http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/memory-hackers.html
NOVA ran a fascinating show on memory last night which summated the history of research and the latest insights.
Memories are rewritten each time they’re recalled. In one experiment by interrupting the rewriting process through a drug intervention, people with long standing phobias were instantly cured. In another experiment a mouse was inculcated with light sensitive cells from photosynthetic plants in a way that these cells became part of a specific part of its memory encoding process. The researcher was then able to flick on and off memories with a laser light completely changing the rat’s behavior at will from a fear to a pleasure state and back again. In another experiment, through a clever talk therapy, a researcher was able to implant a false memory in a person of them having committed a crime from their past. The point gleaned from this research is that memory is not a static thing like a book in a library that’s pulled down from a shelf, reviewed and then neatly put back into place. It’s dynamic and malleable. The show also profiled the recent discovery of “autobiographical memory” in people who can instantly recapitulate every detail, and without error, about a certain day just by being given its date, even though decades might have passed since the event. The show concluded with the questions this obviously begs, how could memories be so faithful in one subset of rare people, whereas for the vast majority of folks memories are highly fallible and morph according to suggestion? Is the purpose of memory the capacity to remember the past so as to apply its lessons to the present and thus affect the future—or does it serve a deeper purpose?
I believe it does. Autographical memory I believe is physical memory that is infallible, however for the purposes of network enabling, it is not meant to be accessible to the individual, just as in an economy a participant is not allowed to print their own money. Furthermore, our review of memory is pliable because it’s really a manifestation of emotional conductivity, so that what may have once been conductive, can shift and become nonconductive, and vice versa, that which once may have been non-conductive, can shift and become conductive (like the spider phobic people who ended up petting and cradling a tarantula.) In this way the mind works like a semi-conductor, a logic gate. But a logic gate for what?
In NDT theory, the real purpose of physical memory (stress of varying intensities) is to induce an emotional charge in the individual so that the physiological affects thereby triggered, which unfortunately can be so disturbing and thus become the concern of dedicated therapists who want to give a patient their life back, nevertheless make an individual act energetically, in other words, just as if they are an electrically charged particle. This is the emotional coherence, the function of disfunction if you will, of dysfunctional behavior. On the network level this allows individuals to easily couple and form a collectivized aggregate that will as a whole act as an energetically informed organism. Whereas if individuals were free to create their own patterns of behavior, we would not see collectivized and socially coherent behavior as the substrate of the mind. Physical memory created by the flow of pure emotion hitting resistance, implements a networked intelligence that can through its semi-conductive nature adapt to shifts in the environment. If it were static, if it were under one’s autonomous control, then it would be like a consumer walking into a store and getting what they want with monopoly money. That would destroy the economy, and so likewise volitive control over physical memory would destroy the network. The body and mind is a logic gate in the network.
This is such a fascinating subject. It is a feature, not a bug, to have constantly over-written and detail-poor individual memories, that we carry in our bodies – being the physical medium of emotional momentum. To have perfect, momentum-free recall of situations strips the information from the network. And yet – this clearly does happen.
It makes me think of how sociopaths, who are a strange kind of conductor, in that since they can’t absorb much emotional momentum from the network, and don’t retain it (punishments are completely ineffective in modifying sociopathic behaviors since they don’t have anxiety about future), still do exist in the network.
It’s these odd kinds of exceptions that prove the rule, that overall the job of the network is to expand and continually incorporate more resistance into an ever-more-complex configuration.
I would love to hear sometime your thoughts on how an extreme example of a non-player in the network – sociopaths – “work” according to the Immediate Moment. What are they missing? Why do they seem to absorb some emotional movement, but not others? How do they project their e-cog differently?
I think the so called aberrants reflect an impasse deep in the network and they are bringing it to the surface. It’s like a boulder at the bottom of the riverbed creating a disturbance on the surface. In the eighties I remember the big complaint about boys in school was their inability to pay attention. Rather than rethink the educational model for boys who need physical action and weren’t mature enough to sit quietly at a desk, they were drugged. So then the network responds so to speak, with intense attention in the young, i.e. autism, much more prevalent in boys than girls and spreading faster than epidemiological models can account for through environmental or genetic factors. Another example of selectivity on a network wide level than an individual basis is the proclivity in neutered males to attack whole males. This reflects the deep judgement that there is something essential about male energy that is inimical to social behavior. The behavior of neutered males is reflecting this deep judgment in the network of dog owners.
That’s a great point. Maybe what’s being viewed as anti-social, or even anti-evolution, is the “might is right” expression of what is typically viewed as male energy. So we deem that energy destructive and create rules to suppress it rather than examining how it’s being channeled – the proverbial throwing the baby (drive) out with the bathwater (behavior).
I’m curious how the emotional shift resulting from this sort of human interference in nature is being played out according to the attraction/pro-social directive, in your view. In the case of intact dogs being attacked, how is nature, or the network, responding in order to improve flow?
I agree that male energy is seen as rocking the boat and judged as might/right kind of denial. Historically there’s a lot of evidence to that effect so the judgment is understandable. The main thing is to bring the denial of such judgments to our attention so that the block can be removed and flow improved. Neutered males are knocked off balance by the energy of a whole male and they are seeking to move by agnostic interaction with the whole male, the energy that can’t move through their body/mind. They’re not initiating a fight as it would appear to an observer, but trying to move what’s denied within themselves. We might learn from this how what happens outside mirrors what’s going on inside. That lesson would improve the flow for the network.