What If Memory Isn't Storage? The Case for a Radical Rethink

A few years ago, I caught the smell of a particular hand cream in a shop and was, for a moment, entirely somewhere else. Not remembering somewhere else. Somewhere else. My grandmother's kitchen, a specific afternoon, the quality of the light, a feeling in my body that I had not had in decades and that arrived whole, instantly, before I had time to think the word memory at all. By the time I had composed myself enough to notice what had happened, the moment had already passed, but for those few seconds I was not recalling the past. I was, in some sense I could not account for, back inside it.

We have a word for this kind of thing and the word is misleading. We call it a memory, and the word carries with it an entire model of what is happening: somewhere in the brain, a file has been retrieved, a stored item has been pulled from its place and brought into present awareness. But that is not what the experience felt like, and the more I have looked into the actual science of how memory works, the more I think the storage model is not just an imperfect metaphor. It may be straightforwardly wrong.

Reliving the past in the present?

The Filing Cabinet That Isn't There

The storage model of memory is so deeply embedded in how we talk about the mind that it is almost invisible as a model at all. We say we store memories, retrieve them, lose them, have them triggered. The language assumes a thing, sitting somewhere, waiting to be accessed. Neuroscience has spent considerable effort looking for that thing. The search has not gone the way the model predicted.

What researchers find when they look closely at the neural basis of memory is not a stored item in a fixed location. It is a pattern of activity, distributed, dynamic, and reconstructed rather than retrieved. The same memory does not live in the same place each time it is accessed. The act of remembering appears to involve the brain rebuilding something, each time, from the current state of a vast and constantly shifting network. This is part of why memories change over time, why they are vulnerable to distortion, and why two people who lived through the same event can come away with genuinely different memories of it that each feel completely solid from the inside. If memory were storage, this would be a strange kind of corruption. If memory is something else entirely, it makes much more sense.

What a Field Actually Is

Here is where I think the more useful model comes from physics rather than from the filing cabinet at all. Consider an electromagnetic field. A field is not a substance sitting somewhere with properties of its own. It is defined relationally: the field at any point in space is characterised by what it would do to a charge placed there. Remove all the charges from a system and there is no field left over. The field is nothing apart from the network of mutual influence between the charged particles that constitute it. It is not a thing. It is a structure of relationship.

The brain, at the scale relevant to consciousness, is awash in exactly this kind of structure. Neural tissue is bathed in an ionised environment, rich in charged particles, and the correlated activity of vast numbers of these particles generates complex and constantly shifting electromagnetic fields. These fields are not stored anywhere as objects. They exist as patterns of relational influence among charged entities acting on one another, moment to moment.

When the brain remembers something, what is happening, on this account, is not the retrieval of a static item from a fixed address. It is the reconstruction of a pattern of field organisation that was shaped by a past interaction with the world. The present state of the neural medium carries traces of that past interaction, not as a stored copy but as a modification to the medium itself, a change in how the relational structure of the present is disposed to organise itself. The past has not been filed away. It has left its mark on the present capacity of the system, and remembering is the present system reconstituting a pattern that its own history has made it able to reconstitute.

Memory is not a thing the brain has. It is something the brain does: a present relational process whose character is shaped by the history of its past interactions.

Why This Changes Everything

If this is right, then the question "Where is the memory stored?" is the wrong question, in the same way that asking where a conversation is stored would be the wrong question. A conversation is not stored anywhere. It happens between people, as a relational event, and what persists afterward is not the conversation itself but the way it has changed the people who had it. Memory, on this account, is closer to that than it is to a recording. It is not a recording of the past. It is the present, organised by the past, capable of reconstituting something of what the past was like because the past has become part of how the present organises itself.

This reframes the smell of hand cream in the shop. What happened was not that a stored file labelled grandmother's kitchen was retrieved and played back. What happened was that a particular sensory input, arriving in a brain whose relational field structure had been shaped, decades earlier, by repeated experience of exactly that smell in exactly that context, triggered a reconstitution of the pattern that had been laid down. For a moment, the present relational structure of my brain organised itself the way it had organised itself in that kitchen, all those years ago. I was not remembering the past. The present had, briefly, taken on the shape the past had given it the capacity to take.

This is why the experience did not feel like recall. Recall implies a gap, a reaching back, a retrieval across distance. What I felt was closer to a momentary collapse of that distance. Which, if memory is a relational reconstruction rather than a retrieval from storage, is exactly what we should expect it to feel like, at least sometimes, when the reconstruction is vivid and complete.

What This Means for Journey Work

This framework also makes sense of something I have observed repeatedly in shamanic practice of which the storage model struggles. When repressed memories surface in deep journey work, people do not typically experience them as recollection. They experience them as re-living. The feelings return at full intensity. The body responds as though the event is happening now, sometimes with significant physical release, because in an important sense it is happening now. Not as a re-enactment of something finished and filed away, but as the present relational structure of the person reorganising itself into a pattern it had been holding, perhaps for decades, without full access to it.

If memory were storage, this would be strange: why would retrieving a stored item produce the same bodily response as the original event? But if memory is the present organised by the past, then encountering that organisation fully, with nothing held back or defended against, is not retrieval at all. It is the present briefly becoming, in its relational structure, what it was at the time the experience first shaped it. The somatic release that follows is the system reorganising again, this time with the person fully present and able to integrate what the earlier version of themselves could not.

The Question of Whose Memory It Is

There is a further implication of this framework that I find genuinely strange and have not fully resolved, and I want to be honest that this part is more speculative than the rest.

If memory is a relational pattern in a medium, rather than an item belonging to a particular owner, then the question of whose memory something is becomes less straightforward than the storage model assumes. A filed item has an owner, the person whose file it is in. A relational pattern in a medium is, in principle, a different kind of thing. The medium is shaped by its history of interactions, and those interactions are not always confined to the boundary we draw around an individual.

I do not want to overclaim here. But this framework at least leaves room for something that practitioners across many traditions have reported and that the storage model has no way to accommodate at all: experiences of memory-like material that do not feel strictly personal, i.e., material that feels ancestral, or shared, or that seems to belong to a lineage rather than to the individual currently experiencing it. If memory is fundamentally about relational structure persisting in a medium, and if that medium is not as cleanly bounded by the skull as we have assumed, then the strict ownership model of memory, this memory belongs to this person and no other, may be another assumption inherited from the filing cabinet rather than a discovery about how memory actually works.

I am not claiming this is established. I am claiming that the field model, unlike the storage model, does not rule it out in advance. And given how often practitioners across very different traditions report something like this independently, a framework that can at least make room for the possibility seems worth taking seriously over one that cannot accommodate it at all.

I think the storage model of memory has persisted as long as it has, not because the evidence supports it particularly well, but because it is intuitive in a culture built around filing cabinets, computers, and the idea that information is a thing you can put somewhere and get back later. The relational model is less intuitive and, I think, considerably closer to what memory actually is: not a record of the past kept somewhere in the present, but the present itself, shaped by the past, capable of becoming, for a moment, what the past once was.

The smell of hand cream did not bring the past back to me. For a moment, it let the present become the past again. That is a much stranger thing to be true. I think it might also be the truth.

Kathy Postelle Rixon is a researcher at Cambridge, Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, and shamanic practitioner whose work sits at the intersection of philosophy of mind, relational ontology, and shamanic practice. She can be reached at kathy@magicinharmony.com or at www.magicinharmony.com.

Have you had a memory that felt less like recall and more like briefly being somewhere again? I would genuinely like to hear about it.