A thought experiment from The Emergent Mind posed an intriguing question: If the brain contains all memories of a person’s lived experience, could we theoretically reanimate it through electrical signals and extract its contents?

This scientific speculation—treating consciousness as readable data encoded in neural architecture—immediately brought to mind an unlikely parallel: the mythology of Highlander, where immortals absorb the power and essence of other immortals through beheading the other immortals.

The Intertextual Connection

These two texts operate in entirely different domains—one in neuroscience, the other in fantasy cinema—yet they converge on a shared conceptual problem: Can lived experience be transferred between individuals? This convergence exemplifies intertextuality: not mere reference or allusion, but the generative space where disparate texts illuminate each other, producing insights neither contains independently.

The Emergent Mind asks whether memories persist as recoverable patterns in preserved neural tissue. Highlander imagines the Quickening—a violent, mystical transfer where one immortal absorbs another’s power and fragments of their existence through decapitation. While the films are ambiguous about whether complete memories transfer, the premise remains compelling: what one immortal lived through over centuries somehow becomes part of the victor. Each survivor becomes a cumulative vessel carrying the essence of multiple lifetimes.

Strip away their respective frameworks (laboratory versus lightning storm), and both explore the same underlying question: Could what someone experienced, learned, and became be separated from their original body and integrated into another consciousness?

Two Models of Experience Transfer

The neuroscientific model is preservationist: memory as encoded pattern, potentially readable through sufficiently sophisticated technology. The challenge is technical—can we map the connectome precisely enough? Can we interpret the patterns we find? Can we extract the data without the substrate?

The mythological model is absorptive: experience transfer through succession, each victor becoming a repository that accumulates power and essence from defeated immortals. “There can be only one” because someone must ultimately carry the weight of all these accumulated lives.

What unites them is treating lived experience as something that could transcend its original vessel—whether through technological extraction or mystical absorption.

The PKM Parallel

This raises an interesting question about our personal knowledge management systems. When we build digital gardens, Zettelkasten, or networked note systems, aren’t we attempting a gentler version of the same process? We externalize thinking, preserve insights across time, create structures that outlive biological memory’s limitations.

We cannot absorb someone’s complete lived experience, but we can traverse their thinking—follow their links, understand their categorizations, see which concepts they positioned adjacent to one another. Digital gardens make the structure of someone’s thinking legible to others.

Perhaps this is the more achievable form of knowledge transfer: not extraction and absorption of raw experience, but understanding how someone connected disparate elements. Not inheriting their memories, but learning their method of pattern recognition.

Open Questions

• [?] Is the structure of thinking separable from the experiences that generated it?
• [?] Can we transfer the process of insight even when we cannot transfer the experiences themselves?
• [?] What is lost when embodied experience becomes externalized information?
• [?] Do our PKM systems capture thinking, or merely its artifacts?

The neuroscientists want to read the brain. The immortals absorb power and echoes of lives lived. We build systems that capture how we think. All three approaches assume something meaningful can transcend its original container.