Memory

My most creative moments seem to be when I am in the shower. The sensual feeling of the water hitting my skin relaxes me. I used to think it activated the right side of my brain but the myth that the right side of the brain is responsible for creativity has been disproved in recent years. I do think that relaxation aids creativity.

Another prime time for creativity is when you are about to go to sleep, drifting between consciousness and that first stage of sleep where you hear things going on around you but you can’t do anything about them and often don’t remember when you wake up.

Both of these times have something in common. It is difficult to remember what you were thinking when you try to recall them later. I had an incident like that this morning in the shower. I thought of a great topic for a blog post. I tried to fix it in my memory but something distracted me and the next thing I knew I had forgotten it.

That seems to happen more and more frequently as I get older. I don’t think it’s organic, at least not yet. I think it has more to do with the vast amount of experience that I’ve stuffed in my poor brain and the pitiful job that I’ve done of organizing it. My evidence for that conclusion is that I usually do remember things that I’ve had trouble remembering. It usually just takes relaxing and not worrying about it.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have a personal memory prosthesis, a digital memory that I could access directly by thinking about it. A memory that would never fade or alter itself over time. I think we may some day have such a device. I even tell myself that I might live long enough to benefit from such technology.

Part of me knows that it is probably just a pipe dream. Brain prostheses are in the same category as general AI, something that is perennially just five or ten years in the future. And even if it should become technically feasible there is the question of how in the world would I pay for it?

I guess my practical hope is that I manage to live a full healthy life free from debilitating mental ailments. Anything more will be lagniappe. Technology advances at an ever accelerating pace. Things that I would have thought the stuff of science fiction when I was a boy are common place today.

Things like only having three or four channels on TV or phone booths or having to wait a week to get a response from a letter you sent to a friend are totally foreign to kids in their twenties and thirties. Even the fact that I call young adults kids shows my age.

I’ll think of the topic that I forgot and post a blog post based on it. That is, if it’s even worth it when I remember.


Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.