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I probably shouldn’t have made the gratuitous comment about the paranormal. I didn’t mean to imply that people unintentionally create false memories, or that ALL paranormal accounts are the result of false perceptions.  But once you decide upon a narrative for an extraordinary event — for example that you saw a ghost — you tend to stick with the narrative even in the face of a skeptic suggesting a perfectly plausible alternative. We hear it all the time: “I know what I saw!” even in cases where we can literally document what the witness really did see.

It just so happens I’m 60 years old too, and yes I remember my first address, my employee number from my first job, and so on. I don’t question the accuracy of people’s memories for details. But visual memory is notoriously fallible.  The texture (for want of a better word) of some memories can be subtly altered by the narrative that people chose for it.