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About the author:
Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird.
About his bi-weekly column:
Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week.
View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...
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The Memory Trick
This is the last one. The last Tale from the Third Lobe. In case you missed it, Two Headed Cat has come to the planned end of its five year mission, and this is my last article to be published here. Thinking about that, remembering how it all started, brought me to thinking about memory itself in a way that most people have never thought about it.
There's a trick to remembering things, and I'll explain it.
What you were doing was nowhere near out of the ordinary. You were talking on the phone, or eating, or smoking, or driving to work, or sitting on the can, or showering, or masturbating, or doing whatever it was you've done a million times and will do again a million times without really taking note. You remember where you were. You remember what you were wearing, maybe. Maybe you remember what you had for breakfast, or lunch, or dinner.
You remember who you talked to then. Maybe you wouldn't even remember the person you talked to except you remember this moment.
This moment, this ordinary moment, is stuck in your head forever. And there's a reason.
See, there's this thingy in your head. I'm not going to call it by its scientific name, nor am I going to say anything about neurotransmitters. It's more accurate to say there is a process, not a thingy, but it's easier to think of it as a thingy, so it's a thingy.
There's this thingy in your head. It's a filter that keeps the daily barrage of nonsense and unimportant details from saturating your neurons. When this thingy is damaged, or for some reason not working properly, then it lets in everything.
Everything. And everything it lets in stays forever.
For five minutes, half an hour, half a day, maybe a whole day, you're the Rain Man. Or rather, there is now a chunk of time in your memory for which you can play the Rain Man.
I'm pretty sure it's happened to you if you've been around long enough to know how to find your way here. There are very few, very fortunate people for whom it has never happened. But it will. Oh, it will.
I mention the Rain Man for a good reason. The story was based on a real man who could remember all—and I do mean all—of a particular kind of thing that happened to him and most of everything else. He was obviously damaged, though. He seemed to have trouble finding connections between his facts, and most of the time he just seemed dazed.
In light of the way the memory trick works, this makes sense. The data comes pouring in. You get a chance to process it later, if you ever get a chance to process it at all. More often than not, you sit there with it in your stomach like an undigested lump for quite some time.
Long-term and short-term memory are completely different process-thingies. In the way that all primary neurological information is obtained, largely via ice pick, you can make the distinctions quite easily. If you damage a particular area of the brain, you get a kind of amnesia where you can't remember anything that happened more than half an hour ago. Damage another, and you have no idea what happened to you minutes ago, but you can still recite the monologue from Hamlet you were forced to memorize in high school. Damage that thingy in the middle and you're still good for the monologue, still good for the past twenty minute or so, but nothing makes it from short-term to long-term. The thingy in the middle, the gatekeeper, is a separate entity. It has a life of its own.
The gatekeeper keeps the door from short-term to long-term memory closed much of the time. As far as I can figure, there are only three ways through.
1) Repetition. Stuff that you keep beating against your brain will eventually stick. It seems to be a somewhat flaky mechanism, this repetition key, because sometimes stuff slips through this gateway without repetition happening. That's what déjà vu is. I dunno what it would feel like for this gate to stick open all the time, but I bet it would feel familiar.
2) The Rain Man/neuroscience lab way. Damage the gatekeeper in just the right way. Everything, all the time, will just keep cascading through. Bizarrely enough, there seems to be room for all of it, so don't worry on that count. I don't know if the ability to remember everything all the time would be an evolutionary step forward. Perhaps this was something we were all able to do once upon a time, but Darwin discovered it to be a very bad idea.
It probably intensifies all kinds of marital arguments when one side or the other can remember, every time, every little thing the other person has ever said or done. Tha ability to forget was probably driven home with a skillet.
...but that brings us to...
3) ...perhaps, quite possibly, the very next phone call you receive. Or the next newsbreak that interrupts your music, your soaps, or favorite reality show. The next "oh-my-god" post you see in a friend's online journal.
It seems like a total no-brainer, but hardly anyone ever thinks about it: You always remember the thing that happens that completely rearranges your world. News of nationwide tragedy. The death of a close relative. Your first orgasm in the presence of another human being. The attack you couldn't fend off. These things only have to happen once to be remembered forever.
In fact, everything that is sitting around in short-term memory follows the trauma down the same hole. Everything you thought about or experienced for the twenty minutes prior to the wake-up call gets burned in, and quite frequently everything that happens until the next time you sleep—or whenever the Xanax kicks in—you get to keep forever as well.
That's pretty nifty, isn't it?
Got a bunch of stuff in your head right now that you want to remember vividly forever? Perfect. Now all you have to do is wait for your phone to ring.
Just try to make sure you're doing something worth remembering.
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Vidicon is a very good driver. |
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