Memories are stored inside our brain. The brain is housed inside our body. Our body is our own; we "own" our body and are in control of it. It obeys to our commands, right? So it should be natural that our memories, since they are ours, should be something that we can use as we wish and control, just as our body. We should be able to access it at free will. It’s like reading a book right? If I want to turn to page 27 and start reading from then, I should!

Well, as you have probably understood from the title of the article, I’m trying to imply here that the complete opposite is true… The memories of our brain do not belong to us and we cannot access them at free will! Instead, they are kind of locked inside our brain and are fed to us only on a need-to-know basis! We cannot choose to activate a part of them unless the mechanism of thought works in a specific way to signify that there is an incentive to access this part (we have something to gain out of it). Then and only then we focus our attention (Battery in Noesis terms) on this memory and start to enrich it until we receive the pleasure we wanted (or avert the discomfort we were worried about). Once this is done, we lose again the ability to access this part of our brain, because as we said it’s on a need-to-know basis 🙂

But wait a minute, you might say: "I can remember what I ate yesterday evening with a lot of detail and I can continue thinking about it for as long as I like! I am the owner of my memories and can bend them at will".

"Sure you’re right", I would reply. "But the fact that you’ll continue thinking about yesterday’s dinner long and hard will only be done because I challenged you for it and thus provided you an incentive for this action. In other words, we return to the need-to-know basis. You will get a prolonged access to this memory because you need to prove me wrong and get some pleasure out of it. Once you think you thought long enough about it and proved your point, again then you stop!"
And, by the way, yesterday’s dinner was a location in your memory palace primed by me! If I told you about thinking your math teacher at school, you would be involuntarily diverted to think about this. The same if I had asked you about your favorite animal instead, and so on…
The point I’m trying to prove here is that we don’t have free access to our own memory and we do access it only when the external stimuli (e.g. an article you’re reading on noesistheory.com) provide as with an incentive (Driving Pocket in Noesis terms) to access a very specific part of our memory (be it yesterday’s dinner or our math teacher or our favorite animal, or other).

Of course our mind is a minefield of potential pains or pleasures that we may experience, and that’s why many stimuli from the environment trigger such reactions and we are forced to activate parts of our memory to think and to act for maximizing our pleasure potential. This might cause us to believe that we are the masters of our brain, but instead it was the external stimuli that triggered those reactions; we never had free will over it.