We've all had arguments of the 'who said what to whom' type. This may be related to the psychological concept of 'false memories' where an imaginary event has the properties of an actual memory.
An archived article in Nature Neuroscience http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v3/n12/full/nn1200_1316.html reports an experiment in which some researchers tested the idea that false memories are related to vividly imagined events in the minds eye and found that it appears to be the case.
If you ponder this for a while it will seem remarkable how easily the brain can be tricked and how often this must happen in a lifetime. In fact I suspect a lot our beliefs about ourselves, the world and our abilities are formed accidentally when these mechanisms are triggered.
This rings another bell with me. For example, Olympic athletes are supposed to vividly imagine successful outcomes many times a day. Maybe they are creating something similar to a false memories. Enough of these false memories could help convince the mind of some wonderful (or dangerously delusional) things.
This research supports the idea that the mind cannot distinguish at some level between vividly imagined scenes and memories. The response to vividly imagined events can be incredibley powerful and is easy to demonstrate - read a porn mag and your mind/body does the rest. Of course in the suggested experiment it is easy to distinguish fantasy from reality since she doesn't talk back.
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