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Comment by behringer | Hacker News Reader

I think researchers are working on this very thing, and it seems like the brain does store "visual representations" or at least it can't be ruled out at this point.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/20/mindreading_mri_spo...

And of course, why wouldn't the brain store a visual representation of what you remembered. That would be the easiest way to store and retrieve it, which is why we do that on computers as well.

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> Why wouldn't the brain...

Because it isn't how brains work. Recollection is re-experience.

The article you link says researchers taught a model how to match patterns to letters, given the presumption that they are letters, for a single subject's MRIs taken while they were experiencing the sight of words and letters. Not at all the same as saying a brain stores data.

At some point the data must be stored physically in the material that makes up our brain. How that is stored could very well be a 1 to 1 mapping, and shouldn't be ruled out.

And what if it is instead stored as I felt x, which led to y, which made me think z? It is conditioning of the pattern into neuronal potentials meaning that we can experience the same thing again. This is not the storage of data, it is the conditioning to react the same way at the start of a similar cascade.

We don't record the memory, we make it easier to feel and think the memory again. Like muscles adapting to exercise, our brains adapt to experience. Keep it up long enough and we get good at it.

If that's the case, how can anybody recall 1000 digits of pi or whatever insane number they're up to these days? People don't recall it based on their feelings. It's memory storage. How it's done is still being worked out.

Because you don't recall the digits, you recall yourself learning these digits. While doing so, you experience, you have feelings, although weak.

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