The brain mixes up—confabulates—what it really knows with what it infers, and doesn’t often make a meaningful distinction between the two. When we age, we begin to confabulate more, as our brains slow down and the millions of memories we hold begin to compete with one another for primacy in our recollection, creating an information bottleneck. We all have, etched in our minds as true, things that never happened, or are combinations of separate things that did.
