The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory

by Julia Shaw

‘Our memories are constructive. They’re reconstructive. Memory works … like a Wikipedia page: you can go in there and change it, but so can other people.’ – Professor Elizabeth Loftus

the operation typically made those who underwent it into zombies with virtually no personality whatsoever. Prefrontal lobotomies were conducted on many thousands of patients in the US, the UK, the Nordic countries, Japan, the Soviet Union and Germany, among others. The technique was first reported by Egas Moniz in 1936 – he surprisingly received a Nobel Prize for its discovery7 – but was generally abandoned in 1967, when psychiatrist Walter Freeman killed one of his patients.

by the age of 9 the brain reaches about 95 per cent of the adult volume, and it is not until about the age of 13 that our brains reach their full adult size.