BREAD CRUMBS

I can remember: I’ve noticed how many of my journal entries begin with, “I can remember”. I remember when my dad told stories he leaned on a disclaimer in the second sentence, “In those days. . .” But I don’t hear much reflection from youthful sources. I think for them, forward is more interesting than looking back and a short memory doesn’t have so far to go. The way story and memory work is more complicated than the models we grew up with, but we needed something simple. Instead of filing memories away like books on a shelf, imagine taking the book apart then dropping pages in different places, all over the place until you run out of pages. So when you want to recover that story it’s not just going to the right shelf and pulling the book. A particular memory doesn’t exist as a book-like construct. It exists as a network of sequenced synapses, like Hansel & Gretel’s trail of bread crumbs. 

Imagine a loaf of bread: you want to recall the “Bread” story. Instead of going to the bakery you have to first find the flour, then the yeast, then the eggs, the milk, the salt, etc. then order them correctly and apply the heat;’Voila’ you have the Bread Story. Imagine a GPS that shows just the route from start to finish, all the twists and turns but no names, no numbers, dot to dot, town to town. When you get the dots connected correctly and see a familiar pattern, “Oh yea, that’s Chicago to St. Louis,” you have the story. Memory isn’t stored in one place as a story, rather it is a network of scattered data points that must be reconnected. My simple explanation has problems but then it’s just an old man’s model and you know, entropy never takes a break. If I’ve made any sense at all then I’ll take credit for that part.

I never thought much about how memory works until I stumbled across it on a TED Talk or in a book I was reading. I better get it while I can; no guarantees. Advancing age has a way of leaving one either extremely grateful or regrettably disappointed. I’m in the grateful column and it follows, I’m grateful for that. I have time to dabble with cool stuff now. If you write it down before you forget it’s like crib notes and there’s no rule against cheating.