Can you re-experience your life frame by frame? Probably not.

Originally published on Substack: https://yurevich.substack.com/p/remembering-is-creation

“It smells like fish sauce!”

My nose sucked in an aroma. My brain successfully cross-referenced it as I was driving through an industrial area.

The only reason I thought “fish sauce” was because I had tried it before. I inhaled it straight out of a bottle. I stowed it away in my mental library of smells.

Can someone who has never smelled fish sauce even register this smell?

Just an ambient stench of an industrial area.

How many other uncatalogued smells make up the ambience of Radialnaya street?

How overwhelming must it be for a newborn? Being hit with an overpowering flood of sensory information.

Good thing they can’t see properly yet. It’s a safeguard for the mind.

As we stride through life, we figure things out by smelling, touching, and picking them apart. I got to know fish sauce a bit, but I’m sure there are properties I’m unaware of. Some things I intentionally choose not to explore.

Fish sauce deserves respect.

And I have dignity.

There was a documentary I watched years ago. Something about a fish sauce factory. National Geographic or Discovery Channel—was it?

I recall parts of it. Anchovies and salt chucked into house-sized fermentation tanks.

There was something about the smell being carried by the wind for miles.

Imagine living near one of those factories.

Did they actually mention that in the documentary?

…

Is your memory like a digital drive that stores volumes of information?

My memory certainly isn’t.

I’m unbothered. moisturized. happy. in my lane. focused. flourishing. Even if the documentary never mentioned the smell. And the wind.

Weirdly enough, if I were to watch that documentary again, I’d say: “that’s exactly how I remember it!”

Even if there was no mention of the smell. Or the wind.

The mind recreates past realities. We don’t replay memory film. I don’t. I don’t know about you.

Can you re-experience your life frame by frame? Like a movie, but with all the sensory and meta-data?

The max I can do is pull up “memory-GIFs.” The rest is deliberate mental reconstruction. It’s work that largely relies on inference. That’s why people with excellent inference capabilities are notorious for having “good memory.”

Storing and retaining a vast library of data is not human. We’ve always relied on external media and tools for that.

Remembering is creation.

Collective memory suddenly begins to make a lot of sense.