BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

It's nice to be here, Zuddy.

What are we up to today?

Chris, we're recording our next daily dose of course.

We've got an extract from one of our WhatsApp docs expert, sharing their wisdom on how to think about your health and look after your mind and body.

Do you remember any of this, Chris?

Is it, I think we were going to record an episode on sneezing? No, Chris, remember, we're

dropping the daily doses in the WhatsApp docs feed throughout January. Where did you get sneezing

from? It must have been a false memory and we all have those as we're about to find out.

In today's daily dose, we are returning to an episode on false memories with Dr. Linda

Henkel. She's a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Fairfield University and I think

about this episode every single day. That's right, Chris. Linda took us on a tour of what false memories are, how they form, and why they are an unavoidable part of the human experience.

You may find this episode unsettling but revealing.

Some of the memory errors that people make, the source misattributions they make, they're almost unavoidable

because that's just how the brain works. Our brains are not designed to be video recorders

recording every experience. We're designed to learn from our experiences, form generalities from things. So we absolutely do form memory traces

for many experiences, but not all of them. And those experiences are things that we're supposed to

look for the generalities. And we form schemas. So every holiday, we tend to do the same thing.

So it's very easy to confuse what happened on one Thanksgiving with what happened on another Thanksgiving.

Relying on external authorities to help guide our memories is not a bad strategy, right?

So when somebody says, don't eat those berries, they're poisonous.

That's actually a good thing to be able to remember.

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