It turns out that having some one’s memories doesn’t guarantee that you are that person!
Here is an extract from “Embracing The Wide Sky” by Daniel Tammet:
Perhaps the most striking example of memory distortion occurs in the phenomenon of false memory, where a person remembers events from his life sometimes in vivid detail and with considerable emotion – which he never experienced. A remarkable case of false memory involving a woman calling herself ‘Anna Anderson’ is particularly familiar to me because I researched and wrote a lengthy essay on it for my high school history exam. Franziska Schanzkowska, Anna Anderson’s real name, was born in Pomerania in modern-day Poland in 1896 and worked in a Berlin munitions factory during World War One. Following an incident at the factory in which Schanzkowska accidentally dropped a grenade that killed one of her co-workers before her eyes, she suffered from shock and was sent to a sanatorium. In February 1920, a short time after her release, Schanzkowska threw herself from a canal bridge and was rescued by a passing police officer and taken to a mental hospital in Dalldorf. She was nicknamed ‘Fraulein Unbekannt’ (Miss Unknown) by the nurses there because she rarely spoke and refused to give any information about herself.
Schanzkowska spent two years at the hospital, much of the time passed reading articles in popular magazines about the Russian royal family, who had a short time before been executed (during the summer of 1918) on the orders of Lenin’s new Bolshevik government. A fellow psychiatric patient claimed that she recognised Schanzkowska as one of the grand duchesses, based on one of the magazine photos, and shortly afterwards Schanzkowska began calling herself ‘Anastasia’, believing that she was indeed one of the Tsar’s daughters. She claimed she had been rescued from the firing squad by one of its members sympathetic towards her and that they had travelled together in a cart across Europe to escape the Bolshevik soldiers. (page 107)
Follow this wikipedia link for further information.
