Memory on Trial: Neuroscience, Eyewitness Evidence and the Reliability of Human Recollection

The eyewitness has always held near-sacred authority in court. “I saw it with my own eyes” is treated as stronger proof than fingerprints or forensic reports. Yet four decades of cognitive neuroscience tell a different story: memory is not a recording that can be paused and replayed. It is reconstructed anew at every stage encoding, consolidation, and retrieval and is vulnerable to distortion at each one.