A post by Andrea Rivadulla-Duró

“But although I now know, intellectually, that this memory was ‘false,’ it still seems to me as real, as intensely my own, as before.”

Oliver Sacks

“That's what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.”

Haruki Murakami

The other day, while going over childhood memories with my sisters, I found out that the summer beach house I had always remembered as blue was actually yellow. The evidence was overwhelming: not only did my sisters attest to it, but a photo album also proved unequivocally that the house was indeed yellow. However, although I immediately surrendered to the evidence, the inaccurate memory of the blue house still remains shrouded in a halo of reality when I evoke it. Although I now believe that the house was yellow, the episodic representation of the house painted in blue is still accompanied by the feeling of pastness and familiarity that usually accompanies episodic memories (Russell, 1921:163). Complementarily, although I can represent the real yellow house concordantly with my updated belief, this representation lacks the phenomenological texture of recollection.

This phenomenon is known as non-believed memories (Mazzoni, Scoboria and Harvey, 2010; Otgaar, Scoboria, Mazzoni, 2014). This label refers to episodic representations that one used to take as memories and that still come accompanied by the phenomenology of memory now, even though it has been clarified that the memory is inaccurate (or even entirely false). Philosophers might claim that, from a factive conception of memory, some of these episodic representations are not indeed memories, but fictions, since the events represented never happened. However, non-believed memories can be only partially inaccurate (e.g., I never summered in a blue house). Following the empirical literature, I will refer to the phenomenon by this label (using italics to note that what is primarily meant by the term memory is that they have the phenomenology of recollection and not that they are entirely accurate).