Judging from the comments, there's a massive misunderstanding going on between the readers, the author, and everyone's understanding of ourselves. There are ce

Judging from the comments, there's a massive misunderstanding going on between the readers, the author, and everyone's understanding of ourselves. There are certainly odd things in this article. What I think the author wants to get at: We don't store specific information like "on a dollar bill, there's a line going from x of the left side to y of the bottom side with a curvature of z" in a specific container labeled "info about dollar bills", to be read out everytime you interact with one. Instead, each time we pay using such a bill, the chain of neurons firing from the moment you open your purse to the moment you get your receipt, as a whole, is responsible for your internal representaion of a dollar bill: (1) first glimpse of sheets of paper in purse (2) fumble indivual sheets to examine more closely (3) recognize key elements like green colour, rectangular, famous bust in the center (4) in case you didn't, now you know you've got cash in there (5) remember the total, do some arithmetic to figure out which bills to hand over (6) extract bills from purse (7) extend hand to hand cash over to cashier (8) wait for receipt/pack things (9) get receipt (10) purchase complete. This entire chain (which is obviously incomplete for the sake of demonstration), with all the completely unrelated stuff about rummaging in a purse or human interaction, comes together to form what you think of as a dollar bill. This is how we store information, by relating it to stuff we already know. Which is why it makes sense that babies come into this world with only the bare minimum. We don't pop out ready made, that's the whole point of childhood and adolescence. We build ourselves, unconsciously incorporating our surroundings into our personality, by constantly relating to what we know, comparing new things to old things. This implies that a faulty impression early on has disastrous consequences in whatever is built afterwards, meaning most of it. (edit) just came up with a nice formulation: the brain doesn't store raw data as in pixels or decimal values, it stores characteristics and rebuilds the thing you're thinking about as well as your medium of expression allows it to (which is why you can always think about something, but when asked to draw or describe it, it just seems impossible). This explanation is far from perfect, and I don't understand how our notions of numbers for example comes to be, but seeing as maths is really just a load of charateristics giving intersting results when combined, I see no problem.