Below is a quote from some writings of Jean Piaget, a psychologist renowned for his work on child psychology in particular.

   "I can still see, most clearly, the following scene, which I believed until I was about fifteen. I was sitting in my pram, which my nurse was pushing in the Champs Elysees, when a man tried to kidnap me. I was held in by the strap fastened around me while my nurse bravely tried to stand between me and the thief. She received various scratches, and I can still see vaguely those on her face. Then a crowd gathered, a policeman with a short cloak and a white baton came up, and the man took to his heels. I can still see the whole scene, and can even place it near the tube station. When I was about fifteen, my parents received a letter from my former nurse saying that she had been converted to the Salvation Army. She wanted to confess her past faults, and in particular to return the watch she had been given on this occasion. She had made up the whole story, faking the scratches. I, therefore, must have heard, as a child, the account of this story, which my parents believed, and projected it into my memory."

   It is truly amazing how a memory so vivid as this could be projected into his mind, and yet it was. He had been fooled, and today, I ask you to question how many times you have been fooled by your memory. How much can it be trusted? How often are memory's perverted into something that is nothing like the original event. Why is it that people always need to hear "two sides of the story"? The true answer to this is that there are two sides of the story. Every person experiences life for him/herself, and their memories are formed accordingly.
   A leading memory research expert, Dr. Stephen Ceci and his colleagues performed several experiments in which they asked young children about events that had happened to them, and then directly after, other events that had actually never happened. Once per week, for ten weeks, the children were asked to think hard about the events and try to imagine them. After all this had been completed, the children were asked about the events, and most of them remembered the "fake memories" much more clearly than the actual ones.

   In fact, most memory researchers will agree that our memories are most commonly not exactly what happened at all. They are the picture that we have painted for ourselves. Elizabeth Loftus, another researcher, has done research which leads her to believe that our memories are shaped by "post-event information". She has conducted tests in which her students watch a movie of a car accident, and afterwards, were asked several questions about the movie. One group was asked, "About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?". The next group was asked, "About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?" And the last was not asked about the cars speed at all.

   The group who was asked about the cars that "hit" each other, estimated speeds much lower than the group that was asked about the cars which had "smashed" into each other. Among several other questions asked, this experiment shows that our memories can definitely be affected by "post-event information", and that perhaps that our memories aren't as accurate as we had thought.

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