Honestly, I know you’re not going to listen but false memories are very much a “thing” and quite easy.
In my college (Wesleyan) the psych department ran a number of peer-reviewed studies on this. Two of my favorites:
In the first, freshmen’s parents were asked for photographs, and, using those, the experimenters photoshopped student’s heads, along with their families, in pictures of people going on balloon rides. After checking with parents that the students had not, actually, been on balloon rides (and discarding those who had), the experimenters sat down with the students with the stack of photos and asked them to recall the surrounding events. When they got to the hot air balloon, the majority of students didn’t bat an eyelid and recalled going on the ride. Many of them could recall extra details about the ride – a ride that they had never been on. When asked two weeks later, the students could still recall and talk about the ride, and honestly believed they had been on one.
In the second, more mind-blowing experiment, students were told they were taking part in an experiment on false memories. They were then told to imagine having gone on a hot air ballon ride (after discarding those who really had been on one). They were told to imagine it every night, and use as many senses as they could – imagining the smell, the air, etc. After two weeks of this, a surprising number of students came in and said (after prompting) they they made a big mistake and they really shouldn’t have been in the study, because they had actually been on a hot air ballon ride after all – they were so sorry about having forgotten about it before. These were students who knew that they were taking part in a false-memory student, and they still managed to implant themselves with a false memory!
