Kira (Kira Greene)

So, you know, it's a great question.

And Chris is absolutely right.

It's a really good way to think about memory in this way.

So, yeah, memory is fundamentally associative.

You have a particular memory and that activates a network of neurons in the brain.

And then each of those neurons in that network are also linked.

They're physically linked with other neurons, which are part of other networks in the brain.

So you physically experience one memory and that literally sends an electrical signal that triggers a connected memory.

So from a purely basic neurological perspective, that is exactly how it works.

We also know that memories are stored in these kind of very associative patterns.

And I talked earlier on about this idea of how we sort of extract gist from our memories.

And one of the things that we do with that is that we use them to build up these sort of blueprints, these schemas for our lives and for our expectations of the world.

And a lot of that is essentially based on themes.

that we recognize the underlying commonalities between our experiences.

Something happens to you or you think about some memory from your life and that triggers another memory.

And because that memory has a lot in common with this one, there are going to be a lot of connections in common.

So there's going to be a lot of those neural connections between those memories and you'll end up with this sort of domino effect then of all these kind of related memories being triggered.

And those are going to be memories that are related in your mind.

If I saw those three memories laid out as like video clips, I may or may not see them as being related.

But they're related for you in some way.