False Memories EPQ

          The Netflix series, 'The Mind Explained', has an episode dedicated to memory and delves into the idea of false memories of huge world events and covers individual examples of real people's experiences.        One case that the episode discusses is of Melanie Mignucci, a child during the tragedy of 9/11 when the World Trade Centre was crashed into by hijacked planes. Mignucci gives a personal anecdote of her very distinct memories of seeing 'smoke billowing out over the water of the Long Island Sound' from the window of her elementary school. However this very specific memory is unravelled as the facts were checked and her classroom windows didn't even look over the water.  Her elementary school was 40 miles away from The World Trade Centre with the smoke drifting in the opposite direction. This is a prime example of how unreliable our memory is and by using a multitude of clips and stories of the media outburst of the disaster being shown

    The question may seem simple but really, what are memories? What are they made of and how are they stored in the brain? How does the mind trigger the vivid reconstruction of your whole life to be remembered at any moment? The fundamentals of memory provide the building blocks for who you are; the collection of snapshots of your culture and upbringing that mould your personality. Yet, memory isn't as simple as picking the recollection of a whole day's events from a filing cabinet in your brain, but rather piecing together snippets to get a millisecond's worth of your past. So how does the human brain do this?    In order to have a full understanding of false memories, I must first understand what memories are before the brain corrupts them. Therefore, I've taken to research to teach myself the science behind a  significant fraction of my EPQ title. What is the science behind our memory?    Our brain forms memories through connections between neurons in the fo