply held assumptions: that what we swear we saw with our own two eyes can be trusted. But, Loftus argues, this serves us well in the end. We are not our memories; we are free to shape our own stories. And in our post-truth era of AI deepfakes and fake news, confronting the profound limits of our own minds has never been more urgent.

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