The American and British scientists have discovered how the false memories are formed, reports the Informing. For this purpose, they conducted a study and applied the method of DRM to determine false memories.

All participants of the study were suggested to read and memorize a few words, such as " winter", " snow ", " ice ", and " heating". All of these words, except the one, were combined with a bait word, which was not included in the list. In our example it is the word " cold". Sometime later, the volunteers were asked to list the words from the proposed list. It appeared that they could remember the bait.

Based on the test results, the researchers concluded that that effect is based on the semantic similarity of the words in the list , as well as on the principle according to which the brain regulates our knowledge . Thus, a person does not remember each word individually. Instead, he builds an overall impression which is stored in the memory.