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Tim Requarth| Longreads | April 9, 2026 | 18 minutes (5,003 words)
How does the brain decide what’s real? It’s a question most of us never have to ask. Our memories feel like records—imperfect, sure, but records nonetheless. We trust them to tell us where we’ve been, what we’ve done, who we are. But that trust rests on neural machinery we can’t access, reality-sorting processes that operate beneath conscious awareness.
My wife insists we once took a yoga class together, early in our relationship. She remembers the teacher vividly (a French acrobat, rainbow dreads, apparently quite a character), where we sat (to the left of the door), and the color of the yoga mats (teal). I insist she is misremembering: I have never been to a yoga class, even to this day. I scrolled back years through my phone’s location history once to settle it, but we’d started dating not long after the iPhone came out, and if the data ever existed, it was gone. The yoga story comes up every few years, but we never resolve it. It is probably unresolvable. As a neuroscientist, I know how these things happen—the encoding mishaps, the source confusion, the neuroscience of how two people can end up telling different stories about the same afternoon. This knowledge has never once brought us closer to agreeing.
