“Time moves in one direction, memory in another.We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting”. William GibsonWe are our memories.They define what and who we are and help us to understand our reality.When we remember, we do not simply recall a perfect representation of the past.A memory is not a snapshot or movie of our lives.We reconstruct our memories based on a set of things that happened, combined with what we perceived and imagined.What those perceptions are depends, in turn, on our past experiences, our knowledge, and our selves. Consequently, each time we recall an event, we change it.We construct a skeleton with the most important facts and fill in the gaps with our imaginations. So the memory recreated is not a perfect representation of the past event. Our memories are flawed but we do not even realize it.Thinking about the future is one of the main characteristics of being human. We plan ahead.We visualize the future: imagining what will happen and how we will react.Thinking about the past and future can seem like different activities, but when we think about the future, we do the same mental work as when we remember. We just remember a future that has not happened yet.These two activities, remembering the past and remembering the future, are deeply connected and never stop.We perform these activities throughout our lives, in a more or less conscious way, in order to define ourselves and to understand our world.
