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It’s easy to say that without memory there is no past. What’s revolutionary is that neuropsychology has discovered that without memory, there is no future either. Interestingly, when we imagine what will happen in the future, the same parts of the brain are activated as when we remember the past.

It no longer surprises us that our memory is not a faithful record of experiences we have lived through. The brain creates, completes and invents to give coherence to the past. And what has now been demonstrated is that if our memory fails and plays tricks on us, it’s in order to better unify our self in the present with that of the past, and even with that of the future.

Using neuroimaging techniques and psychological experiments, Daniel Schacter, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and specialist in memory and neuropsychology and author of the book ‘The Seven Sins of Memory‘, studies the mechanisms of the memory. Schacter explains that the memory is not as reliable when what we are trying to remember are details about something that has occurred in the past. But sometimes, when our memory seems to trick us, it does so to synthesise the general meaning of our existence, to give a sense to what has happened to us.

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