Memory

First broadcast May 2005

From birth through to death our brains will file away huge amounts of information - facts, names, faces, sounds, smells and events and the emotions that are inevitably tied to them.

But what is memory? How does it work? In this four part series, Pam Rutherford will explore the science of memory, its extraordinary capabilities, how and why it can go wrong.

Part 2: The fallibility of memory

Whilst our memories can be a reliable asset - they can deceive us badly. This programme explores how deceptive our memories can be.

Our memory of events can be so unreliable that people who see the same event rarely agree on what happened. What does this mean for the reliability of eye witness testimonies?

Our memories for real events are unreliable but its also surprisingly easy for us to adopt memories that aren't even our own. How and why is our memory so susceptible to error?

Also in the programme why hypnosis may be a clue to revealing why we sometimes feel déjà vu the strange sensation of familiarity for a completely new event.

And why groping for a word that's on the tip of your tongue reveals how the glitches of memory work and that far from being an unreliable hindrance our memory is a creative, dynamic asset.

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