(I was going to ask in this thread, but rather than hijack that …)
Does the brain store moving memories (ie movies), or does it (as i suspect) store
“key frames” (like in animations) and then recall using some sort of tweening process?
And, can we know ?
It would explain a lot … !
Neither. It’s much more complicated than either.
Heck, imagine trying to store a memory of just a single still image. You know what a penny looks like, right? Well then, tell me: Which direction is the profile of Lincoln facing on a penny?
Of course science’s ignorance of how it all works exceeds what is understood, and it is more complex than either of the two choices given, but of the two it is much closer to “key frame” conceptualization than movies … which is true as well for real time perceptual processing in the first place: we hone in on critical features, match to archetypes we expect to experience (be they hard-wired or learned with experience) and fill in the rest, usually in service of filtering for “signal” and editing out “noise”, but sometimes not.
At a basic level exploiting those mechanisms to create incorrect experiences of the reality is how many perceptual illusions work. We identify corners and create lines between - in the wild when they are actually there but partly obscured - and in illusions when they are actually not there at all. We hear words that are muffled using context. Slightly higher level illustratively is the classic “invisible gorilla” test.
We attend selectively in real time, creating and imposing wholes out of the noise, often failing to experience that which we were not primed to see, so of course we have only some key features accessible to use to recreate as what we remember as “episodes” (Word used as what we are discussing gets called “episodic”, as opposed to “procedural”, memory. Also referred to as explicit vs implicit memory.)