Memory. (0030)

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Memory is a funny, tricky thing. When you lose your memory, you don't necessarily know that you forgot something! Sometimes you do. For example, when I woke up in the emergency room, I couldn't remember names. I couldn't remember my wife's name. (That, of course, bothered her to no end.) But, I couldn't remember the names of my children, my pets, my best friend, my business partner. That type of hole in your memory is pretty obvious. Some of it is far more subtle.

To forget a place you visited, a party you attended, something you learned in school, something that is not a part of ordinary, daily life, can be an insidious handicap. You just don't know what you don't remember. Perhaps, in a way, it is a blessing to have no knowledge of how much of your life you have lost.

However, in time, in my days in rehabilitation, a funny thing would happen. A site, a sound, a smell would bridge the connection to some lost memories. Memories would come flooding back to me in a deluge. It was almost paralyzed. The memories would return and an overwhelming tsunami of brain activity. Sometimes this paralysis would last just a couple of seconds while the memories flooded back. Sometimes, it would last for five or 10 minutes. I wonder how much of my original disability was the result of this internal brain rewiring.

(note: expand upon this section -- change from personal observation to medical call)

What became obvious was that nothing would replace the information that was stored in the brain cells that were killed by the lack of oxygen caused by the blood clot during the stroke. However, some memories were not irretrievably lost! Memory is, as it turns out, like islands in a giant ocean. Each memory is like its own little island connected to other memories and to our conscious mind by bridges. Some of these bridges are fragile, tenuous, one person in a time footbridges while others are like the massive Golden Gate Bridge, moving volumes of traffic. Memories are connected to the conscious mind and to other memories by these bridges. Take out a bridge and you may lose access to the memory. It's still layer, recorded indelibly in your brain cells, with no way to access it.

What became obvious after a time was that many of the bridges, especially the main, high-traffic bridges to my memories passed through a portion of my brain ruined by the stroke. I suppose, some of those memories are you retrieve the loss. However, many of the memories were connected by secondary and tertiary bridges. Some of these bridges, undoubtedly, where smaller bridges connected right to the thinking mind. However, many of these alternative bridges were connections to other memories. Many of my, apparently lost memory, were not truly lost; not truly wiped out by the stroke. Much of my memory merely lost the major, high-traffic bridge to conscious memory.

An example:

This happened fairly recently. In college, some 30 odd years ago, I studied hypnosis, autosuggestion, self hypnosis and related fields. I became quite adept at hypnosis and post hypnotic suggestion. However, those memories were gone. They were not part of my conscious mind, my conscious memory. Then one day, my daughter's boyfriend was complaining of a toothache. It was really bothering him. He was putting a topical analgesic on the tooth to alleviate the pain. Something in that conversation with him connected to my memories of hypnosis by a little footbridge. The minute he said that, the minute it registered in my brain, the entire archive of memory regarding my college and post-collegiate experience with hypnosis came flooding back. Now, writing about it, I am sure that there is a construction project underway in my brain to convert that byway, memory to memory only, footbridge into a more direct bridge to my conscious mind.