American Scientist

False memories, or the psychological experience of remembering something that did not happen or that did not happen quite as you seem to remember it, is a common event. Also ubiquitous is our tendency to imagine alternative ways in which past personal events could have occurred but did not—a mental event often called episodic counterfactual thinking. Felipe De Brigard, a cognitive neuroscientist at Duke University, offers behavioral and neural evidence suggesting that both episodic counterfactual thinking and certain kind of false memories are closely related, which in turn suggests ways in which memory and imagination interface. De Brigard spoke at Science by the Slice on April 26, a monthly lecture series cohosted by Sigma Xi and Science Communicators of North Carolina. A video of De Brigard’s talk is below, followed by highlights of the talk in the form of live-tweeting from Science Communicators of North Carolina's intern Imani Vincent.