There aren’t thousands of little “memory files” in your head waiting for you to access them and bring them to consciousness so you can think about them. Instead, memory is all about associations. As an association machine, the brain processes something in the present moment—an idea, a feeling, a smell, an image—and links that experience with similar experiences from the past. These past experiences strongly influence how we understand what we see or feel. That influence occurs because of associations in the brain, where different neurons (or brain cells) become linked to each other. So, in
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