As psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown, eyewitness accounts of events and their memory of them are notoriously unreliable. In her 1980 book, Memory: Surprising New Insights into How We Remember and Why We Forget, Loftus writes: "Memory is imperfect. This is because we often do not see things accurately in the first place. But even if we take in a reasonably accurate picture of some experience, it does not necessarily stay perfectly intact in memory. Another force is at work. The memory traces can actually undergo distortion. With the passage of time, with proper motivation, with the introduction of special kinds of interfering facts, the memory traces seem sometimes to change or become transformed. These distortions can be quite frightening, for they can cause us to have memories of things that never happened. Even in the most intelligent among us is memory thus malleable."
MORE: http://www.skepticblog.org/2012/06/13/i-saw-it-with-my-own-eyes/
See also...
Why Smart People Are Stupid
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06/daniel-kahneman-bias-studies.html
