Memories

When something happens to us, or we perveive it with our senses, wether through sight, smell, touch, taste or hearing, it generates something in our minds. An echo. That echo, which will sometimes return, even years later, is what we call memory.

Nobody is really sure how memories are stored. There are certain experts that assert that the brain can store as much as a terabyte. Some say more. In the end, I think, our similarities with our own creations (".. and God created Adam in his own image") are not really that close in the sense of how we remember things nor in the measurability in bits. Again, its probably more about how memory is conceptualized than how the data is stored.

We could be going down a highway we've travelled often and discover a smell that takes us back to our time in the military service (that happened to me in my recent trip to Barcelona). Or even listen a few notes of a song and remember a situation or feeling. Or that piece of poetry that we remember years and years later and still moves us like the first day. And the smell of someones skin which, one day, we smell again.

All these things and more strike chords in us and bring things from the past. Some good, some not so much.

However, that vital instrument can sometimes fail us at the worst possible time. Why? Those of you who know me will know what I'm talking about. Some "accuse" me of not paying due attention or not assigning the right priority, even though I've forgotten things that were only important (vital) to myself.

It's funny but I can recognize someone in a film, remember their movements, their phisonomy and place them in a radically different argumental environment. And I couldn't give you their name to save my life.

Writing these lines I am struck with a theory. Lets go back to the memory being like that of a computer. Whe computers store memory they do it by random allocation (actually, they follow an algorythm) of the space, thus the name RAM. Assume, then, that the mind does something similar, assigning space in the brain as well as synthesizing the concept to be stored. Naturally, humans being, we will assign a path to that memory, we will link it with others. A path that will later be reorganized and, of course, we will assign a priority to it in order to find it faster at a later stage. But, what would happen if, say, by a genetical flaw, the algorythm failed? What if the reorganization lost a path or misplaced it? what if the process was degenerative?

It offends some people. Others find it funny. Sometimes I worry...

... and then I forget...