Memories and The Mind

Jim Henson and Sammy Davis Jr.

    I like to think of our minds are like computers. There’s a hard drive, apps, an operating system and RAM. The part of our brain that stores everything we’ve ever known and learned is like the Hard Drive. I like to think of our 5 senses as apps. RAM is all our thoughts and actions throughout the day, anything at the forefront of our mind at a given time; I’ve got to deal with that project at work today, brushing my teeth, do I really want to leave my house tonight, Christina Applegate, oh shit that bill is overdue, running for the train because I see it’s in the station so I’ve got to fly down that staircase to make it and what the hell am I really doing with my life? All those sorts of things. Sometimes my RAM is wonky. It’s hard to access the hard drive or my apps are running slow so it needs to be optimized, like with some coffee. Some folks use cocaine. The things that interest me most though are what we know and what we remember as it relates to our personal lives.
     Of course everyone is different when it comes to these things. Everyone has different processors in their brains and different capacities for understanding and remembering. But I doubt anyone can recall what they were thinking or doing on September 12th, 1998, unless that was the day they got married. We do not remember the mundane and ordinary things of everyday life, even if at that time they seemed so important. We may not even remember the non-mundane stuff either, but I believe all our experiences are stored deep in the tissues of our minds. If we see a picture from one day 20 years ago of that time when you and your friends went to the lake, we may recall all sorts of memories that will come rising to the top from deep within our hard drive, to our RAM: The fun you had riding on the jet ski, smoking weed with a power hitter and having sex in a canoe where that family on the motor boat totally saw you. Without the photo though, you probably wouldn’t have thought about any of those things, well maybe you’d still recall having sex in the canoe. But my point is we can only recall so much. And you probably won’t remember your moment to moment thoughts of that day even with that photo. And even within our limits of memory and knowledge sometimes, like computers, our brains can get corrupted.
     In the beginning of March 1990 I started dating a woman whom I had known for about 6 months up to that time. All our dates were fun, especially the one at The Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium, where we saw Laser Zeppelin with a bunch of teenagers. On March 15th, she invited me back to her place. I remember we watched the Rolling Stones on TV, maybe it was MTV, with Guns N Roses. I love how my girlfriend(or soon to be) mentioned how Jagger and Rose were both doing their schtick. You know how Jagger flails around on stage like he’s being electrocuted and Rose is always doing that goddamn sway. Anyway after we watched that we lay down on the bed. We stared at each other for a long time then slowly moved towards each other and began to kiss. We made out the whole night and straight through to the morning. Very magical for sure. That morning, March 16th, I had to be at Brooklyn College. I was a student there and part of the film department’s student film society. We were putting on a workshop for high schoolers about the wonders of film. I wore my girlfriend's flannel shirt and was delirious with no sleep and the excitement of new things. I was reflecting throughout the day on the night before as I navigated to do whatever my assignments were in helping the students. Also on that day we lost two great performers, two larger than life figures: Jim Henson and Sammy Davis Jr.

    We had more fun dates and started meeting each other’s friends. Those times early in romantic relationships have all those magic feelings that emerge when you meet someone and you really like each other. You just can’t stop thinking about them and you want to tell everyone. And when I would tell people about us, I would mention all the things we did in that month of March and I would include any little details that happened along the way such as Henson and Davis’ deaths. Even long after we broke up, I would think about that first month very fondly and still included the details of the untimely deaths of those two icons. That’s the way it was until one day many years later.

    It was around 2010 and I was reading an article online about Jim Henson. At one point the article stated that he passed away on May 16th, 1990. My first thought was to email the writer and tell them that it was March 16th not May 16th that Jim Henson died. Before I did that though, I took a quick look at Henson’s Wikipedia page. No way! It stated right there after his name the date of his death as May 16th, 1990. I then went to check on his death partner Sammy Davis Jr, since they’re forever linked in my mind. What the hell!? Wikipedia also stated his death as May 16th, 1990. I really was dumbfounded. It was like having believed something your whole life, something deep in your heart only to be blindsided one day with the hard truth like Santa Claus doesn’t exist or that our government isn’t a democracy. I know what some of you are saying, “You just simply mixed up the months, they both have M and A as the 1st and 2nd letter. Big deal. People do it all time.” It was a big deal. It’s not like I was just relating a story and meant to say Bill Paxton instead of Bill Pullman. Like I mentioned above, I was sharing my experience of our first month together, March 1990, to friends and family and I was sharing that and reflecting on it almost immediately. So obviously before May 16th, I could not have been sharing something like, “...oh and by the way Jim Henson and Sammy Davis Jr also died that day after our epic make-out”, because they didn’t. Somewhere along the line the files in my brain must have got corrupted or something. When I actually heard the news of their deaths, not only did my brain at some point accidentally put that info in the March 1990 folder instead of the May 1990 folder, it also incorporated it into the narrative of that first month with my girlfriend. Then the question arose of how long after May 16th did I start doing that? Maybe we are in the matrix and they just spliced that wrong info into the existing code, as if that’s how it always was, just to mess with me. If that’s not it though, then the thing that really scares me here is not just that the dates were mixed up on this thing, but how many other corrupt files are in my brain. How many other things in my life are there right now that I believe to be 100% sure of but may in fact be completely wrong?

Our brains are computers
Image courtesy Nathan Johnson, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

    I guess what’s real is that there are many things that could contribute to corrupted files and slow processing that messes with memory and recall, such as traumatic brain injuries, PTSD and diseases like Alzheimer's. Let’s not forget drugs and alcohol either. Years of heavy partying will certainly dull the senses at least. And haven’t we all heard stories about some guy who took one acid trip too many and now his hard drive is completely fried? Despite these things however, there is in fact a very common phenomena called false memory or memory distortion where we think something happened that didn’t or mix up different things that did happen and associate them with each other like I did when I believed that two events, that actually happened two months apart, happened on the same day. All of us are capable of having a memory that didn’t happen.
     Let’s go back to those pictures on the lake. Maybe you didn’t have sex in that canoe with that person because in reality there was no other person there, only you. You were, let's say, very good to yourself but that family had still seen you. The only reason there ended up a partner in your canoe was maybe because you had initially lied to your friends about it in order to appear like some sexual conquistador in their eyes and since you had really wanted that to be the truth anyway, you started to believe it was real. Or maybe you never even went to the lake but all your friends had instead and since they never shut-up about it, somehow it was incorporated in your memory that you went as well. You do truly believe that in your memories you went to the lake but you hadn’t.
     While I guess there are many reasonable explanations as to why our memories may be wrong, including my false memory above, something that in reality is rather insignificant; the deaths of a couple of celebrities, I find all this so discouraging. It still comes down to which of my memories I have about my life to be true and which to be false? What other stories have I been telling throughout the years that never actually happened to me. Did I actually never win the showcase showdown on the Price is Right? Okay I know I didn’t win nor was I even a contestant but I’m still concerned that some significant memories from long ago may be distorted and wrong. I guess the only sure fire way to know what is a real memory as opposed to a false one from this point on is to carry a polaroid camera around like in Memento. But I guess these days we are lucky as we can document every aspect of our lives with smartphone cameras instead. Thank God because using polaroid film would have been so expensive.