Perfect Mnesic Replay: A Hypothesis on Temporally Proportional, Involuntary Memory Reactivation

This proposal describes a theoretical mental phenomenon called "Perfect Mnesic Replay." We assume that memory carefully registers all life experiences, in a manner of speaking, as a movie reel with an intrinsic, ongoing time dimension. We speculate on the existence of a perfect mnesic replay process, possibly accessible through a special memory reactivation procedure, even in anterograde amnesia. This reopened process is presumed to be totally involuntary and uncontrollable by the subject, once initiated. The mathematical relationship between the original encoding time of a memory segment and its subsequent reactivation (replay) time is the subject of this study. This relationship is theorized to be linear, defined by one constant K. This paper presents the theoretical rationale for this hypothesis, a proposed experimental protocol for the first verification using animal models, and minimally necessary safety considerations. The consequences of being able to illustrate and understand such a precise replay mechanism could have far-reaching influences on our understanding of many fundamental psychological processes and offer unprecedented empirical access to the nature of subjective experience. The theoretical framework posits a linear relationship between encoding and replay duration, leaving the detailed mathematical modeling, particularly for scenarios with large temporal dilation, open for expert development.