Our Conscious Perception Of The World Is Really A Memory

Nov, 2022 - By WMR

I'm typing away while sitting on the Marine Atlantic boat and watching the Newfoundland skyline fade away on the horizon.

I can feel and hear the buzz of the ship's rumbling engine while also seeing the ocean waves swaying and breathing in its salty wind. While I make an effort to concentrate on writing this line, my eyes are frantically searching the water for a breaching whale.

Despite the fact that I see them as occurring in real time, a recent article published in the journal Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology claims that these sights, scents, and glances are only memories. A new theory of consciousness that is closely linked to memory was presented by a team from Boston.

In a nutshell, awareness developed primarily as a memory system. It aids in our ability to recall the details of our past—the who, what, when, and where—allowing us to reassemble those details in new and inventive ways in order to forecast or conjure up potential futures.

It becomes more perplexing. We're truly experiencing a recollection of that view, not how the world seems to us right now. In other words, behind the hood, our unconscious minds filter and evaluate the outside environment and frequently make split-second judgments. We genuinely experience "memories of such unconscious decisions and acts," the authors noted, after we become aware of those perceptions and decisions, that is, once they have reached the level of awareness.

In other words, the unconscious mind is mostly in charge.

A significant portion of the brain's processing of our environment and internal sensations occurs without our awareness because of the massively parallel computing capability of biological neural networks, also known as neural circuits. Instead of fragments from a disorganised dream, consciousness functions as a component of human memory to help tie events together into a cohesive, serial narrative that progresses through time.