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Your brain can distinguish between real and fake memories, even if you can’t. Tell the truth: our brain can sometimes reveal if our memories are real or false.stockbyteIt’s a common situation: you’re embroiled in an argument over a fact and you know for certain that you have the right answer. But when someone rushes to their laptop to google the correct answer, you discover that you were wrong. Whether in a fight with a spouse or giving testimony on the witness stand, it is clear that our memories are not always trustworthy. Now, researchers have found that although those vivid...

The Villages, FL (LifeNews.com) -- The newest Republican presidential candidate appeared to stumble on Friday while campaigning in Florida. Fred Thompson appeared as if he didn't remember the national controversy surrounding the euthanasia death of Terri Schiavo and presented mixed views on whether Congress should have gotten involved. Terri was the disabled woman whose former husband won a court order to remove her feeding tube and starve her to death. Before she died from a painful 13 days without food and water, Congress approved a bill by large bipartisan margins allowing federal courts to review the state court's decision allowing...

SIERRA VISTA — When soldiers threw nickels, dimes and canteens over the fence Joe Garcia and his brother knew what to do. After filling the empty canteens as quickly as they could from their family’s drum of water, they threw them back before the soldiers were caught resting on their march. “Then they’d march off with full water canteens,” he said. It’s one of the memories Garcia has as a child in Sierra Vista during World War II and one of the stories from residents being collected for the Henry T. Hauser Museum’s World War II Homefront exhibit. Local residents...

Tomahawk Troops Embrace Pocket-Size Memories Soldiers keep pieces of metal which wounded them during their deployment to Iraq. By Spc. Jeffrey Ledesma 1st Cavalry Division, Multi-National Division, Baghdad BAGHDAD, April 17, 2007 — One undeniable commonality in every battle fought is the memories of war that burn into the minds of the soldiers who fight in it and the small pieces that remind them to never forget. Three infantrymen with Company C, 1st "Tomahawk" Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, experienced three different attacks, on three separate occasions and each came away with...

A new movie about the bloody but heroic World War II battle of Iwo Jima, brought back 61-year-old memories for Manuel Rodríguez. Seeing ads for Clint Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers" brought into focus the sight of thousands of Marines disgorging from the flat-bellied landing craft, some falling the moment they stepped out on the dark sand. In an interview at his Sahuarita home Friday, Rodríguez, 81, shared some memories. Others he left dormant. The one memory that bolsters his spirit, invigorates his patriotic pride, is the movie's centerpiece: the Stars and Stripes being raised on Mount Suribachi, an enduring...

The U.S. Marines rationed him two beers a day. It's a detail Ken Kurkowski remembered about serving in Vietnam. He recalled war protesters spitting on him at the San Francisco airport and barely escaping death when his tank exploded. The veteran poured everything -- the bloodshed, the wild nights, the letters to his girlfriend -- onto 106 pages. Within a year, the Library of Congress will make his memoir a piece of American history. Congress launched the Veterans History Project in 2000. It collects oral and written histories, photos and video interviews from veterans, Red Cross workers, United Service Organizations...

WASHINGTON, July 21, 2006 – If a deployed servicemember misses a milestone in a family member's life, it's gone forever, unless someone at home keeps a good record. "The military family, unlike any others, has multiple stresses related to daily life," said Linda Davis, founder of Connect And Join. "Our communications portal is designed to easily allow families to share events while they are apart, and this scrapbook will allow families to capture ... events to share for a lifetime." Today in Chicago, Connect And Join, a Web-based company that provides a forum for military families to keep in...

I picked up a CD by Alan Jackson at a Christian bookstore. I saw he was doing some of the old hymns and Gospel songs. I expected he was going to play in the Alan Jackson "country style". Instead it was a simple, pure versions of these songs using an acoustic guitar, piano, and organ. His family joined in on some of the songs. I learned on Amazon from a review that the songs were originally intended for his mother but he allows us to in a sense sit quietly in the room for this special moment. Anyway, for those...

“Stolen” memories investigated Jan. 21, 2006 Special to World Science Memories may be the lifeblood of our identity. To some extent, you are what you remember. But what if some of your memories aren’t really yours? Brain structures thought to be important in memory formation. The hippocampus is thought to be central for initial storage of long-term memories. It also receives strong inputs of information from the medial septum and frontal lobes, which are responsible for many advanced cognitive functions including planning and decisionmaking. Some researchers have also proposed memories may be a form of "mental time travel" in which...

On My Way to Viet Nam Memories of that day. 5 Jan 1969 I kiss my wife and kids good bye and board the plane in the El Paso Airport, heading to San Francisco, eventually to Viet Nam. There were a few other GI on board, since El Paso has Ft. Bliss Texas and White Sands Missile Range close to it. I get off the plane and , walking down the concourse spot a blinking sign “COLD BEER”. Although it is only 11 am that sounded awfully good to me. After all, I’m heading to Viet Nam. Belly up to...

LONDON (Reuters) - Do you have memories of being abducted by aliens and whisked away in a spaceship?You wouldn't be alone. Several thousand people worldwide claim to have had such close encounters, researchers say. But in a new study, a psychology expert at London's Goldsmiths College says these experiences are proof of the frailty of the human memory, rather than evidence of life in other galaxies. "Maybe what we're dealing with here is false memories, and not that people are actually being abducted and taken aboard spaceships," says Professor Chris French, who surveyed 19 self-proclaimed alien abductees. Several of the...

The last time I talked to my dad, he didn't seem too perturbed. He was a little tired and amused that my brother and I had taken turns calling him in New Orleans from our Florida homes all morning. At 8 a.m. Monday, I could hear the hurricane creeping up on his end of the phone. A tree limb that had threatened our roof for years was pounding a loud hole into my youngest sister's room. A neighbor's tree had fallen in our front yard. "Luckily it missed your sister's car," he chuckled. That was hours before the levee hemorrhaged....

REMEMBERING HIROSHIMA : AUGUST 6, 1945 All over the world today, people are coming together to tell us how awful it was we dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They have their memories – and I have mine. Sixty years ago, I was with my Dad and my brothers : haying in the hot August sun. We had a portable radio with us, and we stopped work to listen to the broadcaster – who spoke of a bomb – hotter than the sun – that had been dropped on, and that had utterly destroyed the entire city of Hiroshima....

The Fallen Hero and the Living Traitor By Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu FrontPageMagazine.com August 2, 2005 Here is yet another case of the kind of bizarre juxtaposition that continues to characterize the Vietnam War well into the first decade of the new century. I refer on the one hand to the recent loss of Admiral James B. Stockdale, a highly decorated Navy aviator and prisoner of war of the North Vietnamese for seven grueling years. His funeral services were held, appropriately, on the Navy carrier the USS Ronald Reagan with the full military honors the Medal of Honor winner deserved....

See Dick talk. See Hanoi Jane talk. Mark Malaszczyk July 29, 2005 She is nipped. She is tucked. She is enhanced. And she is BACK. Sixty-seven year old Actress/Activist Jane Fonda has announced that she will launch a cross-country bus tour to protest the war in Iraq, scheduled for March 2006. "I've decided that I'm coming out," she said. Green tea drinking, tofu-eating, Birkenstock-wearing, pale, emaciated vegans with multi-colored ribbons all over their tattered backpacks are rejoicing across America, running to get a second tattoo on their lower back and a ninth piercing in their left ear in tribute to...

FRANCE -- "Hanoi Jane" Fonda seems to have tired of her moniker. The wilted flower child who firmly established her place in American history when she mounted a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun has decided it's time to teach a whole new generation to blame America first. If she actually goes through with her plans for a new protest movement, she may well become known as "Jihadist Jane." It has a better ring. More alliteration. Fonda says she wants to criss-cross the nation in a bus powered by vegetable oil, advocating the end of U.S. military operations in Iraq. She's inviting...

Like millions of Americans, I heaved a sigh of relief upon reading that Jane Fonda finally is going to speak out against the war in Iraq. Where has she been? On book tour promoting her autobiography-in-progress, "My Life So Far." We might have guessed a real-time sequel was in the offing. Fonda says that, having met some veterans and their families while on tour, she's decided to break her silence. "I've decided I'm coming out," she told an audience in Santa Fe, N.M. "I have not taken a stand on any war since Vietnam. I carry a lot of baggage...

The other night Ann Coulter asked my boss, Chris Ruddy how old I am. That got me thinking that since late next week I'll be having a birthday, it might be instructive to recall not how old I am chronologically, but how old I am to be able to remember a whole lot of stuff. My friend Michael Reagan, no spring chicken himself, was kind enough the other day to tell me that I am as old as dirt, and suggested that I had been around long enough to have been baptized by John the Baptist. That's not quite true,...

With the approach of a new moon over Iraq next week, and the darkness it will provide for air operations, the days for diplomacy would appear to be dwindling fast. That is why Kofi Annan, the United Nations Secretary General, is preparing for an urgent visit to Baghdad, and it is why President Clinton traveled to the Pentagon yesterday to issue his most explicit warning to Saddam Hussein that the United States will use military force if he refuses to allow unrestricted access to U.N. weapons inspectors. In these anxious hours, it is important not to lose sight of what...