QU'AS TU FAIT DE TON TALENT ?

Instead of encoding pixels or transcripts, we encode new stimuli with respect to other things we have learned, including concepts both physical and social. What we learn is represented in terms of what we already know. Two people can look at a list of important dates in Mongolian history, but if one of them commands a richly developed model of Mongolia, the new facts are more readily incorporated into her network of knowledge. For the other, who knows little about the country and has never been there, the facts have little scaffolding upon which to attach. Recall that in the pace layers model, slow layers provide a framework for the fast layers. As a result, early experience becomes foundational. It develops into the architecture upon which everything subsequent is built. Everything new is understood through the filter of the old. For better or worse, this makes some dreams of the future impossible. In the movie The Matrix, Neo and Trinity come across a B-212 helicopter on the top of a building. Neo asks, "Can you fly that helicopter?" Trinity replies, "Not yet, rings her colleague, and asks for "a pilot program for a B-212 helicopter." Her colleague frenetically hits keys on a collection of computers, and within a few seconds the program is uploaded into Trinity's brain. Neo and Trinity board the helicopter, and she expertly steers it between buildings. We would all love this future, but it's not going to happen. Why not? Because memory is a function of everything that has come before it. One person's knowledge of flying a B-212 helicopter might be encoded by its similarity to riding a motorcycle. Another person might have grown up on horses, so she builds the piloting knowledge on top of motor memories of steering a steed. A third person stores the knowledge in the context of a childhood video game. Each person grasps the task differently, making it impossible to have a standard set of instructions that is uploadable to any brain. In other words, unlike a computer, the "instructions" for flying the machine aren't a file; they are instead tied to everything that has come before in your life. Earlier experiences build an internal city of memory, into which each new resident must find his unique fit.