Retell a story enough times and your memory quietly rewrites it to make sense

In the 1930s, Frederic Bartlett gave British readers an unfamiliar Native American folk tale and had them recall it again and again over weeks or months. Each retelling drifted further from the original — strange details vanished, ambiguous ones got 'corrected' into something culturally familiar, and the plot reshaped itself into a tidier story. Bartlett concluded that memory isn't a recording, it's a reconstruction built from expectation.

— Frederic Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology — Cambridge University Press, 1932 — the 'War of the Ghosts' study
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