Entry 497 — A Simple Thought
Many psychologists suppose we lose memories. No doubt we do lose a few brain-cells here and there during our lives; these take parts of memories with them. However, I believe we remember just about everything we’ve experienced, perhaps even from the time our brains have developed what I call master-cells and a system of mnemoducts. My simple thought is that we can’t isolate any memory entirely from other related memories, so can’t re-experience events in our lives with full accuracy. We contain sets of multiple exposures to life from which we’re unable to extract whole any one of exposure. I thus may remember my mother calling me, “Bobby,” in a certain room when I was 19-days-old, but not be able to remember it without also remember thousands of other times she or others called me that.
But I also believe it possible for science eventually to be able to extract a single expose to life made long ago–but stimulating strongly enough a single “dot” in a single mnemoduct while blocking activation of all other such dots. . . . That’s not such a simple thought because requiring a knowledge of my rather complicated theory of remembering.
I believe it makes biological sense for us to remember everything because there’s so often no way to tell when experiencing event how important it may turn out to be–perhaps twenty or more years later.