Maybe your uncle has his old fishing stories on repeat. Or your grandmother loves to recount the day she met your grandpa. But why do the details seem to change each time they tell them?

When we really stop to think about it, our memories are a lot less reliable than we’d like them to be. Even memories that are considered “flashbulb” memories – those proposed in 1977 by psychologists Roger Brown, PhD, and James Kulik, PhD, as memories so emotionally important to us that they’re recounted as vividly, completely and accurately as a photograph – are faulty. Studies show that “flashbulb” memories are actually reshaped every time we tell them. For example, many people claim to remember exactly where they were and what they were doing on 9/11, but data show they’re often mixed up with inaccuracies and filtered by other happenings in our life.

It turns out that the stories told by the media about events like 9/11, or stories about your own childhood told by your relatives, engage a part of the brain that processes memories. When we go to recount those memories, we feel confident that they’re accurate and that we actually lived them, when really they could be based solely on a story someone told us. This is why eye-witness accounts can be unconsciously corrupted by leading questions and conversations with other witnesses.

And while we think our memories only affect how we see our past, a 2012 review paper summarized work that suggests ways that memory may also play a role in our imagination and future thinking.

In multiple studies, many of the same brain regions, as shown by fMRI brain scans, are active when people engage their memory as when they imagine future situations. A network that involves a region called the “hippocampus” is related to both of these mental exercises. Additionally, other research shows that patients with amnesia who suffered damage to their hippocampus, had challenges with both memory and learning, and imagining the future.
So, why is that important?

If memory can be manipulated by external stories and the act of remembering is entangled with that act of imagination, there may be a connection between the stories we put out into the world and the ways that we do – and don’t – imagine the possibilities for the future. It may seem intuitive, but know how deep the connections are between memory, imagination, learning, and storytelling, what stories should we create to help us better imagine the future we want?