All of Us Liars

By Matt Young

1.

Memory isn’t fact; it is an act of creation. Memories are built and built again from one remembering to the next, each new construction augmented by the sum of our experiences between the remembering.

A simplification: external stimuli trigger the formation of a memory so that we associate the stimuli with an emotion. Then our brain makes a protein bridge between neurons, which is then moved to the hippocampus.

So memories are physical things—not just images floating...