The widespread misconception is that memories arise from specific patterns of neurons firing in the brain, as if each memory has its own dedicated circuit board. According to this erroneous belief, all a person’s memories, spanning an entire lifetime, are permanently etched into the brain and can be accessed by flipping a switch to establish the necessary electrical connections. This conception is wrong. In this video, we explain why we know memories are not stored in the brain, and how memories come from a source outside of us.
The Common Conception of Where Memories Are Stored Is Wrong
The common conception of memory is that memories are stored in the brain. For instance, the memory of your sixth birthday party is supposedly embedded in a distinct location in the brain, alongside every other recollection you have of your life. Consequently, millions of neurons are supposedly reserved exclusively for each memory, and they can’t be repurposed for anything else.
But storing vast numbers of memories and keeping the neurons reserved for every memory from a lifetime is impossible. The neurons are renewed about 10,000 times in a lifetime. We lose around 1,000 brain cells a day. That means losing some 100 billion cross-linkages. That memory of our birthday party at age six would have been lost long ago.
The notion that memories are stored solely in the brain presents additional challenges. Simon Berkovich, a computer science expert from the United States, and Herms Romijn, a brain researcher from the Netherlands, reached the same conclusion independently: the brain cannot possibly store all of our thoughts and experiences from our entire lives. To do so would require the brain to have a processing speed of 1024 bits per second, which is not feasible. Even watching just an hour of television would exceed our brain’s processing capacity for memory retention.
According to physician Pim Van Lommel, storing such a vast amount of information and the related thoughts would fill up the brain’s capacity. “Anatomically and functionally, it is simply impossible for the brain to have this level of speed,” he states.
There are more reasons the notion that memories are stored in the brain is unsupportable. Some individuals remember every event that happened every day of their lives. The ability is called “hyperthymesia.” Actress and author Marilu Henner can recall everything that happened every day of her life. It would be impossible for all those memories to be stored in neurons dedicated to each memory in the brain.
Kim Peek, whose life inspired the movie Rain Man with Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise, had macrocephaly resulting in damage to the cerebellum. He didn’t learn to walk until age four and walked in a sidelong manner throughout his life. He could not button his shirt and had difficulty with other motor activities. His IQ score was well below average.
Despite his shortcomings, Peek possessed an extraordinary ability to recall information. He achieved the remarkable feat of memorizing more than 12,000 books, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of geography, music, literature, history, sports, and nine other fields of expertise. His memory was so exceptional that he could effortlessly recite all the area codes in the United States, as well as the major city zip codes. In addition, he memorized the maps found in telephone books and could provide precise directions for traveling from one US city to another, including how to navigate the streets of that city, down to the last detail. All of those memories could not be stored in the tiny capacity of the brain.
Other Evidence Memories Are Not Stored in the Brain
People can also access memories they never experienced so they could not be stored in the brain. Psychics can access memories about other people’s lives with great accuracy. Past-life regression sessions result in people being able to recall memories of someone else’s life that are checked out and found to be true. People can predict the future, but no sensory neurons have been created during experiences to establish the memories. Mental mediums can recall events from people’s lives without having the experiences the mental mediums describe. Remote viewers can bring to mind pictures, objects, and scenes distant from them that they have never experienced, so the memories could not have been stored in the brain.
Then Where Do We Access Memories From?
We know memories are not coming from neurons in the brain. Then where do they come from?
Memories are experiences. We can have an experience of a sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, or bodily sensation by intending for it to come into awareness. The memories are not stored. They are simply accessible. We access them by intending to have the experience.
We are so accustomed to thinking of records as being stored in file cabinets or hard drives that we imagine memories of experiences are being stored in some location in some medium. However, we must not think of memories as “stored.” Instead, they are simply accessible. No effort to describe a location or medium for the messages will be adequate.
There is a suggestion they are in the Akasha, a vast storehouse of everything that ever was or ever will be. The records are called Akashic records. That terminology is fine as long as it doesn’t suggest there is an immense library somewhere with all the records in storage like files in a filing cabinet or on a hard drive. The experiences in memories are only accessible.
These experience memories include everything that ever was or ever will be in experiences, thoughts, feelings, and everything else that some individual has experienced.
Herman Minkowski's Block Universe
The aptest conceptualization of this concept is the visualization by Herman Minkowski, Einstein’s professor, who suggested space and time are in a block called spacetime. All the experiences, thoughts, emotions , skills, and everything else that individuals have experienced in all of humankind’s history and future are in the spacetime block.
The block image is just an analogy. Think of the block as accessible, but not in a physical sense you could see. I’ll use a block analogy in this explanation, but realize it’s referring to the vast expanse of knowledge we can access, but has no location, no dimensions, and no physical properties. I’ll use the term spacetime access to help keep the analogy of a block from misguiding you into visualizing memories as being stored in a physical cube with three dimensions and an implied fourth dimension of time. The memories are simply accessible. They don’t exist in a location.
Some misinterpret the analogy of the spacetime access, believing it suggests that everything in our lives is predetermined so we just play out the predetermined script of our lives as they progress through spacetime. That is a misconception. Everything that ever was or ever will be in the spacetime access is continually being refashioned. Our mental and physical experiences today affect the mental and physical experiences of the past, and the future. We don’t consciously affect our past and future experiences. We have no knowledge of the effects. They happen as a natural consequence of living with the laws of spacetime in which past, present, and future are dynamic rather than static. The effect of events now on the past has been called retrocausality. We have free will, and what all of humanity chooses using our free will is determining the contents of the spacetime access throughout what we call “time.”
Having an Experiences Collapses the Probability Wave
Every now moment of experience about to come into our awareness has a range of potential characteristics, called a probability wave. No single reality is present in the spacetime access before someone has the experiences. Once someone has the experiences, the probability wave collapses into one reality. That one reality becomes established in our collective minds through Our Universal Intelligence, which is the basis of all that is. There is no physical realm outside of us. There are only our minds and experiences. We, are creating the reality we are all experiencing each time we have such a collapsed experience. We’re dreaming the same dream together and creating the dream together as we have experiences.
There Is Nothing but Mind and Experiences
The memories each experiencer has of an experience are not of all the features of the experience. Each experiencer comes away with unique memories of the event that include a small sample of the entire event unique to each individual. We then have a memory of this small sampling of the event’s characteristics in the spacetime access that we can access. Others there at the time will have a different sampling of experiences they recall later when remembering the event.
Memories Are Personal and Dynamic, Not Impersonal and Static
The memories in the spacetime access are personal and dynamic rather than impersonal and static. There is no record of the entire event like an impersonal video in storage. There is no physical world outside of people’s experiences. Only people’s unique memories are in the spacetime access. Those parts of an event not registered in some person’s mind are not part of the record in the spacetime access. We’re accustomed to thinking of history as events outside of consciousness that happened in an objective world. There is no objective world. History is only a record of people’s experiences. As such, it is more appropriate to refer to “histories,” plural. Today, we have video and audio recordings that seem to suggest there is just one objective set of experiences in events. That is an illusion. Each time someone experiences the video or audio, a new set of unique memories that is a small sampling of the experiences is established. There is no version of a video or audio recording or some celestial record in the spacetime access.
How Can We Access Specific Memories?
All the experiences that ever were or ever will be are accessible from the spacetime access. Then the questions are, how can specific memories be accessed, and which are available for me to access?
We have experiences in awareness. We access experiences we are having now as we live on Earth, and we access experiences we draw from memory in the spacetime access. We experience all in the now point of awareness that has no dimension in time. Awareness is the window through which we experience our lives. The contents of awareness are constantly changing. During our journey in Earth School, we might see a bird, hear the bird’s song and the rustling of leaves, smell the pleasant natural smell of a forest, taste the mint we have in our mouth, and feel a cool breeze across our arms. At every now instant, the experiences in awareness change to a new set of Earth School sensory experiences in the spacetime access.
The sensory experiences then become memories in the spacetime access. Memory experiences do not contain the entire range of sensory experiences in our environment during a moment of time. Our awareness is very narrow. We become aware of only what we need to function successfully and survive in Earth School, what cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman describes as enhancing our fitness for survival. The memory experiences, then, include only what we perceived in the moment, a small sampling of everything that was happening in that instant.
We then draw from the spacetime access to bring memory experiences into our awareness. We might intend to recall Mom’s face, so her face comes from the spacetime access into our awareness. Our love for Mom is part of what comes into awareness. But we also have experiences come into our awareness without our intention. They come from associations that draw memories from the spacetime access. A cardinal singing may bring to mind Mom’s love of cardinals, which might cue into awareness Mom’s face, which might cue into awareness the image of Mom’s ceramic cardinal, and on and on. The experiences come to us because we are engaged in the experience, of Mom.
Memories Are Cued Up from the Associative Network
This conscious awareness that is retrieving memories and evaluating them for fitness to our line of thought processes information at the rate of around 40 to 60 bits per second. That’s enough to listen to and understand a single person speaking, but that’s all. When two people are speaking, we become confused. There’s not enough capacity in conscious attention to process and understand two speakers.
The network of memories associated with other memories in the spacetime access is called “associative networks.”
When we have an experience, either from sensing the world or from memory, the experience cues other experiences related to the experience. As we are trying to remember something, we scan the vast array of experiences in our mind to see whether one of them fits our criteria. As each comes into awareness, we evaluate it and if it isn’t suitable, we go on to cast the net for the next experience to see if it fits.
Conscious Awareness Cannot Perform All the Actions We Perform
So conscious thought doesn’t have enough capacity to perform the complex actions we perform at any one now moment. At one time, we might listen to the radio, speak, drive the car, notice traffic, stop at stop signs, and think about our new job. If we had to rely only on our conscious awareness at 40 to 60 bits per second processing power that would be filled by listening to one person speaking, we would be like immobile, impotent, jellyfish.
Our Ability to Function Comes from the Subconscious
So, where does the extra processing power come from for us to function in our complex world? It comes from what we call sub, conscious processing. What we draw upon from the block of spacetime to help us navigate the world successfully comes almost entirely from the subconscious. One estimate is that 99.44 percent of what we use to function in the now moment of our lives is from the subconscious.
The abilities and experiences are described as being in the subconscious because they are not in our conscious awareness as we go through activities, but they are the source of our actions, thoughts, and sentiments. They’re immediately accessible. When we intend to speak, we easily and quickly access the subconscious to create fluid speaking. We intend to drive a car and all the skills in the subconscious come into play to enable us to drive successfully. They happen automatically, without our conscious thought.
When you travel from a location to your home, you might be surprised when you suddenly arrive. You’ve lost track of time. That is because your subconscious did all the work of driving safely while your conscious mind was plodding along on a thought cloud, one thought at a time. You didn’t need your conscious mind to get you home. Your subconscious took over driving.
Our Subconscious Acts at Remarkable Speeds
Our minds access the subconscious with a processing power estimated at 11 million bits per second, compared to the 40 to 60 bits per second of processing power in our conscious awareness. Virtually all our daily mental and physical activities happen from the subconscious without our conscious awareness of making them happen. We walk, talk, drive, notice sights, hear and interpret sounds, prepare to act, follow through with actions, and all the other mental activities we go through daily, without thinking about them, relying on our subconscious 99.44% of the time.
Your subconscious is accessing all the skills, memories, and other elements that make up the person you are from the spacetime access. You’ve created all the abilities and cues now accessible in the spacetime access throughout your lifetime as you’ve lived from infancy to adulthood. You now access them at light speed with very little involvement from your tiny awareness plodding along at 40 to 60 bits per second.
Complex Actions Such as Playing the Piano Come from the Subconscious
The abilities we access from the spacetime access that is the subconscious are profound. Pianists access their abilities from the spacetime access while playing a concerto. They are able to cue up the experiences they’ve had with the piano because they have practiced until they learn the correct combination of actions that move the body when the pianist intends for them to do so. The actions of a virtuoso performance are not coming from the muscles in the body, the brain, or conscious awareness. The pianist’s mind accesses the skills in the subconscious from the spacetime access to cause the muscles to perform, like a marionette’s puppeteer.
Your subconscious has no physical limitations. It has no time limits. The reason is that it is not, your, subconscious. There is only, one, subconscious. It is the spacetime access that includes all experiences of events, sensory experiences, thought experiences, and everything else individuals have experienced, from all time in all places. It is not the spacetime access described by most cosmologists who suggest it includes events that are not personal to some person. The spacetime access includes only experiences people have had mentally or physically.
Don't Dinosarus, the Big Bang, and Neanderthals Prove Objective Reality Exists?
Then what about the dinosaurs, the big bang, and neanderthals. Don’t they prove an objective reality outside of people’s experiences in the spacetime access exist? No. When Georges Lemaître suggested the Big Bang as the origin of the universe, there was only Lemaître’s experience of the evidence in the scenery of spacetime that collapsed into existence when he observed it. When Edwin Hubble experienced the evidence of galaxies and expansion of the universe, there was only Hubble’s act of observing that collapsed into his experiences that were then recorded in the spacetime access. There is nothing but our minds and our experiences. The experiences come from the spacetime access, and what we observe is then recorded as we experienced it in the spacetime access for us to recall later.
What you can cue up from your experiences in life is just a small part of the totality. This small sampling is accessible to you because it can be cued up from your associative networks. You must have cues that access the memory or skill you have personally experienced. Some other people can access more of the spacetime access. Psychics and people having past-life regressions access a wider range of events and thoughts. You could cue up what George Washington was thinking as he crossed the Delaware River to surprise the German mercenaries hired by the British in 1776. His thoughts are accessible in the spacetime access. You just don’t have the cues to bring it into your conscious awareness.
Your Mind Is Not in Your Brain, So You Will Not Die When Your Brain Dies
Your memories are not in neural networks in your brain. Your memories are accessible from the block of spacetime you draw from through your intention and free will. What you can access is part of who you are as an individual. That lifetime of experiences, talents, personality, and all the rest of who you are is not in your brain or body, so you will continue to live as the individual you are, with all your memories, attitudes, skills, and personality intact after your body dies. Your mind, which is outside of your brain, will continue to grow in love and wisdom as the individual you are, through eternity.
