With physical recognition (touch, temperature, smell, taste, sound, sight), all the details are instantly available to our perception and recall/memory access is easier. It's difficult to fully remember the feeling of a childhood holiday only from your memory. You get a much richer recall experience if you go back to the place/time of year you lived it. Little things will trigger your memory you didn't even know you remembered.
The review author would be less confused if "pattern recognition" was replaced with "memories linked to what you're thinking about." Saying "pattern recognition" of London doesn't make sense to non-tech people. Saying "You remember things attached to London in your mind" helps out more, right?
I like that we are kinda strange.
Is it really the case that my brain is not recognizing patterns when I remember something? I don't think this is the case, otherwise I would never realize something about a remembered object after the fact.
> He does in one place speak of dreaming as a “sequence of patterns” and he might try to say the same about thinking. But this faces obvious objections. First, even if that is true, there is no pattern recognition involved when I dream, or when I think about London and my friends and relatives there.
Seems to me the brain is taking random stimuli and piecing it together into a narrative when one dreams. Sounds like there could be some pattern recognition involved there. Also, the author has never spoken of absent friends and said something like, "Doesn't Bob look sad?" Is he remembering the recognition of sadness, or is he recognizing sadness from the memory, and how could one be sure of the difference?
Methinks the author either knows something left unexplained, or isn't being nearly as clever as he thinks.