INTELLECTUAL LOST PROPERTY

You should get yourself an umbrella with all this rain, you’re physically soaked.

It’s better than being mentally drained. Now, tell me about your childhood…
Is this an interview or have you suddenly become a psychiatrist?You do know that psychiatrists reckon they still don’t know what 90% of the brain is used for – rubbish! It is human nature to fill things up. How many people do you know that have got a cupboard that is only half-full? If there’s room to store things, we will.

Are you implying that we do use the full capacity of our brains?
Every last neuron.

But there’s billions of them, how can we possibly know so much?
Now there’s the thing, see, because we do actually take in and remember all the information that we see / hear / smell / touch / taste (and that sixth sense) around us but the problem we just can’t process it all. It’s all still up there, in your head, but you just don’t know how to access it.

This is not an umbrella!
– childhood memories can change with time

But you do?
Naturally. I’m the one with the shop seliing ideas
and the like…

So the brain is like a big damp warehouse?
Yes, with stuff all over the place but you aren’t able to employ enough staff to sort it out. And some of the mindstuff at the edges touches the walls, gets damp and goes a bit wonky – that’s how we misunderstand things, some call it warped ideas – well, you should discard those thoughts and concentrate on the good stuff but there’s too much of it. With the sheer amount of raw information we store, no wonder the mind becomes overwhelmed. Stuff naturally gets lost – and that, my friend, is how we forget things.

So the bits we remember are neat and tidy?
Yes, if you can recall it you know exactly where it is in your mind, all labelled up nicely.

And the bits we’ve forgotten just disappear?
No, it’s still in your head somewhere, you can’t get rid of it. I’m no scientist but basic physics states that energy cannot be destroyed, it just changes into something else.

Like what?
I dunno, it just gets jumbled up. That’s why old people get confused; if you’re trying to recall a childhood memory and all you can conjure up is a definition of an umbrella you’re going to have trouble communicating, aren’t you?

Yes, obviously.
That’s why it’s good to keep the mind active – move your thoughts about. If all the old thoughts just get new ones dumped on top, pretty soon you’re going to build up a heap of stuff you’re never going to be able to understand. And it doesn’t go away. The thought process works just like geology.

You mean ideas rock?
No, metamorphic rocks. All those childhood memories buried at the bottom of the pile are going to be under a lot of heat and pressure from the later ones stacked on top. Every child knows that from geography classes that heat plus pressure over time equals change – metamorphosis – that is why when you go searching for that childhood memory, all you can come up with is the definition of an umbrella, because it’s changed.

Right. It’s started raining again. Have you got an umbrella I could use?
Did I ever tell you about the time when I was a kid..?