Dr. Amishi Jha

You don't have to tell me, but can you think of it?

Okay.

Were you thinking about it before I asked you about it?

No.

Right.

So what happened in that moment?

But could you bring it to mind, like actually visualize what you were having?

But the cool thing is that you were able to access that.

So what happened to that moment?

My cue, my prompt, dinner last night, required you to kind of bring up the entire episode of your evening.

From that, you used your flashlight to hone in on the specific episode of dinner.

Then you even went even more fine-grained and visualized, maybe even if you thought about it, it was a delicious meal, you might even get your, you know, mouth might start watering.

So this ability to pay attention is what allows us to have access to everything we hold in our memories.

Yeah.

So I think that the flashlight gives a sense of agency.

You hold the flashlight.

You can willfully direct it.

You can give yourself guidance to do that.

Somebody else can prompt you to do that.

But there's another thing to keep in mind about this flashlight metaphor beyond the fact that we use it for the external environment and the internal environment, which is that