How do our memories work?

How our brains record and recall memories is quite a complex matter to the extent that I'm not sure whether scientists fully understand yet how our memories function.

Given the fact that all the cells in our body are constantly regenerating (all cells die to be replaced by new ones,) I find it counter-intuitive that we have the ability to store 50-year-old memories in cells and about a body that weren't even around 50 years ago. While I'm sure this happens because the memories are passed around between cells, but what I find interesting is that the body/cell substance that we were in our memories is not the same body/cell substance we are today. This means that we are not the substance of our bodies, we are our memories.

Imagine what life would be like without memories? We would constantly be like newborn infants, having to learn everything from scratch. We wouldn't know how to talk, walk, eat or do anything that we've learned to do since we were born. Everything important to us would not exist. No family, no friends, nothing we like or dislike. There could be no comparisons, no interpretation, because for all those things we rely on recalling things from our memories. I think it is fair to say that we are our memories.

Let us now reexamine life from the perspective of memory. As we age, we experience certain memory loss. Some memories fall away and others remain. If we are our memories, then some of us is lost with age.

There is a Jewish law that states that he who forgets what he has learned is considered as if it had cost him his life. Our memories are our life, losing them is in effect like losing our life.

How can we hold onto our memories and minimize natural memory loss?

Perhaps one way is by not having too many memories. The more we try to remember, the more we end up forgetting. The same Jewish law suggests reviewing what you have learned over and over again in order to retain the memory and prevent its loss.

Hence, perhaps it should be suggested that if we spent less time collecting new ideas and experiences and more time revisiting, reinforcing, and re-experiencing our past memories, we would lose less life in the long run. On the other hand, we would also have less life to lose. At the very least this should leave us with something to think about with regard to all the useless information we consume in this age of digital information overload!