Do you remember the days that were forgettable? The days where nothing of note happened? Yeah, me neither. The human brain is a wondrous machine that translates perceptions into memories but what happens when nothing worth remembering occurs? Does time pass? Time may pass but it is not perceived to change. Maybe that’s why time seems to speed up as we grow older–our noteworthy experiences are fewer and farther between and our brains are only encoding novel experiences as memories.
Sure your internal rhythm keeps ticking away and so you can sense the passage of time but the Circadian Clock resets every 24 hours so time beyond the stretches of hours must be perceived another way– time must be perceived retroactively through memories.
What makes us remember? Well, we already know that novel experiences are encoded by our brains but think back! Each memory you have is responsible for producing an emotion!
The day I almost drowned in my cousin’s pool by diving at the deep end without knowing how to swim, the time I almost accidentally walked off the dock after giving a double blood donation, the day I was locked outside for hours in freezing snow. These experiences were all life-threatening. No wonder my evolutionarily crafted brain encoded them! And it’s not difficult to see that the stronger and more important the emotion is in relation to survival the more ‘sticky’ the memory becomes.
Tell me. Do you most remember all the times you were confused, bored, or calm? Or do you remember those times that you were horrified, blissful, joyous, and excited? I bet you remember those times of stronger emotions and you might remember a time where you felt a certain way but unless that situation made you feel a strong emotion I doubt you remember that situation very vividly. Weak emotions encode weakly and strong emotions stick.
Here’s a fun word–chronostasis; it’s an illusion in which a new task seems to be extended in time like a clock that looks like it’s stopped when first looking at it or when quickly moving your eyes.
My sister once told my brother and I that before she broke her nose getting hit with a softball time seemed to slow leading up to the hit. She’s not alone. I’m sure you know of an accident in which you or a loved one were in danger where time seemed to slow to a halt. Fear is probably the emotion that my sister was experiencing when the ball was hurtling toward her and it was probably responsible for the time dilation. So time as its humanly perceived can be manipulated.
What if memory could be improved by technological means? This is already a reality; Recordings on video and in pictures give us views into the past and can awaken dormant memories or even (more commonly) give us new emotions that then supplant our original memories. My grandfather looked a lot like my dad but that’s about all I remember about him and yet a google search for Julio Villarmán returns a photo of him from 1974 when he received a 30 year length of service award from the United States Ambassador to the Dominican Republic. Without technology, I wouldn’t be able to have such a connection to my late grandfather.
Memories are powerful but they’re also lossy. It’s a term in Computer Science that means that as a process it’s prone to loss or decay. We have memories of memories and memories of recordings of memories and these memories change every time we engage with them and shape our perception of the world going forward. They are experienced again when neurons throughout the hippocampus fire and reconstitute experience on the fly from constituent parts all throughout the brain sort of like how a browser composes a website. After watching a video of an event It’s hard to say what is genuinely remembered and what has been extracted from these supplemental materials and no matter how hard you try you can’t record the depth of experience on a video tape.
This lossy nature exposes our minds to another phenomenon–emotions (our retroactive perceptions) can be changed or manipulated as well. Watching videos of myself as a kid bowling I no longer know what I was feeling nor does my brother, sister, or mother but I do know what color shirt I was wearing regardless of it’s importance. This is also already done by governments who want to keep their people in line and through movies, photo manipulation, and through word of mouth (eg. Holocaust denial.)
What am I getting at here? Every experience, every sight and smell, and every memory, everyone you’ve ever loved and anything that could ever be is lossy patterns in electrical pulses reverberating in a void until all echoes fall silent. Holograms produced by grey matter in 300 million year old reptiles. A sequence of self-referential forms in a vast web. But we’re holograms together. Your hands, distant planets, reason and doubt, and all the space in between just patterns blinking in the cosmos and that’s incredible.
Your time is precious and the moments you perceive are valuable. Slow down and enjoy life. Experience the world and make memories because memories are ephemeral and yet they’re all we are. You may want to skip a point in time such as this one because “Nothing is happening” but making memories and experiencing the complete scope of human perception is your prerogative.
Live life and make memories because today is literally remarkable!
Here are some pictures of my Abuelo (Grandfather) when he was working for the American Embassy in The Dominican Republic. Please be sure to experience life and make memories; share your memories with me in the comments. See you next time internet friend 🙂
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