http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/...false-memories/

 

My episodic memory stinks. All my birthday parties are a blur of cake and presents. I’m notorious within my family for confusing the events of my own childhood with those of my siblings. I’m like the anti-Proust.

 

And yet, I have this one cinematic memory from high-school. I’m sitting at a Friday night football game (which, somewhat mysteriously, has come to resemble the Texas set of Friday Night Lights), watching the North Hollywood Huskies lose yet another game. I’m up in the last row of the bleachers with a bunch of friends, laughing, gossiping, dishing on AP tests. You know, the usual banter of freaks and geeks. But here is the crucial detail: In my autobiographical memory, we are all drinking from those slender glass bottles of Coca-Cola (the vintage kind), enjoying our swigs of sugary caffeine. Although I can’t remember much else about the night, I can vividly remember those sodas: the feel of the drink, the tang of the cola, the constant need to suppress burps.

 

It’s an admittedly odd detail for an otherwise logo free scene, as if Coke had paid for product placement in my brain. What makes it even more puzzling is that I know it didn’t happen, that there is no way we could have been drinking soda from glass bottles. Why not? Because the school banned glass containers. Unless I was willing to brazenly break the rules — and I was way too nerdy for that — I would have almost certainly been guzzling Coke from a big white styrofoam container, purchased for a dollar from the concession stand. It’s a less romantic image, for sure.

 

So do fake photographs.

Will it send you to Mars to see a triple-breasted woman?

Will it send you to Mars to see a triple-breasted woman?

Get the president and congress to drop the NASA/JPL budget cuts and we'll work on that.

Get the president and congress to drop the NASA/JPL budget cuts and we'll work on that.

 

 

Go Usama!

Go Usama!

How does that one even make sense? Have you been drinking?

Go Usama!

I just lost some brain cells.

So do fake photographs.

 

Yes, I do recall seeing Blake Lively naked...