Unlived Memories

There was a period in my early 20s when I filtered everything through the framework of science. I analysed every piece of information this way, even my emotions. If I felt something, I was thinking of it as a chemical reaction in the brain.

There was, however, a particular kind of feeling that I just couldn’t fit into that framework, no matter how hard I tried. I’m not sure how to describe these feelings, or how common they are, but the closest comparison might be the ones described by Proust. These are emotions that come unexpectedly, often triggered by a specific scene, smell, sound, or a combination of these. They’re elusive. They feel so foreign and beautiful that you want to hold on to them as much as possible, but they fade like sea bubbles. A lot of the time, they feel like a memory, but you know for sure that you’ve never lived that feeling before.

So what does this have to do with the scientific framework?

The thing about these emotions is that they’re utterly unique. No two are the same. They're closely tied to the specific image or sensory moment that evokes them. In other words, there is an infinite range of these feelings, each born from the exact intersection of your lived experience, your memories, the stories you've heard, dreams you've had, the way you personally see, hear, and smell the world, combined with the precise external stimulus that triggered them.

Can such a spectrum of ethereal emotions really be explained by chemical reactions alone? Could evolution have accidentally produced a system capable of creating an infinite variety of fleeting, profound experiences? Even if every possible combination of image, sound, smell, and memory had a corresponding chemical pattern, it still seems like an impossibly complex accident.

Back then, I couldn’t make sense of it, and I still can’t now, unless I view it through an idealist lens rather than the materialist one offered by science. Through that lens, you may begin to catch a glimpse of what these feelings might actually mean.