Memories -why and what lasts!

Do you take pride in the amount of storage in your phone, laptop ? Ever felt grateful that you have got GB’s worth of video,photos in your hand. You could now have a collection of movies and books, that would take a life time to complete in your palm.  Do you feel enriched?, well wait for ages,we the human species, have the gift of being able to reconstruct what happened in the past. Our sense  organs might not be the best in the market (compared to other organisms ), but our retention engine /playback device called brain fills in for it, its the state of art  and best!

However, its not perfect, for you dont get to chose what to keep or what not to keep directly, like you play with your media files in hard disk. But still you get to influence it. These thoughts popped up when I remembered a line from a conversation with a friend. He was surprised because I remembered something he said which was a trivial thought for him. Everyday we kill hours in cafe and we are forced to fill that time with words not worth remembering. But still I rememberd  that “Life is never easy and will never be devoid of challenges, but can be made exciting ever!”

Okay I am not here to ponder on why I did for it, but on why my brain chose to remember it.  And right at the moment, when I put this question,my brain refers me to Inside out. Neuroscientists, should pardon me, because even they are not sure how it works, so I am free to put forth my views.  It will incite more wrath from them,if I show my neural networks to them, because even I would cringe in calling it as a model of human brain.

But the theory is, your experiences are weighted by an importance factor. Again you consciously could assign importance, but it has to be accepted by the dark lord, sub conscious that what you propose is important. You say something is important with thousands if not million neuron spikes from your input senses, but the dark lord gets to veto them out with his single neuron! He decides what stays and how long does it stay, and even where does it stay.

But he is a boss, so doesn’t get in to details, he just checks how it feels. But you as a rational person, assign weights after careful analysis. And though he gives it a careful thought when you weigh something high, he still can reject it ,if he doesn’t feel right. He is the ruler, there is no going against it.

But there is a hack, he being the dark lord, stays in the dark away from the world we imbibe from. All his food for thoughts goes through our senses, if you can filter his inputs you can have an impact on his decision making.

Here we go, we have unlimited storage, a high resolution camera, a reasonably sharp  audio receiver, and an extremely sensitive smell sensor. Smell sensor is not appreciated as often we use it. Its the most sensitive and powerful device! You can close your eyes and plug your ears, but smell, its hard to override its inputs and I assure it impacts almost every choice you make from where to shit to whom to sleep with!

That being said, now its your choice to use these senses and what to let in. Let in more of those content you wish to be retain and your dark lord will oblige!  By the time I learnt this, my dark lord has already learnt some unwanted stuff that conflicts with my conscious brain.

Now when there is a fresh arrival (baby), you get a chance to start from square one, by exposing that little one to all that would only be good.This is that spirit that drives life ahead for millions and zillions of years!