A new study reveals that even people with excellent memories are susceptible to the phenomenon of false memories, or remembering something that didn't actually happen, TIME reported.
"False memories can sometimes be a mere curiosity, but other times they have real implications," the outlet noted. "Innocent people have gone to jail when well-intentioned eyewitnesses testify to events that actually unfolded an entirely different way."
Scientists have long wondered if some people are more susceptible to false memories than others and if people with especially good memories are immune to them.
Both questions received an emphatic no from a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
Psychologist Lawrence Patihis of the University of California, Irvine, led a team to conduct the study, which divided a sample group into two subgroups: those with regular memory and those with "highly superior autobiographical memory."
These individuals can be "downright eerie" with their extraordinary ability to recall exact dates and minute details of events in the news or their own lives.
The study participants were tested for HSAM through a quiz that asked questions about events that were on the news or what had happened on certain dates. The subjects who did well at that part of the screening then were given computer-generated dates and asked to detail the day of the week on which it fell as well as a personal experience and a public event that occurred that day.
"It was a Monday," a participant said when asked about October 19, 1987. "That was the day of the big stock market crash and the cellist Jacqueline du Pré died that day."
The participants were tested with fake memories, including incidents surrounding the 9/11 attacks. Researchers asked them about nonexistent footage of United Flight 93 crashing in Pennsylvania, and one in five people believed they remembered seeing it.
Test subjects were also lured into false memories with word recall. Word lists including "pillow" and "duvet" resulted in participants thinking they remembered the word "sleep."
During the tests, those with HSAM were as susceptible as those with regular memories to come up with false remembrances.
"What I love about the study is how it communicates something that memory distortion researchers have suspected for some time, that perhaps no one is immune to memory distortion," said Patihis.
What the study didn't show is why some people have HSAM while most don't, but scientists are hopeful they can eventually understand superior recall.
"It rules something out," Patihis said. "[HSAM individuals] probably reconstruct memories in the same way that ordinary people do. So now we have to think about how else we could explain it."
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