Recursion

by Blake Crouch

“Because memory…is everything. Physically speaking, a memory is nothing but a specific combination of neurons firing together—a symphony of neural activity. But in actuality, it’s the filter between us and reality. You think you’re tasting this wine, hearing the words I’m saying, in the present, but there’s no such thing. The neural impulses from your taste buds and your ears get transmitted to your brain, which processes them and dumps them into working memory—so by the time you know you’re experiencing something, it’s already in the past. Already a memory.”

When I discovered, through the course of my research, that we never experience the present, that we actually live in memory, it was one of the most exciting writing days I’ve ever had. I love learning things about the world we live in that explode our notions of reality. Finding this bit of research, which is 100% true, was the reason to write this book.