0498
Where do all the things we forgot, go?
If you take into account all the thoughts that people have had throughout human history, where are they stored? Perhaps it's a big brain that has recorded everything and can be recalled at certain points out of the blue. Dreams may draw from this ancient history. Your brain wiring isn't necessarily connected to anything else in human history but there has to be a subliminal learning that's going on. That's the intuitive way to think about it, but when you actually look at what's happened in the world there isn't a learning. We never learn from anything that we do. Why is it that we still have medieval thinking? A lot of things that are happening in the world right now are bonkers collective memes that clutter up our minds. Perhaps collectively we think that if we are posed with the question of whether we should do something emotionally or logically we're choosing emotion as a System I thinking mode. We tend to want to be in our reptilian brain because it feels good it feels good to be angry instead of just bottling it up and not expressing it. We should try several thousand years of doing things logically and see what happens. That seems logical but it isn't maybe it isn't.
Music idea derived from this entry:
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"Those memories might not be gone forever. A recent study in the neurologically simple sea slug indicates that interrupting reconsolidation might not be erasing memories but instead simply blocking our access to them. David Glanzman, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has found that when neurons of the sea hare known as Aplysia californica are transferred to a petri dish, they can be trained much like Nader’s shocked rats. And as with those rats, when Glanzman and his colleagues triggered a memory of the shock and then dosed them with a drug that blocks protein formation, a number of synapses disappeared. But the synapses that dissolved appeared to be random – they weren’t necessarily those associated with the shock. When the researchers went back to the intact animals to see if they could reinstate the shock memory, they found that just a few shocks were enough to restore memories that should have been completely erased. This told them that the memory was located outside the synapses; they traced it to the cell’s nucleus, a part of the neuron that remains intact even as synapses come and go. Deep within the brain, or at least in the brain cells of a sea hare, memories persist."
https://aeon.co/essays/would-you-purge-bad-memories-from-your-brain-if-you-could
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"...ideas are conscious and living, and they have will, and they have great desire to be made, and they spin through the cosmos looking for human collaborators."
Transcript: Elizabeth Gilbert - Choosing Curiosity Over Fear
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