We speak about memory as though it were a place.
Memories are stored in the brain. They are laid down, encoded, retrieved, sometimes lost or corrupted. Neuroscience refines the story with talk of traces, engrams, consolidation and recall, but the underlying image remains remarkably stable: somewhere inside the head sits an archive of past experience, waiting to be accessed.
And yet, almost everything we know about memory contradicts this picture.
Memories change. They blend, distort, sharpen, flatten. They are influenced by language, expectation, emotion, and context. They can be confidently false, vividly incomplete, or newly meaningful decades later. The archive metaphor survives not because it explains memory well, but because it feels inevitable.
It is not.
The persistence of the storage myth
The idea that memory must be stored somewhere has a powerful intuitive pull. After all, the past is gone. If it can appear again in experience, surely it must have been preserved.
But this reasoning already assumes what it sets out to explain. It treats memory as the return of something that once existed in the same form — a content that endures unchanged until retrieved. The brain then becomes the obvious place to put it.
What is quietly overlooked is that remembering is not the reappearance of the past. It is a present experience, happening now, under present conditions, with present significance.
The question is not where the past has been kept, but how something like the past comes to matter again.
Remembering as re-construal
From a relational perspective, memory is not retrieval but re-construal.
To remember is not to access a stored representation, but to actualise a new phenomenon that stands in relation to past experience. What persists across time is not content, but structured potential — a history of constraints, dispositions, sensitivities, and affordances that shape what can be actualised now.
The remembered event is not revived; it is re-formed.
This is why memory is inherently variable without being arbitrary. The same past can be remembered differently at different times, not because it is being distorted, but because it is being construed anew within a changed relational field.
Why reconstruction is not a flaw
Cognitive science often describes memory as “reconstructive”, as though this were a problem to be managed or corrected. But reconstruction is not a limitation layered on top of an otherwise archival system. It is what memory is.
If memory were storage, accuracy would be the default and distortion an error. But accuracy itself turns out to be contextual, task-relative, and value-laden. What counts as a “correct” memory depends on why the remembering is happening at all.
From a relational standpoint, this makes perfect sense. Memory is not in the business of preserving the past; it is in the business of making the past usable in the present. What is actualised is what the situation affords.
There is no original memory against which reconstructions can be measured. There is only the ongoing relation between history and current possibility.
Neural traces without stored content
At this point, the familiar objection arises: surely the brain must store something. After all, neural change persists. Synapses are modified. Networks are altered.
But enduring neural change does not imply stored experiential content. It implies constraint.
The brain carries history not as memories, but as altered potential: changed probabilities of activation, changed couplings between systems, changed sensitivities to prompts. These are not memories waiting to be retrieved; they are conditions under which remembering can occur.
To mistake constraint for content is to repeat the same ontological error seen in the myth of the mind’s eye: reifying a theoretical description and then locating it.
Amnesia, trauma, and the limits of the archive model
Cases of amnesia and trauma are often taken as evidence for memory storage: something has been damaged, therefore something must have been there. But these cases make more sense when understood relationally.
In amnesia, the issue is not lost files but disrupted paths of re-actualisation. The past may still shape behaviour, affect, and expectation even when it cannot be re-construed as explicit narrative memory. What is lost is not history, but a particular mode of making history present.
In trauma, memory can be overwhelmingly vivid or fragmentary precisely because it is not a stored object under voluntary control. It is a construal that forcefully re-actualises under certain conditions, resisting integration into broader meaning.
Neither case requires an archive. Both require a system whose history continues to matter.
Memory without location
Once memory is understood as re-construal, the question “Where is memory stored?” dissolves. There is no thing to be located.
Remembering happens:
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in experience,
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in relation,
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under constraints shaped by history,
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oriented toward present possibility.
The brain is part of that system, but not its container. To say that memory is “in the brain” is like saying that a conversation is in the air. Something important is being registered, but the phenomenon itself is being misplaced.
From memory to possibility
Seen this way, memory is not backward-looking in the way the archive metaphor suggests. It is not a return to what was, but a contribution to what can become.
The past persists not as stored content, but as a shaping of possibility. Remembering is one way that possibility is actualised now, drawing on history without reproducing it.
And this is why memory, like imagination, resists being pinned down as a thing in the brain. It is not an object but an activity; not a location but a relation.
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