It's All Connected

"In memory, the images are connected like events and characters in a story."

- Joseph Gold. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 81

This quote reminds me of the book The Modular Brain, in which examples are shown to illustrate how the brain is connected in ways that allow it to function differently according to the patient; perhaps like how stories function through characters.

The Most Important Tool We Have

"Language is, however, the most important tool human beings possess for producing consciousness. Language, in other words, is an organized report of what is going on – a report that can be stored in memory and retrieved by hearing or reading other relevant language cues."

Joseph Gold. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 117

Non-Retrievable Memory

"God only knows how many trillions of memories are stored inside us-memories we’ll never retrieve simply because we don’t have a device that allows us to browse them properly."

- Douglas Coupland The Gum Thief. Random House, pg 193.

The Truth is Hidden Within Us

"Maybe there is a universal truth embedded in everyone's soul.

Maybe we all have the same story hiding inside
like a shared constant in our DNA.

Maybe this collective truth is responsible for the similarity in all our stories.

Truth has a power
and if we all gravitate towards similar ideas,
maybe we do so because those ideas are true,
written deep within is
and when we hear the truth,
even if we don't understand it,
we fell that truth resonate within us,
vibrating with our unconscious wisdom.

Perhaps the truth is not learned by us,
but rather

REcalled

REmembered

REcognized

as that which is already inside us."

- transcribed from the audio book presentation of "The Lost Symbol" by Dan Brown

Exercise Your Memory - Read

"Literature helps you to exercise your memory because your memory is keyed to feelings associated with memory and literature specializes in calling forth feelings."

- Gold, Joseph. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 259

The Brain Records Everything

"Their extraordinary and consistent detail , which was evoked each time the cortex was stimulated, and exceeded anything which could be recalled by memory, suggested to Panfield that the brain retained an almost perfect record of every lifetime’s experience."

- Oliver Sacks. The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Other Clinical Tales. HarperCollins: New York, 1985. pg 137 

Must be Iconic

"Experience is not possible until it is organized iconically; action is not possible unless it is organized iconically. ‘Th brain’s record’ of everything—everything alive—must be iconic. This is the final form of the brain’s record, even though the preliminary form may be computational or programmatic. The final form of cerebral representation must be, or allow, ‘art’—the artful scenery and melody of experience and action."

- Oliver Sacks. The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Other Clinical Tales. HarperCollins: New York, 1985. pg 148

Externalized Memory

"The one thing that differentiates human beings from all other creatures on Earth is the externalization of subjective memory – first through notches in trees, then through cave paintings, then through the written word and now, through databases of almost otherworldly storage and retrieval power."

- Coupland, Douglas. Microserfs. HarperCollins Books: Toronto, 1995. pg 359

Experiences are Storied

“It is then brought into consciousness and “storied,” normalized and shared as family history, and so becomes part of the open record of the child’s experience.”
- Joseph Gold. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 87

We Remember Everything!

“Their extraordinary and consistent detail, which was evoked each time the cortex was stimulated, and exceeded anything which could be recalled by memory, suggested to Panfield that the brain retained an almost perfect record of every lifetime’s experience.”
- Oliver Sacks. The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Other Clinical Tales. HarperCollins: New York, 1985. pg 137

This reminds me of another quote from Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs.

“Karla believes that human beings remember everything. “All stimulation generates a memory – and these memories have to go somewhere. Our bodies are essentially diskettes,” she says.”

Okay, so if any of this is true, I think my diskettes have been erased or something. My memory stinks. I don’t know why but it just does. I’d like to believe that the memories are there somewhere. I think they’d have to be. Accessing them might be the real problem. Maybe there really is something to this idea.

Story Organizes

“Story organizes, connects, links together and makes things, memories, findable. . . We see how one piece is related to another, how the puzzle takes shape as the pieces, recognized by their complementary shapes, begin to form a whole.”
- Joseph Gold. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 84

Finding is More Important that Memory

“There’s one thing computing teaches you, and that’s that there’s no point to remembering everything. Being able to find things is what’s important.”

- Douglas Coupland. Microserfs. HarperCollins Books: Toronto, 1995. pg 303

Finding is More Important that Memory

“There’s one thing computing teaches you, and that’s that there’s no point to remembering everything. Being able to find things is what’s important.”
- Douglas Coupland. Microserfs. HarperCollins Books: Toronto, 1995. pg 303

Our Perception is Flawed

Errol Morris is interviewed by David Samuels in May 2008’s Wired Magazine.

The article is completely in prose except for one Question & Answer segment. I was always told that this was a lazy way to write when I tried to do the same thing in the university paper. When the editor told me to do a rewrite, I took his editors advice and wrote the entire article in prose.

Oh well, here’s the quote. It’s worthy of my collection, if not for the quality of the writing.

“His point is that we live in a solid world, but our perception of its flawed and partial:

Q: But don’t you think that we manage to keep up a coherent narrative of who we are and where we’ve been?

A: No! We remember things selectively. We experience things selectively. We live in a kind of incomplete, patchwork-quilt universe. A bric-a-brac. Assembled in some higgledy-piggledy way.”

I like how this quote backs up my theory that we actually edit our lives through our use of what we choose and choose not to remember. It’s also interesting that he admits that we don’t have the whole picture. We can’t possibly know the entire story. We live in a limited point of view story but our stories can connect to other stories and create a quilt.

I don’t think the universe is incomplete or put together is a haphazardly way. I don’t think Morris believes this either. He is merely talking about our experience of the world.

I think that Story can explain why we don’t know everything and cannot come to the ultimate truth of the universe. Of course, characters in a story never know everything. They seldom every realize that they are a character in a story. I can’t really think of an example where a character realized this but I am sure there are stories that can be interpreted as such out there.

I think Morris is right and our perception of reality is flawed. But that is only because we don’t perceive the nature of reality to be Story. If we did, we would have a new perception in which to see the world. And upon seeing it with these new eyes, perhaps we can come to some important truths. It makes sense to me.

Story is Organic

“Gregory Bateson goes on to give his definition of story:

A story is a little knot or complex of that species of connectedness which we call relevance. In the 1960s, students were fighting for “relevance,” and I would assume that any A is relevant to any B if both A and B are parts or components of the same “story.”

Again we face connectedness at more than one level:

First, connection between A and B by virtue of their being components in the same story.
And then, connectedness between people in that all think in terms of stories. (For surely the computer was right. This is indeed how people think)

. . . thinking in terms of stories must be shared by all mind or minds, whether ours or those of redwood forests or sea anemones.

In other words, Bateson sees story as a form of all organic organization.”
- quotation comes from Gold, Joseph. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 79-80
- internal quotation comes from Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. Bantam: New York, 1980. pg 14.

Externalized Memory

“We’ve reached a critical mass point where the amount of memory we have externalized in books and databases (to name but a few sources) now exceeds the amount of memory contained within our collective biological bodies. In other words, there’s more memory “out there” than exists inside “all of us.” We’ve peripheralized our essence.”
- Coupland, Douglas. Microserfs. HarperCollins Books: Toronto, 1995. pg 253

Our Bodies are Diskdrives

“Karla believes that human beings remember everything. “All stimulation generates a memory – and these memories have to go somewhere. Our bodies are essentially diskettes,” she says.” - Coupland, Douglas. Microserfs. HarperCollins Books: Toronto, 1995. pg 92

Douglas Coupland is a brilliant writer. It’s strange how I discovered him. I had heard of him prior to this book but I had never read anything by him. Then one day when I was at the library with some kids, one of them spun around the bookrack with a lot of force. This book fell to the ground.

I had wanted to find a good novel to read. I picked up the book from the floor and looked at it. I flipped through it and it seemed strange and unique. I couldn’t put it back on the shelf. I knew that I had to sign it out since it had quite literally fallen into my lap.

I love this book. I have collected hundreds of great thoughts from it. The story revolves around a group of people who work at Microsoft. I know every little about computer programming and this wouldn’t have been a book I normally would have read. But it was a great character driven drama.

Writing Remembers

“The palest ink is better than the best memory.” - Chinese proverb

I actually found this in a fortune cookie I received.