Your brain is more like Wikipedia than a hard drive.

It's interesting to think about how our brains work, specifically about how we remember things and recall them. It turns out that our memories aren't as static as we might think - they can be rewritten and changed over time. This is because our cognitive functions are quite plastic and malleable. Our brains tend to work more like Wikipedia and less like a hard drive on a computer where data is recorded accurately, stays unchanged over time and is recalled at will. Like Wikipedia, our facts and content are being updated and 'corrected' over time by many different sources and input.

As a result, our beliefs and opinions also tend to change over time, as our cognitive functions also change. This means that we're not necessarily the same person we were 5 or 10 years ago, and it also means that we're not limited by the things we once believed or thought to be true. We can grow and change as people, and our brains allow for that.

This also has implications for how we view ourselves. If our memories and sense of self can be rewritten and changed, then maybe we're not as limited or defined by our past as we once thought.

In a recent study called the Audience Congruent Biases in Eyewitness Memory and Judgment, it was found that "participants were more likely to report seeing a weapon when they believed that the audience agreed with their initial judgment about an event or individual. In other words, people were more likely to see what they wanted to see."

This means that our beliefs and memories can change based on the feedback we get from other people, which is a very interesting conclusion. Studies have also shown that there's a clear connection between memory and imagination - in one study, scientists "found that if you imagine doing an activity it becomes easier to remember how to do that activity later."

In another study done back in 1973 called Memory for Tacit Implications of Sentences, researchers found that when subjects were presented with misleading information after a word task, the subjects either didn't notice it or couldn't remember it.

However, in the second part of this same study, the misleading information was placed in a written story about an event and it was found that the subjects were more likely to remember the information if it was included in the story.

These studies and others like them show that our memories are not static and unchanging, but rather they are fluid and changeable based on a variety of factors.

Ultimately, the takeaway from all of this is that our brains are more complex than we might have thought and that they are constantly evolving and changing. This means that we should be open to change and growth, and also be patient with ourselves as we go through life. It also points us toward questioning and contemplating what we think and 'remember' as facts. As a result, we often find that we have more in common with other human beings than we previously thought. I think we can all agree, this is a helpful and hopeful way forward.