Is your notion of who you are built on a mountain of narrative that may or may not be totally accurate?

If somebody told you a totally false story about yourself, could you come to believe it?

And what does this have to do with six people who spent over a decade in prison together

for a crime they didn't commit but believed that they had? And what does any of this have to do with

why you are physically a different person every seven years, but why you can't easily see the changes in yourself

through time, or what the effective technology will be on our sense of self.

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford,

and in these episodes,

we sail deeply into our three-pound universe to understand why and how our lives look the way they do.

Today's episode is part two in the story of our drifting memories.

So last week we talked about memory and its inaccuracies. I talked about how medieval European painters struggled to accurately depict lions because they had never seen a real

lion. They'd only seen versions painted by other people. And as these sequences of paintings

moved forward through history, they became more and more distorted from the original lion

that someone had seen at some point. And the lions served as a

metaphor for us to discuss how memories like messages in the game of telephone become distorted over

time. If you heard the episode, you'll remember I talked about a strange Native American folk tale called

The War of the Ghosts. And this was used by the psychologist Frederick Bartlett. He had people

read the story and then reconstruct it from their memory at various time points later to understand

how their memory changed.

And what he found is that over time, your memory of a story becomes more coherent

with your internal model of the world and also more aligned with whatever your cultural norms are.

So we saw that memories are not static recordings, but instead they are stored in

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