Internal playback

[emjay]

That makes no sense whatsoever.

Well.. could have been an April fool's fake news story... or just a standard Onion one... o not... too long ago for me to remember properly.

One thing that could possibly explain it is due to the fact that the brain has a lot of feedback loops, eg take neurons A-E:

A>>B>>C>>D>>E
^    ^     ^    ^    V
^    ^     ^    ^    V
<<<<<<<<<<<<

And also it's already known that when you imagine something it activates exactly the same neurons as would be activated by external stimuli but just to a much lesser degree.

That makes me think that these backward connections may be part of the mechanism that allows us imagine things in the first place. And that the level of detail in the imagination is dependent on how much you can activate these neurons in the absence of external input. With so much interconnection between neurons, backward and forward, in the brain they can form self-supporting pockets of activation that don't need external input to maintain them. One well-placed internal kickstart (i.e. thought) could set off a cascade of neural activity that settles into such a stable pocket of activation. And after that, additional well-placed thoughts can further support or expand that pocket and that's what I think imagination/memory is.


And with memory I think it's all about the order in which things are activated. Whilst a memory is still in your 'mindscape' (which may be very long term - I think your mindscape is what you still consider useful in life) you have learnt how to initially trigger that cascade and the order of additional thoughts required to boost it step-by-step and it all happens relatively automatically without much conscious intervention. But once you've forgotten how to trigger that cascade, say with a long lost childhood memory, the only way you could trigger it again in all its vividness would be to find or stumble upon those all-important triggers. In other words your memories are not erased, you just forget how to trigger them. The memories may change a little over time because they are all part of a vast interconnected network that is always subtly changing, but essentially they'll be the same.