Think

I was watching a programme about the brain: how it works, how it perceives reality, what reality is. That sort of thing. And I was reading a book by Oliver Sacks: how our perception of the world, our behaviour and beliefs, can be warped by physical insults and injuries to our brains. How anything that could go wrong with our perception probably does go wrong at sometime or other to someone or other, and a bizarrely perturbed reality is the result.

These are deep and occasionally disturbing concepts. We knit together a model of reality in our heads which appears to be an accurate, self-consistent description of how the world around us really is, but is still just a model, a story constructed inside our thoughts. Our most brilliant ideas and most heartfelt emotions are just the result of  myriad electrochemical signals firing across an enormously well-connected neural network that appears limitless in its ability and yet frequently turns out to be confounded or misled or just plain sluggish.

I speak from experience: I seem, in my mildly advancing years, to be taking longer to recall names. Of people, rather than objects. You know they are in there, somewhere. But they don't leap out at you as they once did. Instead you have to go scrabbling around after them, like burrowing through a mound of papers in search of the credit card bill that requires payment. You begin to make notes of this and that, just in case.

The scariest and somehow most hopeful thought is that all these facts and ideas and memories are all somehow still locked away in there. They haven't been forgotten and thrown away with the rubbish. They are just waiting to be unlocked.