8th
Hacking your long term memory?
Several nights ago, I found myself scrambling for my mobile phone to key down some thought that came to me while I was asleep. I was half awake. Interesting enough, it happened to be a particular word I had heard less than seven times in my life. It so happened that I understood the meaning of the word at that time but when I was fully awake, trying to make a connection in regards to familiarity proved abortive.
I realise one thing: we do have immensely powerful long term memories that constantly record what we see, hear, taste, smell, feel and perceive. Now we think we forget but we actually don’t.
I have a theory that the neurologic connections that form that portion of memory sometimes gets disconnected and so we assume we’ve forgotten since you can’t access the thought. When a connection is re-established, we remember. Think of it as an infinitely large disk storage device with a limited file allocation table or some disk sector that contains data but is not addressed. Reprogramming the storage device to retrieve from those memory locations in the “void” reveals interesting things. Just a theory like I said, it might all be rubbish but some neurologist might want to look into it.
