As it turns out, my husband and I have very different memories of our lives together. We differ on such fundamentals as How We Met. Each suspects the other’s memory is at fault, but we want to stay married, so it’s best not to overthink this. I’d read that married couples should never be seated together at formal dinners because they contradict each other’s stories, and now I understand.

In some cases, corroboration may be able to help. I have a friend whose elderly mother is re-imagining her entire life in surprising ways. My friend is able to reassure herself that her own memories are intact by comparing them to those of her siblings and her mother’s friends. When most of the participants remember something the same way, it is probably true.

Or is it? In a 2015 survey of registered Republicans*, over one-third remembered Muslims cheering in the streets of America on 9-11. Our willingness and ability to alter our memories is now manipulated on a global scale by everyone from advertisers to partisans. It would be easy to conclude that if so many people believe something, there must be some truth to it, but that would not be correct.

I credit technology for widening the scope of mass-memory-revising effects.

Back to individual memory alteration. I remember, or think I remember, these cases:

• A woman who remembers her father reading a particular children’s book to her, including the voices he used for each character, later learns it was published after his death.
• A woman visits her grandmother’s grave and learns she was born after the grandmother died, yet she remembers many details of their close relationship when she was a young child.
• As part of a memory study, a college student records her reaction to the Challenger disaster during her freshman year, when it occurred, and again during her senior year. The accounts differ widely. She says, I know that is my handwriting, but I could not possibly have written it.

Why do we alter our memories? Perhaps because we can believe ourselves to be better people, living in a happier world. This is probably genetic. Living in a world that makes sense to us surely makes us more resilient, even if it isn’t real. Let’s not overthink it.

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* http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2015/GOPResults.pdf