Why do we forget? There is no proven scientific reason for why we forget.1 Our brain has the ability to store the equivalent of 2.5 million gigabytes 2 of digital memory whereas my M1 Mac has only 250 GB. Why is our brain designed to delete memories when it has so much space? The ability to recall a memory is often associated with how well it’s stored and it always differs from one person to another. My childhood memories are compartmentalized in two ways. First, is according to the two different schools I studied in, St. Joseph’s Convent till my fifth standard and Montfort School till my tenth standard. Second, is my house. Pre-renovation and post. Before narrating any of my leftover childhood memories, I have to do some mental calculations to figure out the exact age I was in by identifying how I looked (I had different physical phases in different schools) and the setting. If the parking space at my home was spacious and bright, if the staircase was part of the veranda, if the backyard still existed, then the memory is most likely to be pre-renovation. Once the memory is successfully identified, then my brain starts counting the age. I know I was five in my first standard. That being my focal point I work my age to the memory. This is the mental prep that I have to do before beginning to narrate a memory as ‘I was five/seven/eight.’
Tag: Analysis
The Golden Era of Print Magazines by B.R. Shenoy
Magazines were such a massive part of my life growing up. My first ever magazine subscription was to Children’s Digest. Children’s Playmate soon followed in the logical progression.
To a certain extent, the 1980s and even the 1990s were a particularly heady time for the magazine industry.
The Language of Birds by Gary Glass
The hermit thrush has an ethereal flutey call. It composes its serenades in a minor Dorian mode, structured around an ascending scale that concludes with a coy come-hithering, the phrase being repeated at various rather awkwardly connected pitches. Actually, like most birds, it has a variety of calls — even the “mute” swan, which sings like a crow eating a cricket. The so-called “trumpeter” swan sounds something like a hoarse goose. Many a purple poet has assayed to paint the hermit’s song in lyric:
gone beyond all going on beyond real gone
gone beyond all going on beyond real gone
gone beyond all going on beyond real gone
Psychedelic Existentialism in Rob Doyle’s “Threshold” by Declan Toohey
In one of the wittier moments in Rob Doyle’s latest book—a sprawling account of one man’s quest for meaning in the pharmacological era—the narrator visits the world-renowned Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris. There, among other things, he searches in vain for texts by Maurice Blanchot and Pierre Klossowski, and repositions copies of his own novel to cover the works of rival authors. Observing that the Parisian bookshop is as much a tourist attraction as a place in which to acquire books, he bemoans the many patrons who visit the store solely to be photographed, and who shuffle off with a book or two from ‘usual suspects’ such as ‘Kerouac, Bukowski, Hemingway, and Salinger.’[1]