We are actually wired to change our stories. We embellish, we diminish, we combine memories, and sometimes we create memories that never happened. And we do this, according to the work of Frederic Bartlett and several other memory researchers after him, in an attempt to “smooth out” the memory in order to make it fit in the existing network of stories that comprise our sense of reality - our version of what is so. This is why we remember things to suit our situation: we’ve smoothed the memories out to confirm that our reality is exactly that - real. We’ve used this memory to make all the more clear that what is so IS SO. Things that don’t make sense to us, or aren’t consistent with our other stories, get edited out.