The Meaning of Memory

From one of the world’s leading memory researchers, a provocative exploration of an existential question: Can we trust our own memories?

Most of us think memories are like a tidy archive of high-definition video footage, a faithful recording of our most meaningful experiences. Our memories, we believe, make us who we are. But over the course of decades of research, psychologist and memory expert Elizabeth Loftus has proven that our recollections are astonishingly fragile, malleable constructions that are altered every time we access them.

Through her own personal story of how memory has shaped her life—starting with the traumatic early death of her mother—and the eye-opening research that has defined her expansive career, Loftus reveals the truth of just how manipulable our minds can be. Weaving fascinating studies with hair-raising stories of her time as expert witness for some of the most infamous court cases of our times, including Ted Bundy and Harvey Weinstein, The Meaning of Memory shows how simple phrasing changes in police questioning can alter our recall; how easy it is to plant a false memory; and how scientifically unreliable memories recovered through therapy and hypnosis are.

The Meaning of Memory, like Loftus herself, fearlessly questions the popular narratives on memory today, and challenges one of our most fundamental assumptions: that what we swear we saw with our own two eyes can be trusted. But, Loftus argues, we are not our memories; we are free to shape our own narratives. And in our post-truth era of AI deepfakes and fake news, confronting the profound limits of our own minds has never been more urgent.