Source Trace
Whether a memory carries a reliable tag of where it came from.
- Provenance not truth
- Feels real either way
- Confidence is not proof
- Modulator
Source Trace is not what you remember. It is whether the memory arrives knowing where it came from.
Every memory is stored with contextual metadata about its acquisition: who was there, what channel it came through, when it happened. This dial sets how reliably that tag is kept and read back, letting you weight personal observation differently from what you read, inferred, or imagined.
The range
Cost sits at the low end. Moderate to high is the ordinary way this runs.
Lower
The content is available but the tag is unreliable: "did that actually happen or did I imagine it?" is a genuine functional uncertainty. Inferred, told, or imagined content can be reported with first-person confidence, and an idea encountered elsewhere can resurface feeling self-generated. The remembering itself is honest; the memory feels real, only the origin is missing. The cost is vulnerability to false memories and misplaced certainty.
Higher
This is the common shape of the dial. Content and origin are co-stored and co-retrieved, so what you personally observed is reliably distinguished from what you inferred or were told, and experience-based reasoning stays well calibrated. The subtle cost: attention can over-focus on the source at the expense of the content itself, and internal accuracy tempts you to skip the external record high-stakes provenance requires.
It depends
- Sleep deprivation
- It impairs both the frontal judgment process and the contextual encoding that source attribution depends on.
- Conditions at encoding
- High arousal or fragmented attention while something happens means less contextual metadata gets stored, leaving the later source judgment less to work with.
- Vivid, rehearsed imagining
- Imagined or inferred content that is vivid, emotionally significant, or repeatedly replayed acquires the very features that make it hard to tell from real experience.
Your baseline is the architecture; how well today's memories are tagged, given last night's sleep and the state you encoded them in, is the state.
What it is not
- Not accuracy of the content
- This trait governs provenance, not truth-value. You can correctly remember hearing something from someone even if what they said was false, and a true memory can carry the wrong source.
- Not Memory Reach
- Reach is whether content comes forward easily; Source Trace is whether, once it arrives, the system knows where it came from. Fast retrieval can carry poor provenance, and slow retrieval can carry accurate provenance.
Did that actually happen, or did I dream it?
the reaction we design for