Imagine you are here at this moment of time. Just like you are sitting here right now. You look around you and you see the things you see right now. But then you imagine that you have no memory. No memory at all. Again, you look around your environment and you see the things you see right now. But one thing changed, you have no clue what you see. You have no words for the shapes and colors within your vision. Secondly, it becomes very hard to distinguish objects from each other, how would you know that the clothes of people are not just their skins? How would you know that the chair on the floor is not a part of the floor? That walls are solid? that the sun is far away, that you won’t float into the air, or that you are not the only one in this universe? Often, the materials and colors assist your senses to make decisions, but the associations between colors, materials, and shapes are also memories of your mind.

But something weirder will happen. Because when you truly have no memory. You won’t see movement. Imagine that with every new frame you see with your brain, the previous frame is erased. So at first, you might see a car at 20 meters away, you blink your eyes, your memory is erased, and then it is at 10 meters away, a moment passes; 5 meters away, and suddenly it hits you. You are being thrown in the air, but all you see is a different environment with every moment. You start to feel pain, but you don’t really feel pain, because you can’t remember life without it. Your broken leg might always have been broken. This feeling you feel in your legs might have always been there.

This is your normal state now, each second passes and you move along with it. It seems like you just become like a sponge floating in water. You move along with the currents of the environment. You don’t know how the environment will steer you towards any directions, and you also have no intention to steer things yourself. Because as you can’t see movement, you won’t know what it is, and you won’t know how to move any of your limbs. Furthermore, when you are looking at your arms, you won’t recognize their yours. The movement of your arms will always occur with some delay, and you need memory to account for this delay.

Of course, when you think about the now, the now takes only a Planck second (the smallest unit of time), which is a quite unimaginable length. However, our brains process reality a lot slower then the Planck second, so our minds already interpolate through time and make seemingly fluid movements across the time frames of reality. Nevertheless, I still don’t know how fast we can actually think but I also think this is dependent of the rhythm of brain activity (less rhythmic is more distinct brain activity within each second). So I actually don’t know how quickly memory needs to be removed before one can really live without any memory. This difference in time will be very short, so it is almost necessary that memory isn’t processed at all and just flows out the brain. Maybe in some forms of coma’s this occur or severe cases of dementia.