The other day, for some reason my mind wandered to a birthday party my daughter had attended. I was trying to remember when it was, eventually deciding (correctly, it turned out) that it was about three months ago. The way I decided was by analyzing how old the memory felt. I knew it wasn't a day old memory, and yet I also sensed that it wasn't a year old memory. How did I know that? Computers certainly don't work that way. A piece of information is either stored in a specific place or it isn't. It doesn't get hazier with time.
Anyway, isn't that kind of wild, that the brain somehow works like that? Eventually when we figure out how it works, we'll probably laugh at the late 20th/early 21st century view of the brain as a computer. Same way we kind of laugh now at the early 20th century view of the brain as a telephone switchboard.
