Thinking about thinking 3 of 3

There is a movie about wanting to forget things called, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." It is a tragic movie about ruined relationships and people who want to forget the happiest times of their lives because they had been taken away from them and now made them sad to remember.

We are all shaped by our experiences (good, bad or otherwise) and if we were just able to forget of have memories erased, we would all lose the valuable lessons we spent that time learning. There is always something that you take away from a situation no matter how terrible or hopeless the situation looks.
There is one instance that pops into my mind when I think of things that I wish hadn't happened. A bunch of friends and I were in France and we were in this artist's village. We had just gotten lunch and then suddenly, we were surrounded by a bunch of guys. They said they wanted to make us wish bracelets, and that they were free, so we all said yes, they were free right…

Wrong! When they were done making the bracelets, they said now they would like a small donation. I would have been willing to give them a euro or two because the bracelet was interesting, but they kept pushing. Saying stuff like "that's all…" and there were tons of them, and I think between all of us, they got like fifty dollars because we wanted them to leave us alone.

It was a horribly frightening experience that I would love to forget, but you know what it did for me, I am really good at getting rid of telemarketers and walking right past people handing out fliers on the street and politely but firmly refusing the little piece of paper that I'm just going to throw out anyway.

So, as unpleasant as some experiences may seem at the time, you will realize that it is all for the best when you think about what you learned and not what you lost.

Thinking about thinking 2 of 3

A recent article, "Scientists find way to erase select memories in mice" from CBC News, stated that scientists had "elicited memory loss by manipulating the activity of a protein called alpha-CaM kinase II,” but the way they tested this seemed really fishy to me. They tested the mice for memory loss by classically condidtioning them to anticipate/ fear an electrical shock after hearing a certain noise. Once they were conditioned to fear the noise, they were treated with the brain protein, and were left alone for one month. After the month was up, they were put in a different cage than they were originally conditioned to fear the noise in and they did not act scared when they heard the noise, but when they were put in the original cage, they showed a fear response to the noise.

These findings cannot necessarily be interpreted to mean that the mice had forgotten their fear of the noise. The more likley explanation is that classical conditioning is not generalizable. If the conditions change (eg. A different cage or a slightly different noise) the mice would not show the fear response.

Scientists should not be wasting their time on this kind of thing, in my humble opinion, they should be finding the cure for cancer, or developing some kind of miracle corn that will end world hunger.

Thinking about thinking part 1 of 3

There are many things in life that people want to forget, terrible breakups, failed dreams, the list goes on and on. Sadly, this is not how life works. As my sister pointed out to me in an email the other day,

"when you want to forget something you can't because the act of wanting to forget it just makes you think about it even more, ergo making you even more unhappy, and stressing over a problem that isn't even worth your time."

She's absolutely right, trying to forget is one of the sure fire ways to remember something. In an article I read for my psych class recently, there was an interesting research study done. It stated that if a person is given a list of words to memorize and then told to forget a few of the words, they are more likely to remember the words they were told to forget because they were thinking about trying to forget about them.

Brain Tangents

Everyone's brain wanders around from time to time. When brains go off on these tangents, it can be hard to get them back on track. Unlike when classes purposefully try to get professors off on tangents to avoid boring lectures and in an attempt to learn something truly interesting, brain tangents can be rather annoying because just like the professors, you eventually have to get back to where you were. It's easy for a professor, they just look down at their lecture notes, but when your brain wanders, stuff doesn't get done because it gets forgotten about.

In the shower is just about the best and worst place to think about those big ideas. It is the best place because no one talks to you. You are completely and totally alone with your thoughts for ten to twenty minutes and some pretty serious thinking can happen with that kind of quality time. Sadly, there is no place to write any of it down, so even if you come up with the cure for cancer in the shower chances you are not going to remember it when you get out. It's sort of like a dream in that sense because since it is only you thinking in the shower, you don't have to explain your thoughts to anyone or organize them in any way by writing them down, so they rarely make sense when you are done washing your hair none the less when you try to tell someone else about them.

On perception and spiraling out of control.

A lot of weight rests on a person's perception of themselves. If a person believes they are unattractive, they will believe that others see them as unattractive no matter how untrue this belief is. In their most extreme forms, these self beliefs lead to things like eating disorders, in which people try to 'fix' their imaginary body flaws. But in every day life, our perceptions just effect how we deal with situations.

Perceptions have a great deal to do with a person's past. A person who believes they are unattractive generally got that belief from somewhere. Maybe they got it in the first grade when the person they thought was cute said "eew you're gross," and this particular person took it to heart, or maybe it was a more recent and real situation like being dumped by a boyfriend for being a little overweight. In either case, this person's perception of themselves will effect how they del with relationships in the future.

Perceptions can also be temporary. Every interaction we have presents the opportunity for people to give us a perception of ourselves. I for example have a belief that all computers hate me, and so I only like them as long as they are working properly. Thus, the other day after a long hard day (which presented a temporary perception of hopelessness), when I was faced with a computer malfunction, I basically wanted to throw my computer out of the fourth floor window. I cried and screamed and it was generally not pretty. Who knows if on a day that had been better, I may have reacted completely differently to my stupid computer, but as it was, I was pissed and my day affected my reaction.

Selective Memory

Why do I always get excited about going home? I always have a terrible time when I'm there because I end up fighting with someone (someone of course meaning my mom). This time it was a fight about how I don’t value her time because I didn’t give her enough warning that she didn’t need to take me and my boyfriend home because his parents were going to drive us. Personally, I thought she would be thrilled.

Somehow, I always manage to forget about the negatives though. I always remember how much I love seeing my little brother and sister. And how good the apples right off the tree and raspberries straight off the plant taste. Honestly, raspberries lose flavor the longer they are off the stalk. Personally I think they are ruined the second they touch a container and that they should go directly from the branch to your mouth, but that’s another story.

Selective memory as it is formally known is a defense mechanism. If I remembered every little bad thing that had ever happened to me at home or at school, I would probably never go back. I mean the big bad things are bad enough (like when no one in grade school talked to me for like a month because I reminded a teacher about a homework assignment, which apparently no one else had done), but they are somehow overshadowed by big and little good things (like the laugh I had with a friend from gradeschool when she asked me, “do you remember when we didn’t talk to somebody for like a month because of this homework assignment we all forgot about and she did? Who was that anyway?”). Somehow the good times make the bad times all better.

STOP TALKING AT ME!

Last year, my roommate and I didn’t talk to each other very much. It was not like we didn’t like each other, it’s just neither of us were talkers. I liked the set up. It was kind of like not having a roommate.

This year, I am rooming with one of my best friends, and I knew she was a chatterbox when I agreed to room with her, but what I did not realize that her talking would be an issue. She talks constantly. Usually it is gossip about friends from last year, or whatever boy she’s mooning over at the time. All in all, useless stuff that clutters up my brain and makes me forget things.

I was trying to pack to go home for October break, and I had a whole list of things that I needed to bring home. She was talking so much I forgot to look at my list and I forgot my… well basically everything on the list.

The worst is when she starts singing. Which is basically whenever she runs out of gossip, or whenever a song pops into her head, but she only ever knows like one line of the song, and she sings it over and over again until it gets so stuck in my head that I can’t read for class (not that textbook reading is easy even when it’s silent.) I end up doing a lot of homework down in the lobby of my dorm or in my boyfriend’s room because it’s so much easier to think when there isn’t someone filling your brain with nonsense constantly.

Don't Play Poker and Eat Potato Chips

Minds are amazing talented things, but get them off track and they are liable to get a little turned around. I think it was a line in some movie that it is not a good idea to play poker and eat potato chips. The logic behind this claim is quite simple. You end up betting potatoes and putting plastic in your mouth. Not too yummy.

Lives need to have clear rules and regulations or they tend to lose their functionality a little bit at a time. When two aspects of a person’s life get mixed together, there is usually confusion for not only the person who has confused the bits of their life, but also for all the people around them.

Take for example the following hypothetical situation; a father who has a very stressful day at work comes home in a terrible mood. His son runs up to him and says, “I made the winning play in my baseball game today and I got an A on my math test!” The father brushes him aside with an “uh huh, that’s great son,” and goes off to sit on the couch in front of the TV to relax. The father in this situation has sacrificed a wonderful moment with his son because he could not forget about how bad his day was for the few minutes his son wanted to talk to him.

When Forgetting Won't Forgive (part 3)

So, what had happened was…

I’m on a camping trip with a club I am in, and I get this voice message from my boyfriend saying, “hey guess what, your roommate is passed out cold on my couch. We went to a party with some mutual friends and she got totally wasted. She forgot her key and her ID in your dorm room, so she’s just gonna stay crashed until the morning…and Oh…by the way…in case you forgot, my parents are coming down to school in the morning, so she’s gonna be kicked out as soon as I get out of bed.”

Of course. The one night I am off campus all year, she decides to go and lock herself out of our room, forget half of all that happened last night, wake up on MY boyfriends couch in the morning and notice that her teeth are covered in vomit residue. Great!

Just for the record, not only does this affect her college experience, it messes with mine too. I had a lot of fun with eleven of my best friends last night, and nobody even asked me about it. Not to mention that for the rest of my life, when I think of this camping trip which was actually really fun, the happy times will be overshadowed by the crap that I had to hear about and deal with afterwards.

Why would people want to cloud up their minds, especially their memories of college, by affecting their brains with alcohol and other drugs. I want to remember as much as I can about college, and I for one refuse to kill off any of my irreplaceable brain cells with drugs.

When Forgetting Won't Forgive (part 2)

The only bit of that night that my brother does not remember is the ambulance ride. Isn’t that sad!

I know from experience that if you stick a five year old boy in or around any large shiny vehicle, they are going to have the time of their life, and being in an ambulance with sirens and paramedics and all the cool equipment would have been a great memory to have.

They had given him medication to numb the arm so that the Children’s Hospital could set it right away, and the morphine combined with the pain made him… groggy to say the least. My brother remembers the pain, he remembers that he was promised Tylenol and never got it (he didn’t know that morphine’s better). And he remembers not remembering the ambulance ride.

The one bit that would have been not only a really fun but also an exciting memory for him was lost to pain and Morphine.

People should not miss out on amazing experiences because of chemical induced memory loss…
Which brings me to the real point of this blog series…

When Forgetting Won't Forgive (part 1)

Why is it that the things we want to forget are never the things we forget?

People report memories of childhood traumas from anywhere as young as two. My little brother can remember vividly the entire day on which he broke his arm. He was five years old, and he broke both of the bones in his forearm. He remembers that we were at the Lincoln Park Zoo Park in Chicago, and that he was wearing my pink sweatshirt because Dad was running back to the car to get his sweatshirt.

My memories of the incident are even more vivid. I remember the nurses asking why he was wearing a pink sweatshirt, and why he was covered in woodchips. They suspected abuse, but sorry…were we supposed to dust him off? I remember going to find a snack with my Dad, and seeing my uncle (an emergency room doctor at the hospital where we were) going down the escalator as we were going up. I remember that since my brother was so young, he had to be transferred to a children’s hospital by ambulance so they could set his arm. Mom rode with him in the ambulance, and Dad, my sister and I headed home to get some sleep. We somehow got stopped in traffic right behind the ambulance Mom and my brother were in and we threw a couple of pennies at the back windows. I can still see my mom’s face bending over my brother, but she couldn’t hear the pennies hitting the window, so she didn’t know we were there.

There is a point I promise.

To be continued.