Memories and the fountain of youth
The neuroscientists after a study done on memory are saying that 25 percent to about 50 percent of what we have as memories are mostly made up by our own brain. You don't remember your past but it's not all that is as vivid as you have already been convinced by your brain that it is.
I’m looking at a picture from 1998 and the colors don’t look right, but the memory of that event is still in my head. The brain is not working like a video tape would as I had thought before. It’s like someone trying to fix a broken plate with the wrong glue, the final results doesn't have the same shape as the original one did and it never will.
If I am to tell a story a million times, I would end up remembering it slightly differently every single time until it's really different from what happened but still close enough that I'm convinced that's what happened.
So what are memories?
Apparently, the routes for the imagination and memory are the same which makes it really scary in a way to me.
My memories from when I was a kid are probably filled with a lot of false mixed with what really happened. It’s hard to know what to believe.
No wonder some witnesses get the wrong information in court, an innocent person is sent to jail and after some years an evidence comes out to be true and that same witness remembers clearer realizing they had believed their memory which was made up.
I keep the precious memories and I desire to make more memories in my life. If life is short and it's just enough for us to remember, what happens in a fictional world where people live forever. At that point, we may all need biological hard drives to help us remember clearer. You would think that's science fiction but there's billions of dollars put into ways to make us live longer.
Emperors and kings have searched long for the fountain of youth, will the coming generation be the ones to finally get their hands in it? If you had the chance to live forever, would you? And would you consider what happens to those precious memories that keep getting erased and remade?