artificial, fabricated, engineered nature of biographical (or “episodic”) memory, revisited and reconsolidated through our acts of attention and reminiscence, via processes of reinforcement or long-term potentiation of the synaptic connec-tions involved in preserving... what exactly? The memories themselves, persisting between reminiscences? Or rather the multiple representations corresponding to them when they actualize in consciousness as images, hovering between imagi-nation and perception? Proponents of the connectionist approach to mind read-ily speak of “neural activation patterns” distributed throughout brain matter to emphasize the dynamic nature of memory formation and preservation, but the fundamental problem remains: how to reconcile these third-person descriptions with the first-person experience we all have of lived memories—memories lost and found, recollected and transformed. What is the mode of existence of a sin-gular memory, given its elusive, unstable phenomenological texture, confirmed by connectionists’ recognition of its essentially composite and reconstructed character?

A sober, deflationary, even reductionist interpretation would would claim that in reality there is no such things as memories, only acts of recollection. “Memory” thus becomes merely a convenient label for a class of diverse representations grouped under a common mnemonic theme. But doesn’t this simply shift the question to the theme itself? How does the theme persist? For clearly there exists a referential anchor to which we return periodically: a past experience, a fragment of autobiography, is targeted not as the present it once was but as an element of our past, that we can target at different levels of generality, and sometimes recall directly as episodic memories whose vivid details create a genuine sense of revival. This coupling between a mnemonic theme and its specific manifestations in evoked or recollected memories seems fundamentally tied to our subjective experience of memory. The central role memories play in our lives suggests we consider that memories have a life of their own. One approach is to frame mem-ory temporally as a kind of performance occurring at the scale of a moment, a period, or an entire lifetime. When speaking of a memory, we actually refer to a set of remembering acts that involve mobilizing multiple mnemonic traces pointing toward the same source-event in the past. This framework allows phi-losophers and neuroscientists to begin a dialogue without either side dismissing or drastically reducing the other’s viewpoint. But the real work remains ahead.

“Patterns,” [motifs] “themes”: it is not for nothing that the musical metaphor irre-sistibly suggests itself to us. Bergson, who compared duration to a melodic flow, insisted on the fact that the process of localizing a recollection in the past “cannot at all consist, as has been said, in plunging into the mass of our memories, as into a bag, to draw out memories, closer and closer to each other, between which the memory to be localized may find its place.” (Matter and Memory, New York, Zone Books, 1991, p. 171). But if there’s also no grand album where memories are archived like photographs, what evidence do we have for the existence of memories themselves, beyond the episodes where we recall them as images? Let’s acknowledge that a memory’s mode of existence isn’t that of a fixed perceptual image that can be archived—its identity isn’t that of an object or specific mental content momentarily entering consciousness. There remains the persistent feel-ing that recollection involves more than ad hoc reconstruction cobbled together from experience-fragments stored in our neural circuitry and perpetually reshuf-fled. Bergson argues that we intuitively grasp that something endures beyond our moments of recollection—something not reducible to the neural firing patterns scattered throughout our brains.

We must try to give shape to this intuition, even if it leads us down strange paths. Bergson’s philosophy blazes the trail by first teaching us that experience itself can’t be reduced to a series of archived “snapshots.” Lived experience possesses a certain density or quality of presence that unfolds in duration, and perhaps this is