My wife was recently telling some mutual friends an amusing anecdote about the time she was changing our then-baby son’s nappy in the toilet of a busy café, only for him to urinate all over the groin region of her trousers, meaning she had to return to the crowded eating area displaying a deeply suspicious stain. Big laughs all round.

It is a very amusing story, in fairness. There’s just one slight problem with it; it never happened. Not to her, at least. It happened to me. I pointed this out, and she was genuinely shocked, and baffled as to how one of my memories could end up in her head. I suggested that it may be because she has many memories of hearing me tell that story multiple times over the years, and also has many memories of changing that specific baby in public places, so it wouldn’t require much effort for her brain to merge the two and create something effectively new. A ‘false memory’, if you like.

You marry a neuroscientist, and this is the sort of thing that’ll happen.

But this is just one example of how flexible human memory is. And that’s when someone isn’t actively trying to distort your memories and understanding. Should we be worried? Are we all prone to, and riddled with, false memories? How much of what we think we remember genuinely happened?