In Memory Yet Green

There is a quite fascinating article in the spanking new Clarkesworld Magazine about brains and how they function. In it Luc Reid makes a couple of very salient points.

Firstly: our memories are very incomplete. By and large a lot of them are, partially, synthetic constructions. We have certain facts stored in the vaults of the brain and a lot of facts we don't have stored. Thus, when we remember the mind fills in the blanks and so we have what we imagine to be complete and unadulturated memories. The appearance of what happened instead of what actually did happen.

This, interestingly enough, is rather how fiction works. The author throws out a few important facts. He, for instance, describes a scene by pointing out this tree and that house and yonder barking mutt. And the mind of the reader fills in the gaps and gets a full and rich picture of what is going on and what it looks like and how it feels and smells and tastes.

Our mind works like this the whole time, constantly filling in and completing pictures, finding patterns and regularities where none in fact exist. Creating them out of very little. That's why we see faces on the surface of Mars or in omelettes - our brains are wired to see them.

Seasoned neurologists like Lurija and Sacks go a bit beyond this. They claim that our whole consciousness is filled with gaps and glaring holes. They claim that each day we construct our consciousness anew - each day we construct who we are. They claim that our consciousness is not so much a state but a process. Like Phoenix we arise each morning from the ashes of oblivion. Except when we don't. It never may be taken for granted. And the mind is such a delicate instrument, the most delicate there is. No wonder then when things go wrong with it. Miracle that it functions at all.

Those whose consciousness functions poorly may construct a new past for themselves, a new history and a new persona. The flawed mind still connects the dots and where no dots exist it creates them. Usually that works almost as well as the genuine article. Which, as we've seen, isn't all that genuine, to be honest.

But if this gaps in the consciousness theory holds water, then Aldous Huxley was very seriously wrong in his theory. In his book The Doors of Perception he claimed that we see and hear everything, far more than we ever are aware of, and store all of it in the brain. He also believed that the chief function of the mind was to filter most of that unnecessary and unimportant information so it wouldn't clog our consciousness. If we saw and heard and were aware of everything, all the time, saw every tiny detail as through a magnifying glass, and had to notice everything on a conscious level, we'd very soon go mad. Drugs, he thought, disabled the filter and allowed us to experience everything our senses took in, and for once be aware of every tiny detail around us.

"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks in his cavern."

Secondly: each time we access a memory we in essence rewrite it. Remembering something tampers with that memory and ultimately alters it. So the memory is never static, our memories live with us. And importantly, "anything that interferes with the re-writing turns recollection into erasure".

Thirdly, and this is an amusing thought: were somebody to try to copy one's brain (or remove it from one's head and plant it in somebody else's head, which is always a dreaded risk), they would have to recreate one's entire endocrinology as well. For the brain does not operate in a vacuum. All the chemicals we have are individual and are part of how our brain functions. So copying (or removing) only one's brain would be futile without the neurotransmitters and organs that operate the whole system. There's a relief.

It's a curiously haunting thought: every time we remeber something that memory is, if ever so slightly altered. You never can go back. You never can step into the same river twice.

The mind is a fragile and incomplete thing and we are largely our own constructions.