The imagination is not only instrumental in thinking about the future, it’s also involved in recalling the past. In other words, one can never be certain if a thing remembered is a thing that really happened. This phenomenon has been confirmed by numerous studies, forensic investigations, and one uncompromising cognitive scientist.

Professor Elizabeth Loftus has been called a protector of criminals, an outcast of the scientific world, and even an enemy of humankind because of her discoveries. Still, these same discoveries have landed her on the list of the one hundred most influential psychological researchers of the twentieth century, according to the Review of General Psychology—a highly-esteemed journal published by the American Psychological Association, and the United States’ biggest organization in the field.

Her very first study, which she began in the early 1970s, turned all existing understanding regarding the mechanisms of memory and recall upside down. Trial participants watched recordings of car accidents selected from police archives, and were then asked to answer random questions; about the speed the depicted vehicles were going when they either  smashed, collided, bumped, hit or contacted each other. The slight difference in wording was enough to trigger the imagination of the participants