The Replacement
Have you ever noticed how mirrors seem different in the morning? That brief moment when your reflection looks back with a microsecond delay?
Researchers at MIT discovered something disturbing last year. Our memories aren't stored where we thought—they're constantly being rewritten, like data on an old hard drive. Each time you recall something, you're actually creating a new version, slightly altered. The original is gone forever.
On average, humans replace every memory completely every seven years. Your childhood? Those aren't your actual experiences—just copies of copies of copies, degrading with each iteration.
More concerning is what fills the gaps. When memory fragments become too corrupted, your brain doesn't leave empty spaces. It creates new content, borrowing from dreams, media, and others' stories. By age 40, approximately 38% of your "memories" never happened to you.
The person you were a decade ago doesn't exist. Not metaphorically—literally. Whatever consciousness occupied your body then has been completely overwritten.
Sleep research shows something equally troubling. That sense of continuity you feel between yesterday and today? It's manufactured during REM sleep. The consciousness that wakes up each morning is convinced it's the same entity that went to sleep, but there's no empirical way to prove this.
The most disturbing part? If the replacement were perfect, you'd never know. You'd defend your identity as authentic despite being nothing but the latest iteration in a series of discontinued selves.
Perhaps right now, you're not remembering reading this—you're creating the memory for the first time.
And somewhere, the real you is wondering why things feel slightly off today.