emitted by the source, parts of each wave-front passing through both openings, and producing our interference pattern on the plate—but this pattern manifests itself to observation in the form of single particles.” (Erwin Schrödinger, “Science and Humanism”, in Science and the Greeks and Science and Humanism p. 151).

Between two discrete observations of a particle’s state (be it an electron or a pho-ton), between entrance and exit, we can no longer trace a continuous trajectory within the box, no longer distinguish it from other similar particles following other trajectories. The physicist must resign himself to abandoning causality in its conventional form, and his very subject matter eludes him.

From this perspective, similarities already emerge between the brain-memory black box and the wave-particle black box. Memory itself, as experienced by us through voluntary or involuntary recall, likewise eludes the kind of causal tracing that would let us follow its thread backward through successive steps to its origin—the source-event of an encounter or experience located in our past. Memory’s sudden crystallization during involuntary recall evokes the wave-particle materi-alizing randomly here or there during measurement, in a way that precludes the reconstruction of a continuous trajectory, and consequently the deduction of its position from knowledge of its previous states using deterministic schemes. Only large numbers permit deterministic description in statistical terms: the distribu-tion of measurements in space, just as the associated dynamic states, can be pre-dicted with remarkable accuracy, but this applies only to crowds of generic occur-rences, never to specific events. And just as the wave function “collapses” abruptly during measurement to a value corresponding to an observable’s eigenstate, a memory temporarily crystallizes during recall into a particular version—more or less probable—depending on the circumstances of recall and various contextual cues. More precisely, the parallel to the context of experimental measurement in physics would be the complex network that connects a given memory with other memories, but also with the emotions, perceptions, and thoughts coloring and transforming it at that precise moment. Thus, modulated by context, memory crystallizes to appear in a particular form.

If there was a way to give mathematical expression to a “mnemonic wave func-tion,” it would associate each variable with a spectrum of values corresponding to the memory’s different eigenstates, with their respective probabilities. This remains only an analogy, since the fundamental difference is that quantum prob-abilities reflect the situation’s intrinsic indeterminacy, while at first glance, mem-ory-associated probabilities might simply express an incomplete description of the underlying neuronal configurations. However, in all fairness, this limitation strictly applies only under the hypothesis of one-to-one correspondence between distinct, individualized memories and their material counterparts. Considering that each sensory memory component actually activates distinct networks, and conversely that identical networks can participate in preserving and recalling a host of different memories, the idea that each memory corresponds to a well-de-fined neuronal configuration only retains persisting heuristic value. And the prob-lem worsens because memory’s psychic nature grows increasingly elusive and less resembling a discrete state with defined contours as we move from actualized memory toward the nebulous background against which it stands out. The cou-pling between memories and distributed neural activation patterns loses much of its relevance when we focus specifically on what persists between two recollection episodes.

It will be noted, moreover, that in connectionist conceptions, the momentarily regenerated mnemic content doesn’t survive the recollection episode; it immedi-ately dissipates as a flow of traces distributed across various brain regions—traces