Why We Shouldn't Always Believe Our Eyes

From BBC News: A study on visual false memories conducted at Ohio State University found that a majority of tested subjects "remembered" seeing things that were never there. Volunteers were shown a set of slides containing various geometrical shapes, then were shown a second set and asked to identify which ones had appeared before. Sixty percent identified a "lure slide" — a brand new image different from but resembling some of the earlier slides — as belonging to the first set they looked at. "This suggests that visual false memories can be induced pretty easily," neurologist Dr. David Beversdorf told the BBC.

"Memories can be fragile and subject to distortion because we literally cannot record and store all of what we learn and experience," explains a press release of the Society for Neuroscience, which met last week in New Orleans. "People often mistakenly claim to remember having seen a word or object that is similar to something they saw earlier, according to several studies. Such false memories can have an even greater impact when they manifest in such a way that entirely novel events are implanted into an individual’s memory. Such an individual can willingly retrieve these completely false memories, such as being lost in a mall, with surprisingly vivid and specific details."

The same point was proven in a rather more amusing way by a different study released earlier this year in which more than a third of subjects who had visited Disneyland swore they saw Warner Bros. cartoon character Bugs Bunny there.

It's enough to make Walt Disney roll over in his cryogenic chamber.