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Window | Jan 09 2007

Everything we experience is recorded and stored in our brains. I believe I read this many years ago in a science magazine. You might be sitting in a chair, looking out the window, and all the while your brain is silently registering and recording what it feels like to sit in that chair, the feeling of the chair on your butt and the backs of your legs, the pressure of it, as well as everything you see and hear while sitting, things you don’t necessarily even notice, consciously. Actually I saw this on TV. There was a man on an operating table with a sawed-open head. The sawed-opened part had been flipped over and was resting on top of his head. The hinge of this flap (flap is probably the best word for it) was made of skin. A surgeon touched the man’s exposed brain with a pointer that was connected to what looked like a giant car battery. Each time the surgeon did this, he asked the man to say whatever entered his mind. (Yes, the man was conscious during this procedure—in fact, he had to be conscious, or there would be no point in sawing his head open.) Each time the man’s brain was stimulated, he would remember some random, inconsequential experience, like, say, sitting in a chair and looking out the window. I honestly don’t believe I dreamed this. What amazed me was the unconscious part: that the man would remember things he wasn’t aware of when they happened, that everything had been recorded and could be replayed, assuming one could find the play button.

Thinking about this now, I don’t know what the point of all this remembering is. It seems that when everything is remembered, memory is reduced to a mishmash of minutia. Ideally we should only remember what matters to remember, and only forget what matters to forget. It’s impossible of course, because what matters changes, and anyway who’s to say what matters, but still this seems the ideal. Although maybe we already do this, in our fashion, without knowing. This being the work of the unconscious: to choose what matters to remember and to forget (with remember and forget in quotes, of course) and to do so in the background, silently, as we sit in our chairs and look out the window.