I wrote a long answer to this, and sent it in. And came back an hour or so later to find it vanished! Weird, huh? Just kidding.

The prepnderance of the evidence, as you refer to it, is problematical in either direction. The variables are :

(1) people's ability to see memories well without altering them

(2) the unbounded suggestibility of people below a certain state of mental strength, leading to an unlimited set of possible "seeings" that are really just reactions

(3) the ridiculousness of trying to place human thought under the standards of repeatability of condition by which molecules are held to perform in clinical situations, given the fundamental and qualitative differences in their natures

(4) the inability to characterize the difference between synthetic and actual pictures in "memory" (they do act differently but very little work has been done on this issue)

(5) the complexities of putting human beings into situations which call on their abilities but which offer no admiration, acknowledgement or positive feedback (something about which molecules are notoriously indifferent). People tend to withdraw into themselves when challenged. Bricks don't care.

This is probably not because bricks have a higher self esteem; more likely, it is because bricks are unconscious.

A