Book: Bozo Sapiens

Subtitled "Why to Err is Human," this 2009 book by Ellen Kaplan and her son Michael is a lot more scholarly than the title would indicate. Sample passage:

Michael & Ellen Kaplan wrote:

A fool and his money are soon parted, which means that if enough of them enter the [stock] market at once, it becomes not an efficient mechanism for attributing true value but a device for impoverishing fools. This, perversely, puts the fools in charge: their habits will determine the behavior of the professionals. When something like a tulip mania arises, the wise investor does NOT smooth out this obvious mispricing—he buys tulips.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

Memories are dynamic. They're not "set once and forget" but they need to be periodically renewed to be kept as memories.  That's one thing dreams do, as mentioned in the "Why We Sleep" book.

As renewable resources, memories are subject to influence, to misremembering.  They can be influenced by outside events, they can be implanted, they can be altered. That's the source of "false memory syndrome" where kids can be convinced they were victims of sexual abuse when they weren't.  Eyewitness testimony in criminal trials can be influenced by prosecutors looking for certain details the witness didn't actually see.

People who had friends with strong experiences, or who have heard about experiences of celebrities they admire, can alter those memories so they think they happened to them.

Memories that are not thought about in decades can disappear altogether -- and if brought up again, will appear as however they're described rather than their original content. Repeated descriptions of memories that conflict with the person's actual experience will eventually take over and replace the true memory.

Possibly this is why so many Fox viewers describe the horrors of the Obama presidency?