Radical Memory

Hey everyone, it’s october 25th and as promised I am doing my diary which is impromtu more or less after a long work day so be patient with me. If you are a neuroscientist or philosopher please know I am trying to say this in as general language as possible for people who are interested in it beyond academia too.

So… today because we're diving into one of the most mind-bending ideas I've come across in neuroscience recently, and honestly? It's completely changed the way I think about thinking.

So I want to start with a question for you: Where are your memories?

No, seriously. Think about your last birthday for a second. Or your first day of school. Or what you had for breakfast this morning. Where is that memory?

You're probably thinking "well, it's in my brain, obviously." And yeah, I thought the same thing! That seems pretty obvious, right? But what if I told you that might be completely wrong? Not wrong in a "well, technically" kind of way, but wrong in a way that's going to make you rethink what memory even is.

That's what I want to explore with you today. As the bot would say, “This is Part 1 of a series where I break down this revolutionary paper by philosopher Andrea Hiott, and I promise you, by the end you're going to see your own mind in a completely different light.”

I’m pretty tired after a long day but I want to do my best as I promised to do these diaries every Friday.

Alright, let's start with something that seems obvious, because I've learned that sometimes the most obvious things are actually the most misunderstood.

I want you to think about a polo shirt. You know, those shirts with the collar? Have you ever wondered why that collar folds up? I never did, honestly. I've seen polo shirts my whole life and it never even crossed my mind. But here's the thing: that fold is there to protect your neck from getting sunburnt. Once you know that, it's so obvious! But before someone pointed it out to me, I never even thought about it.

This is what the paper calls "assessing the obvious" and it's exactly what's happening in neuroscience right now.

Hegel: the familiar, precisely because it is familiar, is unknown

Whitehead: takes a very unusual mind to assess the obvious

For decades, maybe even over a century, neuroscientists have been searching for memories in the brain. We've had this picture in our minds that memories must be stored somewhere

Like files in a filing cabinet, or data on a hard drive. There's even a fancy name for these stored memories: engrams.

An engram is supposed to be the physical trace of a memory, the actual place in your brain where that memory lives.

But here's where it gets weird

The more we look for these engrams, the more we use advanced brain scanning technology and optogenetics to peer into living brains, the less it seems like memories are actually stored anywhere at all.

Let me give you an analogy

Imagine you're trying to understand weather. You make a weather map with temperatures, pressure systems, and those little cloud symbols. Now, would you ever think the weather itself contains the number "70 degrees"?

Of course not!

The "70 degrees" is on your map or your tv or it’s a number we give to something that we experience so we can communicate about it.

It's our way of communicating about what's happening in the weather.

The weather is just doing its thing, being weather.

The number is your representation. We use the word memory like that, to talk about something that isn’t there the way 70 degrees isn’t there.

This is a bit of a head trip for us for all sorts of reasons

So we tend to confuse the images we make of this process with what can be found

We've been looking at our brain scans, our fMRI images, our recordings of neural activity, and assuming that what we see in those images—those patterns we're detecting—are actually sitting there in the brain as things. Like the brain is walking around with little brain scan pictures inside it.

When you put it that way, it sounds ridiculous, right? But this is actually what many assume, even if we don't say it directly.

Okay, so that's the problem. But where does the solution come from? This is where a tiny seahorse-shaped structure in your brain enters the picture. It's called the hippocampus, and the research around it is giving us a way to see the obvious and to be able to handle this trippy dissonant feeling of feeling our thoughs and memories as a process without being able to find them

If you’ve heard of the hippocampus, you’ve probably heard that its the memory center of the brain. If you've ever heard of this famous patient called H.M., who had his hippocampus removed and couldn't form new memories, that's where that came from.

Scientists thought naturally that the hippocampus is where memories are stored but there is a more complicated story to understanding what storage really means.

But then, in 2014, something remarkable happened  and three scientists named John O'Keefe, May-Britt Moser, and Edvard Moser won the Nobel Prize for discovering something unexpected: the hippocampus is also the brain's GPS system.

Actually it’s not and the story is long and complicated but this cartoon version will work just fine for now because at heart, it’s basically showing us this process of remembering and this process of navigating are the same ‘neural machinery’ so to speak

The same area that supposedly stores your memories is also the area that helps you navigate through space. It contains what are called "place cells" and "grid cells," these special neurons that fire when you're in specific locations or moving in specific directions.

Now, at first, I thought the same thing the scientists thought: "okay, that's interesting, but memory and navigation are still two different things." I mean, memory is mental, right? It's about the past, about thoughts and experiences. Navigation is physical. It's about moving your body through space in the present.

Mental versus physical. Past versus present. Memory versus movement. These seemed like totally different categories. And most people still assume they are

But here's where things get revolutionary, What if they are more like different measurements or assessments of different parts of the same process, like measuring the wind and the rainfall that is the weather…that’s a bit awkward but it starts to move towards the point, you can’t separate the wind/air and the rain and yet you also cannot solve them into one another

So the big insight that's been emerging from recent hippocampus research, and this is where your brain might start to hurt a little—in a good way

What if remembering and navigating are actually the same process but we have to measure them differently because they are telling us about our movement in different sorts of spaces, or thorugh different regularities that we encounter each day?

Think about what you do when you remember something. Let's say you're trying to remember where you parked your car at the mall. You might mentally retrace your steps: "Okay, I came in through the north entrance, walked past the food court, turned left at the big store..." You're navigating through a mental space, moving from landmark to landmark, just like you'd navigate through physical space, right?

Or think about remembering a story. You move through it sequentially: this happened, then this, then this. You're navigating through a timeline, a conceptual space.

An image I keep coming back to: memory and navigation are like "two different paths to the same lake." You can't replace one path with the other, they're clearly different experiences, but they're both exploring the same dynamics, they both lead to the same place.

And this is where it gets really wild for me. If remembering and navigating are the same process, then looking for memory engrams in the brain is like looking for engrams of navigation. But navigation doesn't work that way!

When you navigate, your brain cells don't store "turn left at Third Street." Those place cells and grid cells we talked about? They fire differently depending on context. The same cell might represent different locations in different environments. They remap, they realign, they're constantly dynamic and changing based on where you are and what you're doing.

The representation isn't stored in any one place. It's a pattern that emerges from the interaction between your body, your brain, and your environment.

And if that's true for navigation, then it must be true for memory too.

Okay, so if memories aren't stored in the brain like files in a filing cabinet, what are they?

And this is where the paper introduces a completely different way of thinking

Instead of thinking of representations as things that exist in the brain, think of them as ways we communicate about the brain.

Remember that weather map analogy I mentioned earlier? When we study weather, we don't look for representations within the weather itself. We create representations—weather maps—that help us communicate about what we observe. The map is real, it's useful, it helps us understand and predict, but it's not a picture of something that exists in the weather. The weather doesn't contain maps.

The same might be true for memory. When we do an fMRI scan, we're creating a representation that helps us communicate about neural activity. That scan is real, it's useful, but it's not a picture of a memory that's stored somewhere in the brain. The brain doesn't contain fMRI images.

So memories, then, aren't things you have. They're processes you do and share and elicit in the world and that others and the world around you communicates with you, ongoing, all the time.

They're patterns of interaction between your embodied self and your environment, just like navigation.

This is getting into the tradition of "radical embodied cognition," and it's radical because it dissolves that old boundary between mental and physical. Memory isn't "in your head" any more than navigation is "in your legs." They're both whole-body, whole-environment processes that we parse differently depending on what we're paying attention to.

I know that was a lot. We just took apart one of the most fundamental assumptions about how your mind works, and honestly, it sounds really toough but it actually makes things simpler, not more complicated.

You don't have to imagine some mysterious mental realm where memories float around. You don't have to solve the puzzle of how physical brain stuff creates non-physical mind stuff. Instead, you can understand your mind the same way you understand your movement—as an ongoing dynamic interaction with the world. It is your communication with all you encounter and it’s the portal to realizing you are deeply connected in ways you might not have yet realized…

In another part, I'm going to dig deeper into what this means. We'll explore what representations really are if they're not things in brains, I'll share some of the specific research that's revealing this, and we'll talk about why this matters for how we understand consciousness, thinking, and what it means to be human.

Until then, I'll leave you with this thought: The next time you remember something, try to notice what you're actually doing. Are you retrieving a file from storage? Or are you navigating through experiential space, moving through a landscape of meaning that includes your body, your surroundings, and the dynamic patterns that connect them?

 You might start to care and feel the sensuality of yourself in this ongoing blooming buzzing confusion in a new way.