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In the seventies a fourteen year old boy called Chris was asked, over a number of consecutive days, to write about four events that had happened to him earlier in his childhood. The idea of the experiment was to see whether encouraging him to think about what past events would cause further and more detailed memories to emerge.
One of the happenings the researchers asked about was the time Chris, as a young child, wandered off in a shopping centre and got himself lost . On the first day he was reminded of the incident he was told that he’d been rescued by an older man who had reunited him with his family.
What is surprising, however, is that the incident never actually happened
Over the next few days Chris remembered more and more. He found he could recall what the man looked like. He remembered his mother telling him off, and being scared that he’d never see his family again. More and more memories emerged and after a few weeks Chris told the researchers he could remember the incident ‘very clearly indeed’. He now recalled that he’d been in a toy store when he’d first gone missing, and his rescuer had been wearing a blue flannel shirt, glasses and was ‘bald on top’.