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I ask you to remember a memorable time that you stand on the Brighton beach. You may be transported back to a sunny day, hearing seagulls, watching the waves and a pier in the distance as you spend time with your friends and family.

Memories have this amazing power to evoke rich stories within us.

Today I will share how our minds craft these stories. Traditionally, in the lab, memories are studied by asking people to remember a list of objects like: ice cream, beach ball, sun cream. But there is a big gap between these lab studies and rich real-life memories. 

With my experiments, I aim to breach this gap by using video games that capture the real life much better than watching the person looking for shells on the beach. With this, I can study how real world knowledge influences is making new memories. In our daily lives, we rely on our knowledge and expectations to understand and remember situations.

However, we often underestimate how much our expectations shape what we remember. In fact, my research shows that expectations can be stored memories. For example, imagine this situation where you are packing for the beach about to grab a sun cream but the sound of your doorbell interrupts you. 

Later you realise you left the house without the sun cream, mistakenly remembering packing it. Sounds familiar? Turns out that our minds sometimes create false memories that align with our expectations I found that people often misremember this person leaving the beach, with a collection of shells, despite the video being interrupted before she found one.

High expectations can fill in the gaps in our memories, creating the coherent story that follows a logical sequence of events. With clear beginnings and ends. So how does our brain make these coherent memories?

By measuring brain activity, we show that brain regions involved in perception, knowledge and prediction, all work in synchrony to piece together the puzzle of a known end situation. When we expect a situation is about to reach and end, our brain creates this coherent story, writing the whole experience into our memory. Breaching lab and real-life contrast is not only crucial for understanding how we make memory in the wild, but also to identify the processes that breakdown in memory disorders like Alzheimer's disease.

Furthermore, evidence that memories can be influenced by expectations, has implications for real world situations, like the justice peace, where accurate memories matter. And with that, I would like to leave you with a final thought - that our minds are the architects that shapes the gnar of the our lives.

Thank you.

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