Memories are events remembered that occurred in the past. They can be trusted to some extent, however memories are not recorded like a camera, and they can be misleading in certain cases.
For instance, in Elizabeth Loftus’s speech, she tells the story of a man called Steve Titus, who was pronounced guilty for supposedly raping a female hitchhiker. In reality, he was on a date with his girlfriend and was on his way home. The photograph of Titus was shown to the rape victim and she stated that Titus looked similar to the rapist. However, later during the trial, she said that she was 100% positive that Titus was the rapist. Afterwards, the real rapist was found and Titus was released from prison. From this real life situation, it is clear that memories are not always reliable. As time passes, memories become foggy and less accurate, just like the memory of the rape victim in this situation. She went from “he looked similar to the rapist” to “I am absolutely sure that that is the guy” after some time passed. From this situation, we can know that false memories can really do a great deal of damage to an individual. Due to the false recount of the rape victim, it cost Titus a year in jail, the loss of his job and his fiancé. Subsequently, he started filing lawsuits against everyone he believed were responsible for his hardship and due to an excessive amount of stress, he died of a heart attack.
From this situation, we can determine that memories do provide knowledge of the past to some degree, however humans are not machines and cannot remember everything precisely. Our memories do tend to become muddled as time passes to the point of it becoming a false memory, at which point we cannot trust it, since it would give people the wrong kind of impression.