Behind the Scenes of The Brain Show

by Zeev Nitsan

  The Sweatshops of the Brain

  Maintenance of memory skills is worthy of becoming a routine procedure, exactly as many of us engage in physical exercise as a means of maintaining and improving physical health. Often, various types of physical activity are also beneficial in terms of maintaining and enhancing thinking skills.

  British rowing champion James Cracknell, who crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a rowing boat (with a partner), once said, “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six sharpening the axe.” The tool we use for chopping down the trees of reality is our brain, and one cannot stress enough the importance of constantly sharpening our brain.

  The masters of sharpening the brain axe and maintaining memory skills gather once a year at the brain sweatshop of the World Memory Championship.

  At the air-conditioned hall, in which the competition has taken place annually from 1991, brain muscles are stretched silently, and virtual puddles of brain sweat cover the floor.

  Ben Pridmore, a British accountant, was the 2009 World Memory Champion.

  In a journalistic interview focusing on his wondrous memory performance, Pridmore complained that his memory always betrays him with regard to remembering names and faces.

  His performance was extremely impressive; he remembered the order of cards in a standard pack of fifty-two cards after looking at it for 24.97 seconds.

  The task in a competition called “binary 30 minutes” was to remember a sequence of the figures 0 and 1 that appear in a random pattern. Maximum memorization time was thirty minutes and maximum recollection time was one hour. Pridmore achieved the world record for 2009 when he recalled a sequence of 4,140 binary figures.

  In the “short distance” competition, the task is called “binary five minutes”—memorization lasts for up to five minutes. Pridmore holds the record for recalling a sequence of 930 figures.

  At the brain athletic stadium, other competitions take place simultaneously, such as “cards in an hour”—the order of cards in the maximum number of packs the competitors remember after an hour of memorizing.

  Pridmore’s world record in this competition is twenty-seven packs of cards. In other words, he remembered the sequence of cards in twenty-seven standard packs, in each of which there was a sequence of fifty-two cards, which adds up to a sequence of 1,404 cards!

  When Pridmore was asked about the secret of his success, he said that, unlike many of his colleagues, who convert each card to a single mental symbol, he converts in his brain any possible sequence of two cards into a single mental image. For example, a combination of the two of clubs followed by the ace of hearts is translated in his brain into a fishing net. Pridmore weaves a story in his brain according to the sequence of mental images, where the chronological arrow of the plot represents the order of cards.

  According to Pridmore and his senior German competitor, Dr. Gunther Karsten, their memory performances do not depend on innate supertalent but, rather, on an acquired skill. During a journalistic interview, they said that the way to enhance memory skills depends on converting sequences of cards into a suitable mental image and memorization. The performance curve improves in accordance with the duration of memorization.

  This is a known approach that is based on converting one mental symbol (a sequence of figures or cards) into another mental symbol that is more accessible to recollection (visual mental images). The mental symbol is easier to remember as a sequence by means of weaving a plot based on a time arrow. Pridmore developed a “private language” whose grammar rules are clear only to his brain, and it enables simultaneous translation of the figure language and sequences of cards into the language of mental images from which the plot is weaved.

  Memory Characteristics

  The term “memory” refers to various, different soul functions.

  Some define it as the lasting footprints of an experience, past effect impressions that continue to exist in the present, or a bridge over the river of time that connects the past bank to the present bank. The fingertips of memory allow the present to “touch” the past and sometimes to try to touch the future.

  According to an anonymous saying, “beautiful memories are the paradise from which no one is able to expel us” (at least not until the dreadful scenario of overall memory deletion, as described in several science fiction movies, takes place).

  A memory whose impressions live within us, even if it is of an event that involves people who are no longer with us, such as a memory of a talk with a person who has passed away, is like observing starlight coming from a star that has already vanished by the time its light reaches our eyes and our consciousness.

  Plato talked about the Greek word for truth, “althea,” in its etymological sense, which is “without forgetting.” He thought that memory was a solid documentation of past events. Freud, on the other hand, claimed that the memory was a cocktail of facts and heart wishes.

  Although we generally aspire to create memories that are as reliable and reality- compatible as possible, it is more accurate to perceive memory as a biographer of the brain than to perceive it as a biographer of a reality experience as it is. Memories are incomplete reconstructions of our experiences. Our memory lives in the meeting point between complete accuracy and fiction.

  Memory as Commemoration of the Essence of Experience

  We attempt to grant the profile of our experiences an eternal face in our memory. Memories tend to minimize into a refined extract. Their refined core is preserved, while “peripheral features,” which are not perceived as the essence of memory, tend to fade away and vanish.

  Unlike copying information from a computer file, which results in a new file that is totally identical to the original, our brain does not remember the experiences with total accuracy. The brain outlines an encoding pattern that preserves the “essential core” of the experience and the essential relationships among its various components. “The spirit of things” is prioritized over perfect matching.

  The various memory manifestations—encoding of experience impressions, consolidation of memory and rebuilding it at the time of recollection—are all formed based on preserving the essential core of memory (“essential” as perceived by the brain).

  Preserving the essential core of an entity takes place in our brain with respect to all types of sensory inputs.

  Learning and memory are like inseparable Siamese twins.

  Memory is the bedding on which new learning is based. Thus, our memory is not only a historian; it also sends its arrow toward the future in the sense that our conceptual infrastructure and many of our capabilities are based on pieces of information stored at the cellars of our memory.

  A desire to cover the scope of solutions, which is an important layer with respect to solutions offered by digital computers, turns out to be a poor strategy with respect to many tasks in our life. Adapting a “computer approach” in dealing with problems in our daily lives might severely decrease our life expectancy. As illustrated by the example that was previously mentioned in this book, the attempt to identify the type of a snake accurately and wonder about the level of its toxicity when coming across it accidentally might turn out to be the last taxonomy investigation made by the “computer approach” strategist.

  Mythological Memory

  According to Greek mythology, the love between Gaia, the goddess of Earth, and Uranus, the god of the sky, created Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. Indeed, memory, like its patron, is both divine and earthy.

  According to Greek mythology, at the moment of death we cross the Lethe River in abysm, and the ones who drink from its waters forget all their memories at once and wander to the lands of not-knowing in the absence of memories. Thus, memory loss is one of the manifestations of death. The blessed ones get to taste the water from the lake of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. According to this myth, memory preservation is the earnings of the “illuminated.”

  According to Jewish tradition, “Seeking to forget makes exile all the long
er; the secret of redemption lies in remembrance’’ (Baal Shem Tov).

  And from the dark depths of tragedy, a request rises as a testament: “And remember me” (Hamlet, Shakespeare).

  Constant Change of Memory

  Our memories undergo change and reshaping, weaving and ripping as a routine procedure.

  The surface of the various aspects of the sea of memory—encoding, preserving and retrieval—changes as the surface of every sea. It depends, inter alia, on winds—an external factor to the sea—and on depth currents—an internal factor to the sea. Metaphorically speaking, it depends on external phenomena and on phenomena related to our “internal weather”—within our body. Thus, we have only partial control over the depth currents of the sea of memory.

  The image of our memory changes with time and depends on multiple factors, some of which are subjective (such as our mood, our age, and our health) and they might subtract from the “objectivity” of memory. For example, recollection at a time in which we are in a gloomy mood is likely to darken the shade of memories. The weathercock of memory casts its shadow on the image of memory.

  We have a gallery in our head—pictures of our life experiences hang in the corridors of our brain. Some of the figures in the pictures become bigger and their colors become more intense as time goes by. Some of them become smaller, and their colors fade away, until it is hard to notice their outline. Metaphorically speaking, people who were once central in our life might lose their importance in our life, and vice versa—they might become even more important, as would, accordingly, our memory of them in our brain.

  In the philosophical sense, each change in our brain—and such changes occur all the time—leads to changes in the entire capacity of information in our brain. Thus, a plausible inference is that the shades of our memories constantly change (the memories’ chameleon), even when we do not process them consciously. Memory, in this sense, is like a view from a kaleidoscope that constantly changes its shape. For instance, information with which our brain is confronted after the experience takes place constantly affects the components of the memory of the experience as a lasting dialogue.

  Evolution and Memory

  Memory, as a reliable documentation system, is essential in terms of survival. As George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Making the same mistakes as a repetitive pattern, especially those that involve life risks, is a suicidal behavior pattern. The struggle for survival will not be sympathetic toward a creature whose reality documentation is not “sufficiently” loyal to the facts.

  Mental density is the manner of preserving information from past generations and ancient areas of evolution (“evolution memory”), which preserves patterns and insights of knowledge spread across the ages.

  This density is reflected at the structural level by dense neural structures that are linked together in a compact pattern and that hold the wisdom of all the generations that preceded us for millions of years. According to a common estimate, in the approximately 250 thousand years since our species, Homo sapiens, appeared on the face of Earth, about ninety billion men and women of this species were born and died. The products of their brains, and the brains of those who preceded them in the evolutionary chain, are etched in the evolutionary memory, which is encoded in us in a genetic pattern.

  The amygdala (an almond-like structure at the core of the temporal lobes, close to the hippocampus) is a dense concentration of representations of these ancient patterns, and is like a refined capsule of evolution memory.

  Each and every one of us stores within us an evolutionary bottle that is capable of bringing out ancient demons directed at various behavioral tendencies. These demons reflect survival-related lessons that were bought in blood, sweat and tears by our primeval ancestors in various ages of evolution.

  The Archetypical Memory—The Womb in Which Myths Are Formed

  Conditioned reactions to unique world stimuli, which improve survivability, are, in fact, memory etched in our DNA. This is a specific repertoire of behaviors that exists due to an automatic protocol that is genetically dictated and is essential to survival. The final design of such a memory pattern requires appropriate environmental stimulation, which completes the fixation of the pattern.

  Possible examples of the memory that is etched in our brain from birth: the tendency to be deterred by fire, fear of snakes, fear on the brink of an abyss, rejoicing in view of sunshine, a sense of tranquility triggered by the sound and view of running water.

  The British ethologist Desmond Morris claims that our tendency to be covered derives from being “naked monkeys” who remember their hairy evolutionary past. The primeval yearning for body fur is, claims Morris, at the core of the urge to cover ourselves during night sleep.

  Carl Gustav Jung, Freud’s student and one of the minds behind the collective unconscious concept, described how the concept regarding the collective unconscious popped up in his brain following a dream. In his dream he found himself touring his house, and, when he descended the stairs to lower floors, the furniture seemed more antique and typical of earlier periods. When he reached the basement, he found a cave that contained pottery and human skeletons, which symbolized the age of prehistoric man. It seems that the consciousness of prehistoric man puts on its play on the fringe theater stage at the basement of our consciousness as human beings, and more than once the “fight-or-flight” cry in the caveman version derives from the basements of our brain.

  Like our childhood sceneries as individuals penetrate our being in a pattern of our personal memory treasure, our “childhood sceneries” as a race also penetrate our being. These sceneries form the basis of collective memory, assimilated in us from the moment we are created. Along childhood sceneries in our individual mother’s lap, our brain stores the childhood sceneries as a race in the African savanna.

  According to this view, man is the collection of his experiences as well as a collection of the experiences of past generations encoded in him. The memory of our species’ history (phylogenetic memory) is etched within us and contains representations of our ancient forefathers and foremothers, even before we became human—in other words, before our species, Homo sapiens, showed up on the stage of life. In this spirit, said Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.”

  “Anima mundi” (‘the world soul’ in Latin) can be used to refer to the collective memory of our entire evolutionary journey etched in our DNA strands.

  The archetype memory as genetic memory saves experiences that are beyond the personal. This is a collective memory, hidden as an innate gift among the folds of our brain, and, like the Internet, constitutes a reservoir of memory and knowledge available to every human being at any given moment.

  Jung focused on the concept of the collective unconscious and characterized it as containing universal human contents, which are reflected as primeval archetypes and myths. As such, they share numerous similarities and are weaved into the different human cultures.

  A hint of the previous memories that are part of us from the moment of birth can be found in the Aggadahs (fables) of the Sages of Blessed Memory (Chazal), which tell of a baby boy in his mother’s womb. The embryo in its mother’s womb is like a folded notebook, a glowing candle on its head; knows the entire Torah (Pentateuch); and observes the world from beginning to end. When the time comes for it to be born, an angel comes, slaps it on the mouth, and makes it forget all chronicles. Thus, according to the story, we are born equipped with previous knowledge that we were made to forget. Our role on the face of the earth is to remember it all over again. According to this story, life is a process of remembering.

  Historical Memory

  For ages, prior to the invention of the alphabet, human memory used to be the slate on which the chronicles of history were written.

  Ideas of primeval myths were passed from father to son as oral traditions and marched from one generation to the next as an army of determined a
nts in a pattern of ideological heritage: the Deluge, the Epic of Gilgamesh, etc. Each generation poured into the plot the medicament of “spirit of time” from its era.

  Prior to the invention of the alphabet, whatever was not told orally disappeared from the collective consciousness and sank into the depths of oblivion.

  The Iliad epos, which included sixteen thousand verses, was told orally by Homer. This myth challenged even the memory of the residents of Olympus, and even more so the memory of plain people. Mnemosyne, a Greek goddess by profession, and the patron of memory, by her specialization spread her wings over Homer, who had a reputation as a storyteller who consistently, wondrously, and heroically (following the behavior pattern of some of his heroes) remembered the plots of all his stories.

  Herodotus is considered “the father of history.” He was a chronicler and a wandering storyteller. He used to tell stories about the chronicles of the capitals of the realms of ancient Greece until he decided to document the information he stored in his brain in writing and to contemplate the meaning of the described events in writing. By doing so, he established the documentation of history.

  The Griot mnemonist who preserved lineages among tribes in Africa carried in his brain the core memes (ideas skipping from brain to brain) at the basis of tribal culture and orally passed them from one generation to the next.