Stephen Downes

There's a thing called the physical symbol system hypothesis  (PSSH) which asserts that our mental contents (such as memories) are encoded and stored verbatim, and that the act of remembering is essentially a playback of this recording. It's a popular folk theory, but as everyone here (Alan Levine, Audrey Watters, Andrew Hickey) agrees, that's not how memory works. We don't 'store' memories, but it's not magic either: experiences cause a wave of neural activations, which in turn alter the strengths of connections between them. Remembering (something distinct) is the having of an experience based (more or less) exclusively on neural activations based on those connection weights; it's not (as everyone here attests) a playback, not a 'story' (that's the PSSH kicking in again), but but a reconstruction or recreation. You can't just say "the brain is not a computer" - that's meaningless in this context - but by the same token, the brain does not in any meaningful way resemble the device in ypur desktop or in your phone.