I already mentioned here the importance of observation to understand what is the real life of people. It is related to the fact that out of context, no one is ever conscious of his actions, and that the awareness of the daily life is precisely activated by the context.

Do not listen to what I say: my memories are wrong!

New discoveries in neuroscience have confirmed this. First we learn that our memories are not perfect recordings of our experiences, but now we discover that we change them each and every time we recall them to the consciousness.

Memory is not reliable.

The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus had done a famous experiment a long time ago on what she called the false memory syndrome. She had submitted to two dozen people a paper detailing four events that had occurred in their infancy. Three facts were real. The fourth one was purely fictitious. It described how, at the age of five, the children had been lost in a shopping center and saved by a stranger. When she interviewed the subjects, a quarter of them remembered having been lost, and remembered even with a remarkable attention to detail. "I was crying and I remember that day… I thought I’d never see my family again." "An older man approached me... He had a flannel shirt on… I remember my mom told me never to do that again". Except that there had never been a man in flannel shirt or a warning from the mother.
The discovery of the unreliability of memories has changed the turn of number of trials in the United States.
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