How dementia and ageing distort memories, creating false narratives that are hard to correct
- Researchers are studying why some elderly people vividly detail things that didn’t happen to them, but which they believe are real memories
- Paradoxically, older people can become more confident in their memories despite the fact that they become less accurate
People with dementia are often said to forget recent events but remember the past. Carers can easily imagine their loved ones’ memories as a lifetime’s worth of photos, but it is the newer ones that are disintegrating and the old ones that are still sharp.
So it was a surprise to my brother and I when our mother, now 89, started telling stories about her past that we knew weren’t true. In one I’ve heard a lot for the past year or so, she was driving by herself in the mountains around Tucson, Arizona, where she lived for a few years in the 1980s.
She spied a man lying partly submerged in a roadside lake. She got out of the car carrying her trusty cellphone, which never left her side, and checked on the guy, who was dead. When the police came, she learned the man had been murdered.
But my mother, who was very late to accept cellphones, didn’t have one back then. Plus, Tucson is a desert. Most important, this is a woman who could talk for an hour about visiting a thrift shop. My brother and I would know if she had found a bullet-riddled body.
Many other tales in my mother’s dwindling repertoire of stories, including the one about the tall young women who came into her room in her assisted-living facility to steal dresses, are also not true. We know there’s no point in arguing, but the phenomenon is intriguing. Our mother was a voracious reader of historical fiction and newspapers. On TV, she watched only CNN and the local news. Is she mixing fragments of her life with fiction and television?
Why are these false memories so firmly planted in her brain when she’s forgotten so much of her true history? Can I trust other stories that sound more plausible, such as the preacher who tried to kiss her when she was a teen? Or the small-town boys who made sure she got home safely from work at night during the second world war?