The Scientists Who Want to Rewire Your Past to Fix the Present

Memories are the language we use to tell the story of our life—an ever-changing language.

In the last several decades, scientists have shown just how malleable our memories really are. We don’t so much recall the past when we remember something; rather, we recall our recollection of the past. And every time we dig back into the crevices of our mind, the details of our remembrances can shift ever so slightly for any number of reasons, including our current emotional state.

Usually, this system works perfectly fine enough. But sometimes, we can conjure up or even be coerced into creating false memories of events that never happened, a phenomenon that’s occasionally fueled moral panics and wrongful convictions .

Scary as all this might sound, some neuroscientists have started to ex