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042: Staggering Under the Weight of Memory

I know nothing about NLP -- Neuro-Linguistic Programming -- and, since there's a whole subtext to the BOOK OF LIES about language and how the brain processes language, I figure I should at least check NLP out. So I fight my way through a couple of websites, getting the basics down and wrestling off the strong urge to nap, and eventually realize that I want to talk about NLP even less than I want to read about it. However, there is something which slips into my brain and takes up residence.

Every piece of memory data in your brain has two attributes associated with it. First, there is all the raw information -- the empirical sensory record of that instant of time -- which is a simple data snapshot. This information is the "unobserved" data; this is the information that any recording system (with enough processor power and storage space behind it) could capture and store. It is just a series of points and values which could be reduced to a matter of binary information. The second attribute is your interpretation of that data.

Sensory data (be it visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory or kinesthetic) flows into the appropriate primary area of the brain that is devoted to this type of data. Nerve fibers run from the primary area to a corresponding secondary area and, in fact, this is the only connection the primary area has with any other section of the brain. The secondary areas are interconnected, allowing information to be dumped into yet another section -- the associative regions of the brain -- and here it is that the collected information is ultimately processed. A value is placed on this block of data, and it is marked by your brain as having some context within the larger volume of your mental space.

Say, for example, that you are sitting on a park bench and an animal hops up onto the bench next to you. Your brain takes in all the information about the arrival of this mobile object: the sight, sound, smell, and possibly contact, of this creature. This raw data is distilled down in your brain to a nugget of data which is then compared against the entirety of your memory and found to match previous elements in your memory container. In fact, there's a label on this container: "squirrel." A tag is now attached to this new data that says, in effect, this memory block is another example of "squirrelness" in case you ever require more than one block of historical data to make comparisons against.

Now, I want to tell you about this experience and I say, "I saw a squirrel today." Your brain immediately matches the pieces of that sentence to the appropriate data containers in your head and constructs meaning from that series of words. But you don't know that I was sitting in Wright Park and that the bench was a worn picnic table with metal legs and a wooden top. You don't know that I was there because I was eating a Subway sandwich or that the sun was over my right shoulder or that two red cars passed in quick succession in the street beyond the park. You don't know any of these things from my sentence, but they all exist in my head because they are all indelibly linked as part of the sensory data which accompanies the construction "I saw a squirrel today."

What's running in your head right now is the associated data from the last time you saw a squirrel. Unless you've never seen a squirrel, in which case you have no idea what I am talking about.

I could also have said, "J'ai vu un écureuil aujourd'hui." That sentence builds the same picture in my mind, but may mean absolutely nothing to you. But I've just altered the association tags in my memory. I haven't touched the sensory data -- that remains the same -- but my understanding, my comprehension, of it has changed. Now, my associated links spiral off into other associations I have with the French language (including a bit from Eddie Izzard about "le singe" being "sur la branche").

The amazing thing about the brain is that it isn't just a recording device. The brain is a vast muscle which continually evaluates and re-evaluates the data it has access to. Do you suppose that if you left the brain alone long enough and let it crunch away at the data residing within that it could eventually fabricate its own system of classification and taxonomy? Language, whether it be French or English or Urdu or Chinese, is a communally built system of classification and communication. If you weren't bound by such a system, would your brain eventually invent its own language? Or would it rediscover one that it was genetically predisposed to that exists below social constructions?

And now, because my brain just took off on a series of associated links, I'm wondering what really happened at the Tower of Babel.

Posted by Teppo at May 13, 2003 01:36 PM