Awash in Time

Interesting article…

“One of the most intriguing physics discoveries of the last century was the existence of antimatter, material that exists as the “mirror image” of subatomic particles of matter, such as electrons, protons and quarks, but with the opposite charge. Antimatter deepened our understanding of our universe and the laws of physics, and now the same idea is being proposed to explain something equally mysterious: memory.

When memories are created and recalled, new and stronger electrical connections are created between neurons in the brain. The memory is represented by this new association between neurons. But a new theory, backed by animal research and mathematical models, suggests that at the same time that a memory is created, an “antimemory” is also spawned – that is, connections between neurons are made that provide the exact opposite pattern of electrical activity to those forming the original memory. Scientists believe that this helps maintain the balance of electrical activity in the brain.”

Article: ‘Antimatter changed physics, and the discovery of antimemories could revolutionise neuroscience’. March 30, 2016 by Harriet Dempsey-Jones, University Of Oxford, The Conversation. http://m.medicalxpress.com/news/2016-03-antimatter-physics-discovery-antimemories-revolutionise.html

Been thinking about this, regardless if it turns out to be more than a theory, in some sense there’s a validity to the experience of remembering.

The future is indeed rooted in the past…

Well yes, if you think of the past as fixed, a series of snapshots of the way things were…
But if we weren’t there, we simply accept what we are given…the telling of the way it was…
If we lived through it, we remember it as what we recall leading up to it… which is always limited by what we focused on, and if we perceived it correctly, and what we have previously accepted as true…

But memory is not fixed, and the way it happened is not likely the way it happened…
What we ‘recall’ is really a summary of a series of experiences that have been interpreted, and so we remember a summary of an unfinished remembrance, which is always a little different each time we recall it…

Because… each recollection happens in a new moment, and we are influenced by the new, even as we influence the new moment with what we have accumulated, which to us we then take as the old… But it isn’t old, it’s always new in the space it is happening.

And what is new also seems to emanate from the future, from what has not happened. So the present experience is fluid, awash in what hasn’t occurred, and is formulating out of memories and what has been ruled out, the ‘antimemories’, those boundaries we gather up along with our summaries and assumptions…as we move through time… awash in time and ‘anamnesis’…

“The starting point for choosing between alternatives is negation. In order to affirm ‘A’, we must establish it; this means that we must distinguish it from ‘not A’. It is the ’not of not A’ that establishes ‘A’… Carefully considered, the truths arrived at through this logic of linear negation can never be final. A logical truth cannot establish itself; it must be referred back to other, more basic truths, and so on. Even ‘referred back’ and ‘arriving at’ are processes whose validity could only be established in this way. Whatever path we take, whatever branches we follow, in the end we are led to the point of having nothing to say.”
‘Knowledge of Time and Space’, p. 342