It was a casual conversation with a friend that got Tim Requarth a bit freaked out. The friend had made an AI video, a fake video of himself scaling Mount Rushmore. And then some time passed, and the friend felt a tug of memory, not of making the video, but of actually scaling the mountain.

As a neuroscientist, Requarth had questions about the effect of AI on our brains, which he explored for an article in Longreads.

“ The brain has some very fundamental processes for sorting reality from fantasy,” Requarth told The World, “… and it surprised me that something as simple as an app could trip those up.”

Carolyn Beeler: To begin to understand this a bit more, I want to have you walk us through how our brains actually store and retrieve memories. You wrote, hopefully, I think, that it doesn’t work like your phone storing photos. It’s actually more like your brain partially reliving the event.…