Guest: Elizabeth Loftus.

Recent studies have shown that it's possible to make people believe they have had experiences they didn't have. They can also be led to believe that these experiences were extremely traumatic—or they would have been, if they had happened. Today on Focus, we're joined by well-known memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus from the University of California at Irvine. We'll talk about her work and review some of the controversy over recovered memories.

Guest: Gerald Edelman.

Scientists and philosophers across the ages have speculated on the nature of consciousness. Even today, with our knowledge of brain function, we still wonder how the activity seen in the brain results in our subjective thoughts and emotions. One of America's leading neuroscientists, Gerald Edelman, has spent his career trying to understand the origins of consciousness. He joins us today on Focus 580 to explain what recent advances in biochemistry and evolutionary biology can tell us about the connections between mind and body.

Guest: Andrea Rock.

Humans have long been captivated by dreams. Why do they occur? Why do we only remember fractions of them? Why do they induce such intense emotions? Today on Focus, we'll be joined by Andrea Rock, author of The Mind at Night. She'll talk about the questions that scientists are trying to answer in this new field, a fascinating combination of psychology and neuroscience.

Guest: Daniel L. Schacter.

Absentmindedness, transience, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. These are The Seven Sins of Memory according to Daniel Schacter. He joins Focus today to explore these instances of memory failure, suggesting that "failure" is actually a misnomer—and that these miscues are signs that memory is working as it should.