Wednesday, August 15, 2007

patterns

Let's see if I can articulate this.

Do you ever have those moments where you witness just a commonplace event and suddenly your brain is working on overdrive trying to remember how what you're looking at that very second reminds you of something from childhood?

I was just at the store and one of the entrances was blocked off for the night using shopping carts. When I came out of the store I glanced over at the pattern and my brain knew it to be familiar, it was trying to remind me about something I used to experience as a kid. I still have no idea what, but I love that feeling. Things forgotten but almost remembered... A favorite moment. :)

7 comments:

Bearette said...

Did you bite into a madeleine? ;)

RW said...

Alcohol sometimes does that to a person.

Stefanie said...

That happens to me with smells sometimes... I know that a scent resonates with me, but I can't remember what the connection is.

Poppy said...

Bearette, no...?

RW, I had consumed no alcohol.

Stef, me too. I enjoy that. I had that happen this past weekend. A smell that reminded me of the good parts of kindergarten.

Anonymous said...

Actually Poppy, those little Deja Vu moments are not failures to recall memories- but chemicals in your brain, whose job it is to reach back into the index of your mind to retrieve memories, just swirling around in your grey matter for a second with nothing to do.

Think of your brain as a hard drive- somewhere in your fat table is a pointer to a file (memory) that just isn't there. When the disk tries to retrieve a file, it moves to the sector of the disk where it should be, and if it comes up empty, it produces an error. That's what your brain does sometimes.

And once you realize your brain is a giant hard drive, you can see that dreaming at night is a way for your brain to go offline while it transfers memories and experiences from its short-term buffers into long-term storage.

Sorry, I totally geeked out on this.

Bearette said...

It's a Proust thingy, in Remembrance of Things Past he bites into a madeleine and it brings back all of these memories :)

whall said...

I absolutely love those times when I experience that.

and did belchspeak call you a fat table?