It was cold, cold enough that the white walls of my room seemed to be glowing on this gray morning. I had no TV, no radio, just one light, a basic dresser and a wooden cross on the wall. It was silent, and yet exciting. I was in my mid-teens and on a retreat with other kids from my church.
The brothers who ran the place chosen for the retreat were about to cook everyone a big breakfast. While they were in the kitchen quiet time had been scheduled for meditation and prayer. We used much of that time for sneaking around in and out of windows, toilet papering the rooms of unpopular kids and surfing down the stairs on boxes.
But this column starts in a moment before all of that. I can still vividly recall how I felt waking up that day. It felt like electricity was in the air. There was whispering and laughing in the hallway as I hurried to get dressed.
What goes into making memories?
According to neurobiologist Antonio Damasio, the brain scatters information across its neurons to make memories. As opposed to capturing snapshots of events or recording them, the brain records “conjunctions of details” in zones of the brain.
In a story entitled, “The Human Hard Drive: How We Make (And Lose) Memories” at BigThink.com, Damasio says we create codes to represent facts. Reliving a memory is actually the process of pulling together various details from different areas of the brain to “reconstruct” the past.
As with hard drives, recording all of the details of an event would take up too much space. So our memories end up being more like jigsaw puzzles we assemble and reassemble each time we reminisce.
What kind of things do we tend to remember?
People remember negative events more than positive. This makes sense evolutionarily speaking, and also we tend to dwell on negative experiences more than positive ones. Details associated with stronger emotions are also more likely to get stored.
That brings me back to this moment on retreat where I am out on my own. For the first time in our young lives there are no parents on hand, just a bunch of kids ready to go nuts, excited by the day’s potential.
The brothers who ran the place chosen for the retreat were about to cook everyone a big breakfast. While they were in the kitchen quiet time had been scheduled for meditation and prayer. We used much of that time for sneaking around in and out of windows, toilet papering the rooms of unpopular kids and surfing down the stairs on boxes.
But this column starts in a moment before all of that. I can still vividly recall how I felt waking up that day. It felt like electricity was in the air. There was whispering and laughing in the hallway as I hurried to get dressed.
What goes into making memories?
According to neurobiologist Antonio Damasio, the brain scatters information across its neurons to make memories. As opposed to capturing snapshots of events or recording them, the brain records “conjunctions of details” in zones of the brain.
In a story entitled, “The Human Hard Drive: How We Make (And Lose) Memories” at BigThink.com, Damasio says we create codes to represent facts. Reliving a memory is actually the process of pulling together various details from different areas of the brain to “reconstruct” the past.
As with hard drives, recording all of the details of an event would take up too much space. So our memories end up being more like jigsaw puzzles we assemble and reassemble each time we reminisce.
What kind of things do we tend to remember?
People remember negative events more than positive. This makes sense evolutionarily speaking, and also we tend to dwell on negative experiences more than positive ones. Details associated with stronger emotions are also more likely to get stored.
That brings me back to this moment on retreat where I am out on my own. For the first time in our young lives there are no parents on hand, just a bunch of kids ready to go nuts, excited by the day’s potential.
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