Reality monitoring error

Biological Parallel

Mental simulation creates neural patterns similar to actual experience, making imagined and real memories difficult to distinguish. Rats planning future routes show place cell activation in hippocampus identical to activation during actual navigation—imagined movement becomes indistinguishable from real. Corvids (crows, jays) planning future tool use pre-activate motor cortex; later they exhibit uncertainty about whether they actually used the tool or only imagined using it. Octopuses show skin pattern changes during sleep that match hunting behaviors, suggesting dream-state simulations generate memory traces hard to distinguish from waking experience. The mechanism: prediction and simulation use the same neural substrates as perception and action. Evolution favored systems that treated imagined outcomes as 'real enough' to guide planning, creating the side effect that source monitoring (did I experience this or imagine it?) becomes error-prone.