The truth is in the details

When I was little I always thought about the wonderful tool that is our brain. Whenever I recalled something from my past, I would wonder: what a marvel, where does it store the images and videos of my memories? It was as if it could store images of my past and retrieve them, like a computer.

If a scientist investigated long enough, he should be able to find those stored images somewhere in our brain. Thus, by connecting somewhere in our brain, one could review all the images and videos of our life.

But once I heard a scientist who knocked that thought to the ground that I had carried since I was little.

I heard a scientist demonstrate to me that we do not store any image anywhere. We store emotions but not as images... instead we do not store images or videos of our life. No matter how much you search a brain, you will not find images or videos... you will only find emotions that we would have to decipher to convert into images or videos... and that already seems much trickier.

What that scientist said, I remember it marked me a lot; perhaps it is very obvious to everyone but for me, until that date it was not.

That scientist said that the images we “see” when we recall an event from our past do not exist, as they were before we remembered them… instead there are emotions that we “transform” into images when we recall them…

The proof was very evident… (according to him)

We always see the world through our own eyes… so our memory should store the image exactly as we saw it.

But if we force it, generally when we recall a past event we see the images as if they had been recorded with a camera; we see ourselves from outside… something impossible if we stored an exact copy of what our eyes see.

Indeed, many times what we “see” when we recall is not what happened (or need not be) but what we want to remember, or what our brain wants to remember… often they are subjective “images”… not real, like those from a camera.

Personally, when I recall past events, some I remember as if I saw them with my own eyes and others I remember as if I saw them from outside… but curiously, since I know that we tend to remember by seeing images from outside, now my brain only recalls them as if seen by my eyes and not as if they were recorded with a camera… self-suggestion?

Curious fact, I am not a scientist, I cannot prove any of this, perhaps it is false and is a self-suggestion of a self-suggestion, but ultimately it is not important whether it is true or false, but that it opens your eyes to think that things can be different, to think that not everything has to be as we believe it to be…