Do you remember things that never happened? Of course not. Well.... In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, it's the science of memory, and you'll meet a researcher who will make a believer out of you - a believer, that is, in imagined reality. Also, Mary Karr remembers The Liars' Club.

SEGMENT 1

M.I.T. neuroscientist Matthew Wilson tells Judith Strasser about his work with Nobel Prize winning biologist Susumu Tonegawa. They plot electrical activity in mouse brains to determine how mice store spatial memories. The mince (and probably humans) carry mental maps in their brains.

SEGMENT 2:

University of Washington psychologist Elizabeth Loftus tells Steve Paulson about the experiments she designed to prove that "recovered memories" are unreliable. About twenty five percent of the time, Loftus can get a subject to vividly remember being lost as a child in a shopping mall, even when it never happened. Also, psychologist Brooks Brenneis tells Jim Fleming about his search in the psychiatric literature for hard evidence documenting "recovered memories." To his great surprise, he couldn't find any. Brenneis is the author of "Recovered Memories of Trauma: Transferring the Present to the Past."

SEGMENT 3:

Poet Mary Karr is the author of a best-selling memoir called "The Liars' Club." She tells Anne Strainchamps some of what she remembers from her childhood, and talks about the difference between writing memoir and writing fiction.

Distribution dates:

• week of 04/20/97 - hour 2
• week of 06/21/98 - hour 2