precisely what persists in episodic memory, attached to singular moments. Not the spatial scene where action unfolds, but the gesture that gathers scattered elements in a single impulse [élan]; not the group portrait where everyone poses properly, but the tension and energy running through bodies, a certain atmospheric quality giving that hour its particular tone. These flowing qualities are not attached to dis-crete instants; they are strands of duration that attention vaguely identifies in the moment, strands overlaid with other strands experienced simultaneously across multiple scales, as well as more or less expansive, more or less profound planes of consciousness. Within perceptual experience itself exists something other than an image, something less defined than an image, yet already more than an indistinct cloud of sensory aspects delivered to the brain’s machinery.

To put it in another way, memory is inseparable from a continuous perceptual activity, a process that bears no resemblance to what might be suggested by the cinematographic recomposition of experience through successive discrete cap-tures. If recording occurs on some level, it happens like the continuous sculpting of a rock by flowing water. If the brain manages to extract from the present what will later prove useful for reconstructing memories from perceptual fragments, it doesn’t do so by capturing things at 24 frames per second, but in keeping with the ongoing action, following attention’s oscillations. Of course, each moment of experience can be decomposed, in retrospect, from multiple viewpoints. Whatever its atmospheric unity, the countryside picnic from that summer after-noon ten years ago admits an indefinite multiplicity of possible decompositions, virtually enveloping countless “images,” snapshots, sequences, and more or less blurred vignettes we might replay when the time comes. But precisely, this isn’t what’s preserved, even if this is how we typically remember it. In this regard, the sensible essence of Combray condensed in a madeleine’s taste remains the exception proving the rule.

Let us provisionally leave Bergson, whose scientific knowledge, though impres-sive, inevitably seems insufficient at a time when brain imaging appears to realize the fantasy of tracking memory dynamics in real time. Much remains to discover on that subject, and models abound. Yet the relevance and persistence of the philosopher’s questions is clear from how the problem of consciousness—of the emergence of mind from neural processes—keeps resurfacing like a sea serpent. Assuming the problem is properly framed, we’re still left facing something essen-tially opaque here. As opaque, perhaps, as the double-slit apparatus, that other black box physicists devised to test light’s properties: a double-slit plate toward which particles are projected, inputs and outputs corresponding to measurements taken at the extremities, a mathematical framework organizing these measure-ment results, and in between, at the device’s core, a process that defies description in conventional terms and utterly escapes our ordinary intuition about particles moving through space.

Shall we say the particle emitted at the entrance immediately spreads throughout space like a field, enjoying diffuse existence until observed? We must still acknowl-edge that the obseved interference fringes—whose characteristic pattern indeed signals wave-like behavior—consist entirely of impact traces marking where par-ticles struck the screen. Schrödinger described this unprecedented situation:

“We must, so it seems, give up the idea of tracing back to the source the history of a particle that manifests itself on the plate by reducing a grain of silver-bromide. We cannot tell where the particle was before it hit the plate. We cannot tell through which opening it has come. This is one of the typical gaps in the description of observable events, and very characteristic of the lack of individ-uality in the particle. We must think in terms of spherical waves