Most people assume their memories are accurate recordings of what happened. They're not. Every time you recall a memory your brain literally rewires the neural connections storing it and saves a slightly altered version back. This is called memory reconsolidation.
Elizabeth Loftus proved this with a single word. Participants who heard the word "smashed" instead of "hit" when describing a car crash later remembered seeing broken glass that was never there. They weren't lying. Their brains had genuinely replaced the original memory with a fabricated one.
Ronald Cotton spent 11 years in prison because of this exact mechanism. The witnesses who identified him weren't committing perjury. They genuinely believed their reconstructed memories were real.
I made a video breaking down the full science behind this — the Loftus research, memory reconsolidation at the neural level, and why 69% of DNA exonerations involve mistaken eyewitness identity.
Happy to discuss the research in the comments.