Our Grip On Reality Is Slim

Further experimental evidence of the way that memory works with a good dash of imagination and various reality checks:

Our work has implications for the validity of witness statements and agrees with other studies that show that our mind sometimes fills in memory gaps for us, and we confuse what we imagined occurred in a situation - which is related to what we expect to happen or what usually happens - with what actually happened.

This is the 'space' that illusionists sometimes work with and also allows cold reading and similar 'spiritual' counterfeits to take place. Of course it also gives a basis for thinking that there is something in false memory syndrome. What I find interesting is to note how, essentially, imagination is a facility that first and formost enables us to get a grip on reality ... that's an interesting reflection: imagination is only secondarily about making things up; firstly it is about being the substance of things literally unseen. Here is the neurological basis for the idea that we have to have faith in order to know stuff: we have to rely on imagination filling in the gaps in order to observe and recall properly: raw data is polyfillered. That may not be quite the same as pre-interpreted, though, it's more dialogical than that.
ScienceDaily: Our Grip On Reality Is Slim, Says University College London Scientist:
Filed in: perception, memory, imagination, hallucination, mind, brain