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Memory is HolographicFollow

#1 May 15 2014 at 12:30 PM Rating: Excellent
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or Why Did I Just Call My Wife by my Ex-Wife's Name?

I am not a neurologist, nor is this intended as a scientific paper, it is something I have thought about for many years and I wanted to write it down somewhere.

Memory can be viewed as a collection of multiply overlapping holograms. Each thing we see is stored as an image, and each time we see it again is stored and connected to all the other times we have seen it. This series of images is primarily connected to an icon and additionally connected to all the icons that also represent a part of that memory. The more times we store it the stronger/more relevant that icon becomes.

When we think of a concept, such as Mother, our brain accesses not only a picture of our own mother and all the images behind that one, but also images of a mother nursing, our wife, our wife with our baby, and even that prayer card we saw when we were 5 of the Virgin Mary. All these images are visible to our memory when we access that one icon.

Language is similarly encoded, but is connected with icons of the alphabet or the phonemes used to speak that name. When I think of my Mother, in addition to pictures of her I also access "Patricia", "Patti", "Mom", "Parent", and "Mother", but also "Meg" (my first wife and mother of my eldest), "Shannon" (my second wife and mother of my youngest) and "Fran", my current wife and the one who has raised the younger son who calls her "Mom". Looking "through" the icon of Mother I see all of these memories. Our brain then filters out all the extra bits of information to retrieve the one I was looking for; my mother's name.

So why, in the throws of passion, do we call our current lover by a past lover's name?

Quite simply, in that distracted moment our brain grabbed an older image from the stack and, before our over-taxed brain could register the error, handed it to our language center and spoke the name.


More to come on this later but this is the core of my thoughts on icongraphicly-accessed holographic storage (our memories).


Edited, May 15th 2014 1:33pm by Bludwyng
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