Just yday learned something about microwaves (kitchen appliance). First produced by Raythreon in 1947 were big and expensive ($68,000 in 2023 dollars). By 1986, roughly 25% of households in the U.S. owned a microwave oven, up from only about 1% in 1971. Same goes with solar - it's so cheap now everybody can get small installation. So it's breaktroughs, then incremental improvements in efficiency and production cost. Commercial availability allows scaling and further fall in production cost. It takes time...
Memory is sometimes considered as a network where "pieces of memories' are pulled together to create a memory for "present you". Traumatic memories from the past aren't that traumatic after many years after, and are being changed every time when being recalled (that's one of the theories).
You can lisen to recent Lex podcast with Charan Ranganath, i got it timestamped when talking about child memory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iuepdI3wCU&t=885s
a bit of sidetrack, but i think interesting;
there are some people with aphantasia (which is lack of mental imagery), and they seem to be doing fine (Craig Venter is one of those people).
On this distinction, what exactly is abstract shape? I can imagine cube quite easily, but tesseract is a lot harder. Would it be helpful not to have this visual preconceptions in the mind?