Ok, that is just so weird.
Very well-written article though, and the books and he quotes from are also very well-done. Some nice quotes from literature too, Tolstoy to Joyce to Homer to J.M. Coetzee. Never heard of Thomas Nagel (What Is It Like to Be a Bat?) or Jakob von Uexküll and (umwelt), but maybe I should. Except there is probably no room in my brain for those men and their ideas and essays.
With all the tons of stuff I shove into my brain day in and day out, it’s a miracle I can remember even 1% of it. Actually, my life is sort of like a contest. I am often having a contest to see how much stuff I can shove in my brain. Then I go back over things, like a list of an author’s main writings, and I see how many of the titles I can remember. I am amazed I can remember even a few, but so many just blow away with the wind and the rain in the night when you can’t even see it happening. You wake up fresh in the new day, and it’s where’s did all that data go? Over there, over yonder, to this way and that, to the four winds and beyond, who knows where it goes.
What about all the stuff that stays? Where does it all go anyway? How can a brain possibly store all of that stuff? I don’t get it. Sometimes I think we know too much stuff, and there is no way we could possibly store all of that in our brains. Our heads are just too small. It doesn’t add up.
Maybe the brain gets full and we start putting the information out into the air around us, sort of like an extra-cerebral swap file, and as we cruise through life we can sort of sniff along at all the info left behind in the swap files in the atmosphere, and sniff out things previously remembered but not exactly forgotten, merely swapped out into the world outside our consciousness. We sniff it out with our brain tentacles, and if we have learned the information before, better if we remembered it or stored it as a data file, then we can somehow find that file of information again outside of our minds and put it back into the hard drive in our head. Universal, Jungian, but conscious and not unconscious and data and not myth.
What a crazy thought. About as insane as the idea that our brains can actually store and recall those terabytes of data files in a space no larger than a cantaloupe.
My brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare.
I had to cram so many things to store everything in there.– David Bowie “Five Years”
