I Swear I Remember That… Until I Don’t

Send us a Comment, Question or Request, we'd love to hear from you Memory isn’t a hard drive. It’s a storyteller that edits, trims, and fills gaps every time we press play. We put that idea to the test with Bartlett’s War of the Ghosts, a famously slippery folk tale that reveals how the brain swaps canoes for boats, inserts ghosts that never glow green, and confidently recalls details that were never said. The result is honest, human, and often wrong—and that’s the point.We dig into reconstructive memory and schemas, the mental blueprints that help us make sense of messy life events. You’ll hear how stress narrows attention, why each recall subtly rewrites the past, and how two people can share a moment yet leave with different “truths.” From Loftus and Palmer’s work on leading questions to the social power of repeated stories and the “lost in the mall” effect, we unpack why eyewitness confidence does not equal accuracy. Along the way, we share personal moments of shock, “work mode,” and humour-as-coping that show how trauma shapes what sticks and what fades.It’s not all pitfalls. We map out practical ways to remember better: focus your encoding, use elaborative rehearsal to connect new ideas to what you know, chunk information into meaningful groups, lean on spaced repetition, and turn lists into stories with vivid mnemonics. None of this makes memory perfect; it makes it more intentional. If you’ve ever argued over who said what, sworn a detail was true, or watched a childhood favourite and wondered how your mind got the colours so wrong, this one’s for you.If this conversation resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend who loves psychology, and leave a quick review to tell us your most surprising memory mix-up.Support the show