# Memory?? someone has seen my memory?? Author: Paynalton Canonical source: Language: en Original publication: The Silver Mountain Man has remembered something, has remembered that he must remember.


Every event from his past life, every story of what never happened, every thought of what will never be. All of it converges into a tangle of memories from which his soul feeds and grows, for with each new memory his strength increases. Soon will come the day when his spirit eclipses the greatest luminaries of reality, sustained only by the power of his memories.


But unfortunately for us, the Silver Mountain Man does not exist in our reality, he is a being condemned to live forever on the web. The misfortune for us is that we will never see him, for he has found happiness in this kind of existence.


And thus spoke the Silver Mountain Man, singing and shouting, when he learned that he could remember:

"One of the greatest mysteries of humanity is humanity itself. Among the strange and wonderful secrets we can find in its fleeting existence is what we call memory.

The human being is incapable of knowing the present. I make this statement based on the functioning of human senses: touch, sight, hearing, taste, smell... these five basic senses are enough to understand the universe in its entirety and discover all its secrets.

Yet, however, the very senses, as part of the universe, are limited by the laws of this universe.

The first limitation we see is the source of their information. Whether it be the waves in the air that produce sound, the light that bounces around creating colors, the chemical substances that fly in clouds of aromas with the wind, or the caresses of a beautiful lady under whose arms we find ourselves enchanted, all the senses depend on external factors to function.

Thus, when the scent reaches us, it is difficult to identify its origin, when the sound arrives, it has had to travel through distance, and the caress will never be felt until it occurs. Here is that time plays a trick on us, for even light, with its swift flashes, must account for time in order to reach our eyes.

Thus, what fills our senses is not always pure, and can be manipulated along the way, creating illusions that deceive our senses. The greatest illusionists will confirm this.

In addition to this problem, the organs responsible for receiving these signals from the universe are located away from the center of our thinking. That is why millions of nerve pathways transmit the information obtained to the place where it will be interpreted, analyzed, and used.

Once again, time influences our perception of the universe, since nerve impulses are not entirely instantaneous, and they will always take some time to reach where they need to, and, once they have done so, we have to wait for their processing before we can say: "That thing you're wearing is my shirt?"

That's how things are: when we've realized that someone else has our favorite shirt, they've already run off.

Then we take a heavy object and throw it at the fleeing runner. That poor unfortunate person runs extremely fast, and when the light that bounced off of him reaches our eyes with the beautiful colors of our shirt, he is no longer there, but a little further ahead.

That's why our mind makes the necessary calculations of speed and distance to compensate for the flaws of our senses. We throw the projectile, the person falls to the ground moments before we even realize it, and the blood stain has ruined the shirt forever.

Our mind, then, is the one that is in charge of correcting the errors of our senses and presenting us with a perspective close to reality. And our mind does such a good job that few have realized that what they have in front of them, what they smell, what they hear, what they taste, what they feel, and what they see is not the present, but the immediate past that has been gathered by our mind and interpreted for us.

Let's see, then, that when our mind has to do its job, it is presented with a serious problem: the information is never complete.

We cannot see the back of objects, we cannot taste what does not reach our mouth, and basically, what our senses deliver is always only a small part of everything that is happening around us.

So why, if the information is incomplete, can I find an object that has never been in my hands and estimate its dimensions, its weight, its fragility, its temperature, its taste, its smell, and the sound it will make if we hit it?

Our mind compensates for the lack of information with something very simple: memory.

When we see a glass full of water in front of us, our mind only has the image of something cylindrical. After interpreting its shape and dimensions, it searches in memory for an object similar to it and gives it a name: "glass." Now that the mind knows what it is dealing with, it realizes that it is missing a lot of information, so it searches in memory everything related to glasses and fills in the gaps of information with what it can find in memory. That is why, once we finally understand that it is a glass, we already know almost everything about it, even though our eyes only delivered one or two images from a single perspective without any reference as to what the image contained.

Then memory turns out to be a fundamental piece of the functioning of the senses and our understanding of the universe.

It would be wonderful to know the algorithms that control that memory, but the only thing I can understand is that memory is not a storage system like a computer.

According to my understanding, memories are stored in a fragmented way. Our friend is dead, the shirt is ruined, and we have a problem. Memories are being stored at the same time we realize what we did. However, the memory is not a video stored frame by frame. It is not a file containing all the information and stored.

Our nervous system, as part of the universe, has a limited space for memory and cannot be updated to get extra space.

Then the memory is not stored intact, but fragmented. We know what a friend is and we already know many things about the dead person. Also, we know what a shirt is, that particular one, we know what blood is and what killing is. Much of what we are seeing and that we are going to remember already exists in our mind, so... why waste space?

The best way to store the memory is then by linking the situation to many other memories within our mind. In this way, we don't need to remember each of the images, but simply a small fragment of what happened and our mind will take care of reconstructing the complete memory when we need to recall it.

In that case, despite the seriousness of the situation, the memory will occupy only a few extra bits of space in our memory. Where will these memories be stored?

Our neurons are not good at remembering, they are only good at receiving impulses and sending them to another neuron to create a tangle of circuits.

With these hardware limitations... where are the memories stored?

My theory is that within the circuits themselves.

Just as the eyes take a few moments to deliver the impulses that have been caused by photons hitting our sensitive cells, the nerve impulses take time to reach from one neuron to another.

Here we have a place in space and time to store a memory. A neuron can send a series of impulses to another neuron, while these impulses are en route, the neuron continues sending signals, so that it maintains a constant flow of information that, for a few moments, is circulating only through our body.

Suppose that once the other neuron receives the impulse, it does nothing but replicate it back to the neuron that sent it.

Then we have a single closed circuit where the same information is traveling back and forth without ever stopping. There is our storage support, which has a capacity as high as the distance between the involved neurons.

So memories are stored in closed circuits between neurons that can be accessed and rewritten as many times as needed. As long as the individual lives, the memory will remain with him.

If I were to design a human being, I would make the most of the available space to store memories, and if a circuit has as much capacity as its length, we should create circuits between the neurons furthest from the body. A neuron from the enteric nervous system linked to a cerebellar neuron would be a great option.

This would explain why some people who have received organ transplants claim to have memories of the donor, since there is a possibility that the neurons existing in that organ are part of a memory circuit. Therefore, if they manage to reconnect themselves to another circuit on their own, they will start replicating the memories of their former owner.

However, I doubt the effect could be so profound, since, as I said before, memories would be stored in fragments. Therefore, in most cases, those inherited memories would not signify a real change in the person, and they would probably be rewritten at the first opportunity.

because space is limited. If a memory fragment is almost never accessed, it is not important to keep it, and we can replace it with new memories. It is thus that gradually we are forgetting the details of our memories and forgetting things we once thought were important.

There are things we cannot remember, and there are things we will never forget. Like I cannot forget how to roll!!!,  
I can feel!!!  
And you can't make me stop rolling!!!  

I am the man of the Silver Mountain!!!"