And then something interesting happens. We reconsolidate and restore this changed, 2.0 version of the memory and not the original. Reconsolidating an episodic memory is like hitting save in Microsoft Word. Any edits we’ve made are saved to the neural circuits of that memory. The earlier version of the memory that we just retrieved is now gone. Every time we recall an episodic memory, we overwrite it, and this new, updated edition is the version we’ll retrieve the next time we visit that memory.
