The seat of memory

Churchill said that Russia is "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, tied with a hanky, rolled in a blanket, and packed in a box of white Styrofoam peanuts." Or something like that as Washington Post columnist O’Rourke recalled it in his book "Eat the Rich" (1994), a humorous look at economics. People used to think the brain is as elusive as Russian economics but is it really? Bombarded with complexities and jargon from a train conversation with an interesting Yale neuroscientist once, not only did it seem to me then that neuroscience was a riddle wrapped in a mysterious spring roll of scientific jargon but I also started to feel like I too was being wrapped in a riddle, enigma, hanky, blanket and box and eventually rendered irretrievably nuts. But hardwired for "curiosity," if anything else, I just could not drop learning more about the brain. Besides, if it is what defines me, it may be a good idea to make friends with it by trying to understand how it works. Maybe if I do that, it can let me get free passage to more territories of the mind I have never been to before. So then, what is this gray matter between the ears that is packed with 100 billion neurons firing and connecting in the form and magnitude of 100 trillion synapses that define who we are? How could it make sense of the daily novelties and emergencies of the "now," store them as "past" in its memory drives, available for use in future days and nights strewn in the blink of our individual lifetimes?

Memory and learning are twins as far as the brain is concerned. How the brain learns is the same as how it makes, stores, retrieves and loses a "memory." Who we are is what our memory consists of and our memory need not only be of sensory facts and perceptions, but also of the imagined, their emotional and language/speech content and cocktail permutations of all these in varying proportions. And they are made by the connections of the 100 billion neurons known to inhabit and fire the mind – the same number of stars in our galaxy and believed to be the same number of galaxies in the universe. To make a memory, one has to learn something, anything, like for instance, this antiquated way of computing I learned in grade school called the "number line." Learning fires a host of neurons to make connections with other neurons like simultaneous little fourth-of-July’s called synapses. We cannot grow new neurons but only new connections between them. When we say we are growing mentally, it means we are making new connections, new wiring or rewiring. If you stop learning, your brain literally does not grow. If you keep on learning or doing the same thing over and over again, you petrify the synapses into a "habit." All this learning/memory is stored in sets of neurons of 1,000 –10,000 called "modules" in not just one area but different parts of the brain. When a set of neuron fires, it excites a set of neurons in another module, which recognize it and that is how a memory is recalled, perfectly or partially. For instance, sensory data like what you see, what you hear and what you associate something with, are stored in what neuroscientists in a burst of unfettered imagination, named the visual, auditory and associative cortices, respectively. But the making of a memory does not stop there as memory also has emotional context stashed in the amygdala and language content stored in the cerebral cortex and the language areas of the brain. So when I see a graph notebook (visual), I remember this flat way they used to teach addition and subtraction 32 years ago called the "number line," and then I remember the constant page-flipping, and the vigorous rubber-on-paper sound of erasing (auditory) that my mother who was then frustratingly teaching me that specific lesson, made. Furthermore, strangely enough, when I see number lines or graph notebooks, I also remember the song "Rock the Boat" (language and speech) playing on TV to which my teenage uncle was dancing a few meters away (associative) from my six-year-old number-struggling brain then, a scene that partially distracted me then from the pain of numbers (emotional content). Experiments have shown that learning seems to be enhanced when you felt good when you were learning that particular thing which may explain why I still feel hostile to numbers as an adult (George Christos. Memory and Dreams. The Creative Human Mind. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2004). So memories are like friends or enemies you have in various places and professions who get together to crown, grill or torment you.

In each of us then, we cradle our own universe, our island of memories and dreams, which are universes unto themselves. One of Neruda’s poem, "We are Many," has these lines: "Of so many men that I am, that we are, I can’t find a single one. I lose them under my clothing, they’ve moved to another town… and so I do not know who I am, or how many I am or we are…" We are always torn, not only by the left side of the brain which is dominantly analytic, introspective, logical, problem-solving and story-making, and the right, known to be largely responsible for intuition, arts, music, mathematics and spatial reasoning, but also by the gender-specific characteristics of brains and the seasons of learning in human lives. It is known that the corpus callosum, that bridge that connects the two hemispheres of the brain, is larger in females and that females also have larger "anterior commissure" that accesses the unconscious realms of the brain (Diane Ackerman. An Alchemy of Mind. The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain. New York: Scribner, 2004). This may explain why they use a lot of parts on both sides of the brain when they process information compared to men. I also read in an issue of the Scientific American a couple of months back that when women make love, the brain part responsible for "planning" lights up together with the amygdala, responsible for sex and emotions, while in men, it does not (I have yet to find out how they hooked up these subjects to machines during this time). Teenagers also seem to use the amygdala more when they make decisions, which may explain the largely emotional content of their decisions as opposed to later in life when as adults, the frontal context makes use of reason more.

There is also so much information we have to make sense of everyday and store consciously or unconsciously. All these data, though totally unrelated and meaningless by themselves, assume a life of their own, like strangers contacting each other during the REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep. Scientists think that this kind of memory called "spurious memory" is what kicks off our creativity and our dreams. There is a different set of chemicals working in the brain when we sleep and another when we are awake. It spells the difference between the realities of waking and dreaming. So dreamwork (when we remember dreams and try to make sense of them to know ourselves better) and creative work are a kind of alchemy of sorts, since we harness the powers of chemicals of our "sleeping" lives to bring life to our many waking, walking selves. Creativity and novelty are also what can break a "habit," good or bad, infusing a new rush of information often enough to weaken the ties that neurons made to cement an old habit. That is why when a relationship becomes a habit, you may need a new creative way to romance it to a new level, or when you fail to notice the wondrous details that fill the scene when you pass the same way all the time, you may want to pass another way or take the passenger seat to gain new perspective.

The brain seats our many selves, encased only by the calcium shell of a skull. Reaching out to the universe, it loves and feeds on information about the world, the universe and its myriad ways. It is the way it feeds and excites itself. It is the way it grows. So from my many selves to all of yours, I end this 100th column, my hundredth weekly dance, to try to cultivate for myself and the readers, seeds of sense and wonder at a universe that is expanding and accelerating, too.

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