One of the most quietly unsettling findings in psychology, for my money, is ‘verbal overshadowing’ – a weird fact about memory that’s liable to make you 1 if anything you believe about your life is really true. The finding is this: putting your experiences into words makes you less likely to recall them accurately. If you were to 2 a mugging, say, then scribble a record of what you’d seen, you’d be more prone to misremember than if you’d written nothing. Or think of all those ridiculous things your boss said, some of 3 you’ve told friends about. Maybe how you felt when you heard the presidential election result, or what it was like when you 4 into labour. In all 5, none of those conversations fixed the experience more vividly in memory. They probably distorted them, so your recollections may 6 little resemblance to the truth. This has consequences far graver than the accuracy of your anecdotes: Elizabeth Loftus, a leading researcher 7 verbal overshadowing, advocates for those mistakenly convicted as a result. It’s a horrible irony: in trials we need eyewitnesses to give statements. Yet the 8 of giving a statement undermines your value as an eyewitness.