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Wednesday, February 7, 2024

Where Are Memories Stored?

Most of us have been told all our lives that everything having to do with our cognitive experience is controlled by our material brains, but an increasing amount of research and an increasing number of scientists and philosophers are coming to doubt that the physical brain is all there is to us.

One area of research that's casting doubt on the material view of the human self has to do with the storage of our memories. Our memories are immaterial but our brains are material, so how is an immaterial memory of, say, your mother's face stored in a material object like a brain?

Does the brain store memories the way a computer stores information? Despite a lot of looking, no one has been able to locate where in the brain memories would be stored.

The following 6 minute video discusses why a lot of people who study this problem think that memories must actually be stored outside the physical body, in an immaterial soul or mind. It's a novel way to think of human memory storage. Take a look: