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[Eckhart Aurelius Hughes]

Hi Scott,

In your book, "In It Together," the following sentence appears: Like a new paint job on a car, your literal clothes change, your appearance changes, your financial wealth changes, your name can change, the shape of your body changes, the height and weight of your body change, your memories change, the instinctive—even primitive—mechanical urges and feelings of your body such as hunger or anger change, ebb, and flow like the tides of a river.

Hughes, Eckhart Aurelius. In It Together: The Beautiful Struggle Uniting Us All (pp. 100-101). OnlineBookClub.org. Kindle Edition.

What exactly do you mean by "your memories change?"

Hi, Alida Spies,

Thank you for your question!

A common misconception about human memory is that it works similar to memory on a household computer or cellphone, such as a video file stored on your computer or phone. The video and the data in it won't really change on its own. The video will typically look the same even years later, no matter how many times you play it.

However, every single time a human replays a memory, it changes.

This is in part because replaying a memory in your head is much more like dreaming at night than the original observation or taking and playing a video with a digital device. Most of what you are remembering is being invented at the time you replay the memory. Your brain fills in all the details that it didn't see or didn't save at the time, which is almost all of the details because the brain can perceive very little at once. In fact, at any given moment, your eyes are actually only seeing a tiny little fraction of what you might think they do and can.

Moreover, as time goes by, you forget more and more details of the tiny few that were saved and haven't been altered by the recall effect.

Even if you think you remember it very well, what you are really remembering is your dream-like altered imagined memory of it.

In other words, even if you feel like you remember something vividly, over time that 'memory' evolves into a completing fabricated imaginary event that never happened even remotely as you remember.

Here are some links to some science articles from experts that explain it much better (and with much scientific authority) than I can:

Your Memory Isn't What You Think It Is. Memories change each time we remember.

Your Memory is like the Telephone Game. Each time you recall an event, your brain distorts it


If you lived long enough, eventually you would forget everything you remember now, and then have all new memories. It would be similar to waking up in somebody else's body, with their brain, their feelings, their bodily urges, and their memories, without yours.


With love,
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes