The Illusion of Memory: Why Your Past Keeps Changing

Описание: It’s early January, and the calendar feels like a reset. In a quiet kitchen scene from last year, the mind supplies uncanny precision: a sentence, a face, the angle of light on the counter. But change one detail—shift the light, swap the words, replace the person—and the scene still “fits.” That discomfort is the entry point for a deeper claim: memory isn’t a vault of recordings, it’s a living reconstruction, continuously audited against the present.

The brain behaves less like an archive and more like a prediction engine, constantly running simulations that keep the organism alive, socially coherent, and meaning-making. Remembering is not retrieval so much as measurement: a recall event that updates the state of the memory itself, narrowing possibilities the way observation collapses a quantum system’s spread of outcomes. What feels like certainty may be a model snapping into place—useful, elegant, and sometimes wrong.

This episode follows memory through its full lifecycle: encoding as writing, consolidation as saving, reconsolidation as re-saving, and distortion as model-correction. The stakes are personal. If the past is repeatedly rewritten by the needs of the present, then identity becomes less a fixed timeline and more a narrative under continuous revision.

If your memories keep changing to help you survive and belong, what exactly is the “you” that claims it stayed the same all year?

Main Video Chapters:
00:00 One that records the left half...
07:21 So when you ask Why can’t...
11:26 One group hears How fast were...
12:58 A participant is told sometimes with...
14:37 The lure word sleep is so...
15:59 Disagreement can be the natural outcome...
18:45 When someone is encouraged to recover...
20:16 So here’s a personal tool a...
22:33 You’re asking What story will keep...
24:04 If you want to keep going...

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👋Hi! I'm Rowan K. Mercer, Quantum Physicist and Interdisciplinary Researcher.

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