If Our Memories Aren’t Stored, Are We Even the Same Person We Were Yesterday?
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I’ve been struggling with this lately, and I need to get it out. I teach yoga in Oslo now, but honestly, I’m starting to feel sick of the whole wellness-industrial complex. Everyone wants the perfect posture, the Instagram-worthy mat, the quick fix. They don’t want the actual root work. So I’ve been digging into the older, messier traditions—breath, mantra, sitting with discomfort—and that’s where I stumbled into this rabbit hole about memory.
I read about some IBM-backed work recently on how memory networks actually function, and it completely wrecked my head. It’s pointing toward what established neuroscience has been tracking for years: memory isn’t stored in one neat little folder in the brain. It’s distributed. Every time we access a memory, we’re not pulling up a recording; we’re rebuilding it from scratch, often changing it in the process. From what I understand, this tracks closely with memory reconsolidation. If that’s true, then who the hell is “me”?
I’ve always clung to this idea of a continuous self, you know? Like a steady thread running through every version of me. But if my memories are being rewritten every time I touch them, then my identity is more like a kaleidoscope than a straight line. It’s terrifying. And honestly, kind of liberating. It hits me right in the Tower energy—sudden collapse of a false structure, leaving you standing in the rubble wondering what’s actually real.
Carl Jung talked about the persona versus the shadow, how we construct these masks to feel stable in a chaotic world. Maybe the whole “fixed self” is just a cognitive bias, a narrative we stitch together because the alternative feels too unstable. I’m sitting with this a lot during my moon rituals now. Instead of asking “who am I?”, I’m asking “who am I becoming right now, in this breath?” It’s uncomfortable as hell. My ego hates it. But the practice demands it.
Has anyone else felt this ground shift under them? How do you hold onto practice when the very idea of a continuous “you” starts to unravel?
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"If my memories are being rewritten every time I touch them" — yeah, that reconsolidation window is basically the biological mechanism behind why my post-trip integration feels like literal self-authoring. It validates that the Tower isn't a collapse, it's just the system rebooting so you can finally patch the code you've been running.
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