“Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original… it is a continuing act of creation,” researcher Rosalind Cartwright reminded us in her fascinating treatise on the science of dreams . “The biggest lie of human memory is that it feels true,” Jonah Lehrer wrote shortly before being engulfed in a maelstrom of escalating accusations of autoplagiarism and outright fabulation. Yet while we already know that memory is not a recording device , the exact extent of its fallibility eludes — often, quite conveniently — most of us. In a New York Review of Books essay , the poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks tackles precisely that, exposing the remarkable mechanisms by which we fabricate our memories, involuntarily blurring the line between the experienced and the assimilated: It is startling to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened — or may have happened to someone else.…