06/27/2025
Cool
This is an interesting theory! Cognitive scientist Elan Barenholtz says memory isn't retrieval. It's generation. There is no image of your mother. He's exploring how we might improve our own prompt design, because “memories, in some ways, aren't real.”
Barenholtz says memory isn’t what we usually think it is. Most people imagine that memories are like stored images or videos sitting inside the brain, ready to be pulled out when needed.
For example, when you try to remember your mother’s face or a moment from last summer, it feels like you’re just replaying something that was already there. But according to Barenholtz, that’s not how it really works.
What actually happens is that your brain creates these images in real-time. When you try to remember something, your brain builds that image or scene on the spot, based on a request or input. The memory isn’t sitting somewhere in your brain waiting to be accessed, it’s being generated fresh in that moment. Even if someone could fully decode your brain, they wouldn’t find the image of your mother’s face stored anywhere unless they were able to recreate the exact process your brain uses to generate it.
So, in one way, memories aren’t “real” in the traditional sense, they’re not static things stored inside your head. But in another way, they are very real, because you can produce them whenever you need. Your brain has the power to recreate anything: your mom’s face from the front, from the side, cooking breakfast, anything. This flexibility shows that memory is more like a creative tool than a storage cabinet.
This idea leads to an important question: if memory is a generative process, how can we make sure we’ll still be able to generate important memories later? The goal isn’t just to store something now to retrieve later, but to set things up so our brain can successfully recreate it when we need to.
There’s already a huge amount of research on how to remember things better, this is what most of the science of learning is about. And Barenholtz agrees that these findings are useful and valid. But he suggests that if we shift our thinking from memory as storage-and-retrieval to memory as generation, we might discover new ways to help people remember. This shift could influence how we teach, how we study, and how we understand learning itself.
Instead of just focusing on how to “put” information into the brain and hope it stays there, we might focus more on how to train the brain to recreate the information later. That could open up new tools and methods for learning and remembering, based on how the brain dynamically builds memories rather than passively stores them.
