For every step in memory processing—encoding, consolidation, storage, and retrieval—your memory for what happened is vulnerable to editing and inaccuracies. To begin with, we can only introduce into the memory creation process what we notice and pay attention to in the first place. Since we can’t notice everything in every moment that unfolds before us, we only encode and later remember certain slices of what happened. These slices will contain only the details that were seduced by our biases and captured our interest.
