Absolutely certain you’ve seen that person’s face before? Now there is a tool to help you weed out the real memories from the false ones. Roberto Cabeza at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, and Hogkeun Kim at Daegu University in South Korea asked 11 volunteers to view 82 related-word lists, each with a theme – like “farm animals”.
Immediately afterwards, they were given more lists and asked which ones they had seen before and how confident they were about their answer. All of this was done inside an MRI scanner, which measures brain activity.
They found that when…
