Steve Ramirez

I remember the smells of there's the smell of horses outside and the smell of rice and beans inside that we were reading.

But the different details really do begin to shape shift, like the color of the plate that I'm eating from or the shirt that I'm wearing.

or the clothes that my family was wearing or even some of the sounds like was it chicken squawking or was it a cow mooing or was it just my nieces and nephews running around?

That changes every single time I recall this memory to the point of I'm not sure at all what the actual

accurate version of that memory is, other than I remember where I was and when it was and what I was doing.

But some of those details, I think, have certainly shapeshifted more and more the more I've recalled that memory.

There's a mismatch, which I think you intuited here beautifully, which is that when we're encoding those memories or storing them in the brain, we're a smaller version of ourselves.

We might be seven years old or 11 years old.

So all we remember is our first person perspective of making that memory.

When we're recalling it, of course, we're decades older.

So presumably we're a bit bigger.

We think of memory differently.

We think of ourselves differently.

And we've certainly warped what our childhood home more or less looked like the more we've recalled it as well.

And that mismatch, I think, is exactly what we feel

when we go back to our hometown or to our childhood home.

That mismatch, I think, is a reflection of how much growth we've done in those ensuing decades since we first formed that memory.

But it's a very real and well-documented and all too relatable of a phenomenon.

Where's that memory?

We don't have a surefire answer to that question yet, but we do know what experiments will get us there.