I read an IAI article titled Memory is not stored in the brain: Time, not space, contains memory. Of course, I had to read it. It sounds implausible even on the surface.

Anyone familiar enough with my writing knows that I don’t support objectification – nounification – except as a scale-dependent heuristic shortcut. Victoria pulls memory out of the object of the brain and relocates it to time or, more specifically, to Bergson’s durée. But this move doesn’t make sense either. Plus, it adds an unnecessary or at least unearned metaphysical inflation. Whilst time may be containerised, durée can’t be by its very phenomenal nature.

In any case, after an extended chat with a GPT, I asked for a rendition to share. I’ll amend this in various ways, but for now, I wanted to capture the essence for review. I’ll describe the relata in more detail presently.

1. Phenomenal Presentation
   Whatever is presently given in experience before it becomes a later recollection. This is not necessarily an unmediated encounter with reality, merely the phenomenal field available to apprehension.
   
2. Dynamically Weighted Relata
   Presentation, attention, salience, bodily condition, prior experience, habitus and ontological grammar operate relationally rather than as isolated faculties. Their relative influence shifts according to context, purpose and inherited orientation.
   
3. Selective Apprehension
   Only part of the phenomenal field is attended to or registered. Attention and salience are especially entangled here: what appears salient attracts attention, whilst attention may itself produce or intensify salience.
   
4. Lossy Collection / Compression
   What is apprehended is not preserved as a complete experiential copy. Some features are omitted, abstracted, merged or weighted more heavily than others, leaving a compressed consequence of the encounter rather than the encounter itself.
   
5. Retention as Altered System-State
   The event has ceased, but the apprehending system remains differently configured because it occurred. ‘Retention’, therefore, names a persisting alteration or inherited constraint, not an object stored intact within a container.
   
6. Cue-Dependent Recollection
   A later cue, whether sensory, linguistic, affective or contextual, recruits the retained alteration. Recollection is not simple retrieval but a present operation conditioned by both the earlier event and the system’s current state.
   
7. Reconstructed Re-Presentation
   The result is a new phenomenal presentation related to, but not identical with, the earlier one. Its vividness does not guarantee fidelity, since missing material may be supplied through expectation, narrative, habitus and present context.

The feedback loop indicates that recollection may itself revise the system. Each re-presentation can alter subsequent weighting, interpretation and recollection, so memory is not a static archive but a recursively reconstructive process.

I borrow some of this nomenclature from Iain McGilchrist, which I’ll also explain in future.