The most vivid, accurate memories of our past could be fake. At least partially fake.
The international magazine Journal of Experimental Psychology has published a study about how reliable our memory is. Clarity of recollection, the emotion felt then could be incredibly deceiving. The process starts when a shard of memory is relived, and details are missing. Our brains intervene and fill the gaps with what seem vivid images. But much of it can be only a deception.
The fact is, as psychologists say, that every time we remember something we recreate the event or image or smell in our mind. Post-event information can be of various origin: details we learned later and that we add without realizing it, opinions and attitudes towards that memory, photographs of other events, or elements that belong to another moment of our life, and that melt into a single memory altering the original data.
And there is another important element to add to the picture: our memory is selfish. It tends to make us feel better, adding or altering data that shows us a better picture of us or of reality. All in good faith, of course.