Josh Karthikeyan Week 14 - Daydreams
I fell asleep. Away from reality. Wandering mindlessly until I tripped upon a memory. And I remembered how in 3rd grade, we were able to sit wherever we wanted and I chose a beanbag. It’s so random, so unimportant, yet so distinct. I feel like memories have a mind of their own and I cannot control them. I cannot control their desires, their beliefs, their ideas. They control me. They shape my choices and my decisions.
Memories do not follow rules; they follow our emotions. The memories I expected to be the longest lasting would have been the moments that defined me: the milestones, the ones that should have stayed the clearest in my mind. Yet, in my mind, my memories are able to linger as long as they want, and disappear just as quickly.
Maybe their randomness is the point. They are not meant to be logical, obvious, or meaningful in human-defined ways. Randomness is their strength. They are pieces of us, scattered and resurfacing when we least expect them.
Memories reveal what our minds choose to hold onto. The smallest and most insignificant moments still leave a lasting impression without us noticing. When combined, these fragments build into a cohesive whole that shapes who we are. My memory about the bean bag must have something, somewhere, worth remembering. Except, I do not know why it holds value but my brain and my unconscious do.
It takes nothing but a quiet moment, half-sleep, for an old memory to surface back. A moment and a daydream.
Image via Annie Medaris
Hi Josh! Yes! Sometimes I remember the most random of memories as well. This seems counterintuitive since studies show that your brain remembers the most from repetition or trauma, but why can I still remember the most random things like the color of a stranger's sweater on August 31, 2023?
ReplyDeleteRecent organizations have explained exactly the opposite of how memories actually form, so why do random memories still exist in our heads? Do they have a connection to these studies? According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, connections form when we learn something, but they get stronger or weaker based on how exposed we are to a certain event. That's why sometimes when someone asks me what I ate the previous day, I always need a few minutes to remember. However, the stronger the connections we create, the more we'll remember it, just like the milestones you mentioned or sometimes trauma that evokes a drastic emotional response.
Have you ever had a random dream that was a replay of an event that happened many years ago? For me, I still have these dreams (especially traumatic ones), but they happen less often than when I was younger for some reason. You would assume as I get older and make more memories I would get those dreams more often, but it seemingly only happens once every few months whereas when I was a kid these dreams happened around once a week.
It really intrigues me how memories are formed, and I hope that future research about the brain helps us learn more about why these random memories form or why dreams are sometimes so random but easily forgettable. Thanks for this nice blog, Josh!
“Randomness is their strength” is a really interesting way to look at it, Josh, I never really thought about it that way! It is definitely interesting to see how our mind stores certain pieces of information longer than others, though said others may objectively be more important. The brain is making connections with everything around us: it is likely that some sensory detail provoked the memory of the beanbag chair you thought of, which is sometimes when we “least expect them.” I would slightly disagree that they are completely random (because of the connections the brain is making) but I get what you’re trying to say in terms of us not consciously controlling those memories. In fact, the brain uses certain memories to heal: fake scenarios, decades old memories, wild dreams at night and many more are the brain’s way of processing certain types of information, especially if they trigger certain emotions inside of you. It’s also intriguing to note that it really does take “nothing but a quiet moment” for us to start remembering random events from years ago: our gen-z brains and our 12 second attention span/borderline ADHD likely lead to our “daydream[s]” the moment we settle down, which is likely a consequence of overstimulation that is becoming increasingly inescapable in the 21st century. In your writing, I find that your anecdote does an effective job of introducing your topic and drawing the reader in, and is a nice hook. I also like how you sprinkle instances of anaphora in the blog, which add emphasis to your points. Thank you for an awesome piece!
ReplyDeleteThank you for writing this beautiful post, Josh! The relationship between memory retention and emotional context is certainly interesting. I especially found it intriguing when you said, “Memories have a mind of their own and I cannot control them. I cannot control their desires, their beliefs, their ideas. They control me. They shape my choices and my decisions.”
ReplyDeleteAs I said under Disha's post, it’s often said that a person is a culmination of their past experiences, such as people they’ve encountered. But I think it goes a little deeper than that. Because our minds can choose what memories we retain, I think a person is a culmination of what they let define them. For you, it might be the autonomy of being able to choose to sit on a beanbag. For me, it might be using my own (read: my dad’s) cash to pay for an undercooked chicken burger from Wahlburgers because I relished the feeling of independence. A person chooses what they want to keep in their memory based on how significant they feel the event was, or, more importantly, how much of an impact that event had on them. Furthermore, this “impact” that an event has on someone isn’t fixed; like rememory, that impact continues to live on and can grow or decrease over time. In the example of the beanbag, that event may have not held much significance to you when you were in third grade. But now, you might look back on it because its impact on you has increased.
This is just a silly little theory of mine. It reminds me a little of Sethe’s “rememory.” Maybe reading Beloved will have a greater impact on me in the future.