What Are Memories?
How does your brain process information and store them as memories?
Most of us take our memories for granted. We as human beings remember our past and imagine future scenarios as the only animal that we know.
But what are memories? How are they stored in our biological cells and neural network? What does it even mean to store them? Does the chemistry in the cells change? Do the neurons get more or better connections? What does it even mean?
It’s hard enough to imagine an image or a video as stored in 1’s and 0’s in a computer, but it’s not even like we can store vivid memories or imaginations in bits and bytes and retrieve and distribute a perfect copy. Wouldn’t that be nice, though?
Our human memory is quite impressive, but on the other hand also quite flawed. Did you know, that every time you retrieve a memory of an event, it will become more flawed and less correct?
When you retrieve a memory it gets influenced by newer thoughts, emotions, and knowledge which can interfere with the memory structure of the neuron connections, so when it is saved again in the long-term memory after being retrieved, it might no longer be the same as before. It becomes a memory of a memory. You will not be able to know the difference since it’s not like you have version control of…
