The brain guesses. The memory stabilizes. The self believes.
Memory becomes truth the moment someone believes it.
We begin with time. Not the ticking of a clock, but the felt structure of existence. A timeline that seems to stretch in three parts: past, present, and future. But physics tells us this is an illusion—Einstein called the separation between past and future a “stubbornly persistent illusion.” And yet, our biology treats it as real. The body stores sequences. The mind recalls. Anticipates. Plans. The flow of time may be a trick, but it is a necessary one.
The past lives inside us as memory. But memory is not a recording—it is a reconstruction. Light hit your retina. Sound moved the hairs in your cochlea. You were there. But what you carry is not the event. You carry the reconstruction—assembled from sensation, wrapped in emotion, filtered through meaning. You remember not just what happened, but how it mattered. And that “how” is constantly in motion.
The future, for its part, is pure modeling. There is no sensory data from tomorrow. What we call “the future” is a projection generated from prior experience—a probability cloud shaped by desire, fear, goals, or survival. Plans are memories in reverse. They are working hypotheses about how cause might become effect. And we believe in them just enough to move forward.
Only the present seems solid—until we look more closely. Neuroscience has shown that what we experience as “now” is a lagged construction. Our brains buffer reality, stitching together signals that arrive at slightly different times into one fluid experience. Even the moment is not a moment. It is a guess. But it is the only place we can act. The only surface we stand on.
So we build. We use the scientific method not just to explain the external world but to make sense of the systems we encounter again and again. How does fire behave? What makes a wheel turn? What causes a disease? Our brains crave pattern. Memory of systems—repeatable, testable—gives us predictive power. It lets us design. It lets us avoid harm. It lets us care for others with more precision than instinct alone. This is the domain of shared knowledge: recipes, protocols, physics, ethics.
But not all memory is about systems. Some is about presence. A face in the library lamplight across the table. The hum of a late-night xerox machine near the reading tables at the edge of the library stacks. The smell of toner mixing with floor wax and stale dust. In those pre-search-engine days, we wandered through knowledge manually—drawers of cards, shelves of journals. It slowed us down. It rooted memory in space. These experiences were not just informative—they were formative.
Then came the acceleration. Email, forums, hyperlinks. By the late 1990s, the computer lab wasn’t just a workspace. It was a portal—where we wrote to people we had just left, syncing our experiences across distance. It felt miraculous. And now, AI allows us to interact with the structured memories of countless others—distilled, reconfigured, trained on everything that has been written. We are no longer alone with our thoughts. The pattern we carry can be instantaneously matched. Interrogated. Amplified.
This is astonishing. But it also raises a deeper question:
What resonance do you carry, even if no one else believes you?
Because belief shapes memory. A moment isn’t real until it lands somewhere. We may hold a personal memory, vivid and true, but if no one else affirms it, it exists in shadow. Conversely, a lie—told with confidence and repetition—can become a kind of shared memory. That’s how misinformation works. It replicates not through accuracy, but through coherence with what people want to be true. The memory of a thing begins to matter more than the thing itself.
We see this in politics. In history. In personal relationships. Someone says, “That’s not how it happened,” and suddenly you’re adrift. You begin to doubt not just your memory, but your place in the shared story. And yet—if you hold it, if it shaped you, if it feels true in the muscle of your life—then it is real. It shaped your pattern, your future modeling, your ethics. It has weight.
This is why I take photos. I am drawn to capturing memory through that medium—not as evidence, but as expression. Each image is a wordless record of resonance: a moment I noticed, held, chose to save. Most of these are never shared. Some live quietly on my photoblog, or appear on a feed with no explanation. But I didn’t take them to prove anything. I took them to say: this mattered to me. A stillness. A shape of light. A truth that asked to be kept.
So where does that leave us? In a strange place. A place where truth and falsehood look structurally similar. Where memory is both foundation and fog. And where the only test left is: Does this make me more able to understand? To connect? To act in alignment with something deeper than fear?
We come back to unspoken memory. The kind we never record. The kind we never say aloud. Not because we’re ashamed—but because there is no need. These memories are folded so deeply into the self that speaking them might distort them. They exist in color, temperature, posture, instinct. They are the blush of recognition you feel when the light hits just right. They shape what you say without being said.
And still—we write. Not always to be heard. Sometimes just to remember ourselves. To notice what shaped us. To build internal coherence before the world’s noise arrives. The diary, the sketchbook, the nighttime note—all are traces of pattern laid down in trust that someone, someday—maybe only us—will believe them.
The illusion is not that memory is false. The illusion is that it is fixed.
We don’t carry the past. We generate it.
And we shape it every time we ask someone: Do you remember that too?