Memory is usually treated as an archive, as a space where past things are kept in case they should be needed, and this image is mistaken from its very first word. Memory does not store, it transforms. Hebb’s law formulated this with the austerity that truths have when they fear nothing: neurons that fire together wire together, and this means that every experience is not recorded in some inner notebook, but alters the structure of the one who lived it. A human being does not have memories, he is made out of them.

Up to this point science feels safe, and it has every reason to. The real question begins immediately afterward, when we find that the memory which shapes our behavior does not always correspond to some event that actually occurred. Elizabeth Loftus devoted decades to precisely this point, and succeeded in implanting in healthy adults the memory that they had been lost as children in a shopping mall, a scene that never existed and which they then enriched on their own with details, colors, and emotions. The brain reacted almost as it would have reacted to a lived event. Biology cares very little about historical accuracy, what interests it is the imprint.

There is something still more disquieting, which neuroscience discovered later. Every time a memory is recalled, it is destabilized and rewritten before being stored anew, a process that Karim Nader named reconsolidation. This means that the memory someone considers most precious, because he visits it most often, is at the same time the most altered, a copy of a copy that has passed through dozens of hands, all of them his own. The distinction between true and false memory thus ceases to be a difference of kind and becomes a difference of degree.

Here is born the paradox that cannot be allowed to pass unnoticed. If a nonexistent memory can shape an existing human being, what in the end is the essential difference between lived experience and implanted information?

The ethical side is obvious and needs no defense, since the violent implantation of memory constitutes a violation of freedom at its innermost point, there where consciousness does not even have the opportunity to resist. The philosophical question, however, remains open, and it concerns us daily, without anyone having imposed it upon us. Every book we read introduces into our brain experiences we never lived. Every historical event, every theorem, every person we came to know only through narration, all of them become our own memory without our having been witnesses. Civilization in its entirety is nothing other than an unceasing transfer of memory from human being to human being, and no one has ever considered it a fraud.

The answer, as often happens, is not to be found where we search for it. It is not found in the origin of the material, but in its fate after entry. The course we have already described, from experience to acquired experience, from acquired experience to knowledge and from knowledge to consciousness, is not a series of counters at which you pay in succession, it is a series of syntheses. At each stage something is combined with something else and produces a third, which did not pre-exist in either of the two. Implanted information, whatever its form, reading, narration, or laboratory experiment, delivers the first step free of charge. It delivers experience without friction, and precisely because it cost nothing, it remains exactly where it was left.

This explains something we have all observed and very few of us have named: that two people with the same education, the same readings, and the same stimuli end up entirely different, the one possessing knowledge and the other possessing quotations. The material was identical. The process was not. Memory belongs to the Essence, it is a function of the vessel, electrochemistry, and structure, and as such it behaves with absolute consistency, accepting indiscriminately whatever is given to it. What determines whether the stored will ever become knowledge is an inner catalytic process that appears in no brain imaging, because it does not take place at the level where the machines are looking. It is set in motion by the Divine Spark, and without it the richest memory remains full and empty at the same time.

A library knows nothing, however many books it houses. It has not read a single page, it has never changed its mind, it has paid for none of the conclusions it keeps upon its shelves. The person who confines himself to the accumulation of memories and information does exactly the same, he builds shelves and calls them a self. Memory is the precondition of evolution, it is not evolution, just as stone is the precondition of the temple without being a temple.

Thus the question of the authenticity of the memory proves to be the wrong question, or at least a secondary one. What is crucial is not whether something really happened, because even the things that did happen have in the meantime been rewritten dozens of times by the very brain that keeps them. What is crucial is whether the material, whatever its origin, passed through that inner synthesis which converts it into something that the human being now is, and not merely into something that the human being possesses. Nature does not ask where the information came from. It asks what it became within him.