How will you remember this title 2 weeks from now?

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”

-Proust in Remembrance of Things Past- The Episode of the Madeleine

“After all, we like to think of our memories as being immutable impressions, somehow separate from the act of remembering them. But they aren’t. A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes.”

-Lerer in “Proust: The Method of Memory”

               In the first quote by Proust, he is discussing an instance in which he tasted a tea cake for the first time in a long time and it invoked a strange feeling of happiness. At first he could not place the feeling, until he realized it brought back the memory of spending time with his Aunt Leonie in Combray. The almost romantic language he is using to describe this sensation is very interesting. He is describing that although life can change so much after the formation of a memory, even to the point of not remembering you have the memory, things like smell and taste can bring the memory back to light even though those senses are somewhat ‘fragile’. His comparison of those seemingly meaningless but actually quite important senses to souls is interesting because he gives those senses a ‘body’ so to speak. He romanticizes them very much.

               The second quote is by Lerer, who actually writes about Proust’s story and writing style. Lerer describes how Proust’s novel is fully focused around intuition. In fact, he describes Proust’s episode of the madeleine cake as more of an explanation of how memory and senses were connected inside his brain, which was a very advanced thought for Proust’s time. Later Lerer describes that now scientists know that the senses of smell and taste are directly connected to the hippocampus, which is where our memories are ‘stored’. Specifically, though, Lerer’s quote discusses how our memories actually change each time we remember them or think of them, which also relates to Proust. Proust believed that our memories were not real, and were instead imaginations of the brain. As Lerer writes about Proust’s madeleine, “Proust realized that the moment we finish eating the cookie, leaving behind a collection of crumbs on a porcelain plate, we begin warping the memory of the cookie to fit our own personal narrative”. Lerer seems to be fascinated by Proust’s extremely advanced ideas that memories are not perfect pictures of events. Lerer uses a scientific experiment known as the Nader experiment, in which rats are shocked when a certain song plays, to support this idea. In the experiment, the rats obviously became terrified when hearing the song after being shocked enough times. The scientists injected some of the rats with a drug that stopped formation of memory, so obviously the song meant nothing to the rats, even after they were shocked numerous times in accordance with it. In the experiment, they also injected the rats that had been conditioned according to the song, only this time, the injection occurred when the song began playing. The scientists had believed that after the injection wore off, the memory of the ‘bad song’ would return to the rats. However, this did not happen. By injecting the rats at the same time they were having the memory, they actually erased it. This proved that memory is actually a continuous process. Memories are not, in fact, stored permanently somewhere in the brain. It also showed that every time a memory is remembered, it is actually transformed to become more relatable to your life at that present time. As Lerer states, “The moment you remember the cookie’s taste is the same moment you forgot what it really tasted like”. This is quite interesting to me, especially since I had a very similar experience just yesterday. For dinner, I got ribs and corn on the cob from the cafeteria. When I took that first bite of corn that happened to have some barbeque sauce on it, I immediately began thinking of summer cook outs. That specific taste brought back the memory of those summer evenings to me. Does that mean I had forgotten the taste of corn on the cob and ribs? Or had I just not been remembering that specific taste in any recent time? (Of course, why would I randomly think about the taste of corn on the cob and ribs?)  It is interesting that memories can be changed by ourselves to fit us so convincingly that we don’t even recognize the differences. How can this idea ever be proven? If no one ever knows what a memory first looked like, how can we know it changed? What happens if we remember exactly what happened on a specific day and we have that day on video tape and watch it again years later? Were the memories between the actual event and the moment we watched the tape different from those that actually happened? When we watch the tape is it like a refreshment of the first memory, but since it is the newest version of the memory and we didn’t notice the small memory changes earlier, we don’t realize our previous memories were slightly skewed? Or are memory changes things that are so small that the differences between the memory changes and the original memory can’t be caught on tape? (For example, remembering the sky as a much more vivid shade of blue, and explaining away the more dull shade of blue by the limitations of the video recorder). I understand that our memories are obviously changed by experiences we have had since the formation of the memory, but how long does it take before the memory is changed in our minds? For instance, if I looked at the beginning of this post, will changes about what I wrote or my ideas at the time already have occurred? I can definitely understand and even somewhat notice changes that showed memories in a more positive light. For example, if you had been looking forward to doing something fun like riding a roller coaster, and the first time you actually rode it, it wasn’t as fun as you had hoped. Later, when remembering the event, you claimed ‘it wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t too disappointing. It was actually kind of fun’- and you actually remembered the event as more fun than it actually was. This is, in my opinion, kind of an emotional protection. You don’t want to be disappointed by something that you had been looking forward to, so your brain changes your memory to protect you from that disappointment.

               The idea of constantly changing memories is interesting in the sense of novels or works of literature. Do certain writers change the memory of the original idea of their character as they’re writing? Does this affect how the story is written and how the reader understands it? I have been ignorant of the idea of constantly changing memories until this week, so I will have to keep an eye out for this in the future and other ways changing memories affect the flow or writing of a novel.

               I definitely may have rambled a lot during this post, but a week after you read it, your memories will have changed on it anyway, so you may not even remember that fact.  

Attention Paid to Attention

“But it may be questioned whether this be a fault; it is absolutely necessary, in many processes of the mind, to suppress a number of intermediate ideas.”

-Maria Edgeworth, Practical Education

“The mind does not pay equal attention to everything it perceives. For it applies itself infinitely more to those things that affect it, that modify it, and that penetrate it, than to those that a present to it but that do not affect it and do not belong to it.”

-Johnson and Proctor quoting Malebranche, Attention: Theory and Practice

This week, I am writing my post on the third chapter of Maria Edgeworth’s Practical Education, entitled ‘On Attention”, as well as Attention: Theory and Practice by Proctor and Johnson. Edgeworth discusses how attention span works, mainly in children, and how to apply this knowledge to teaching a child. Proctor and Johnson discuss how the brain perceives the great stimuli it encounters. In the above quote by Edgeworth, she discusses how children, during the process of being tutored or learning a subject, can ask questions or give answers that do not seem to relate to what they are learning at that point in time. According to Edgeworth, this is because humans are able to pass over their intermediate thoughts to just the result of those thoughts. Malebranche is discussing the same type of idea. The quote describes that the mind pays more attention to the things that affect it than to those that do not. These two quotes raise the following question for me: what makes humans ‘overlook’ things, and is this process a good or bad thing? For instance, you are sitting in a classroom, paying full attention to the lecture, and a loud sound is heard in the hallway that pulls your full attention off of the professor and transports your thoughts to what is occurring in the hall. You are overlooking the lecture, which could be considered a bad thing, especially if the event in the hall is nothing that would affect you. However, if the sound in the hallway is truly indicative of danger, than it could possibly be more beneficial for you to be placing your full attention on that as opposed to the important lecture. In a more simplified example in which the good and bad are not as clear: you enter a room and observe everything that surrounds you. Instead of focusing on everything in the room, your attention is drawn to one specific thing. Of course, this could place you in a good or bad situation, but for this situation, we are assuming there is nothing in the room that would be of immediate danger. What exactly draws your eyes to this one object and forces you to overlook everything else in the room, even for just a moment, especially if this particular object does not necessarily have an effect on you? Also, how does your brain, in the split second of viewing the entirety of the room, decide that nothing else is worth all of your attention? What exactly makes you daydream in the middle of class? What makes your own thoughts more important to your brain than the thoughts of the professor? Obviously, all these questions connect completely to attention. I suppose that your attention is focused on the object, sound, or smell because those things are more interesting to you than the other stimulus that is effecting your brain. It is interesting to think that attention works in this way. Also, what pushes certain items or thoughts to the ‘back of your mind’ or away from your consciousness until a later time when they are more suitable for thought? It is very interesting to me that consciousness and attention can work in varying degrees. More attention can be paid to certain things, while little attention is being paid to something else. A quote by Lotze in Attention: Theory and Practice supports this: “Various stages [of attention] may thus, indeed, be distinguished in the consciousness according as simply the thing itself and its own nature is conceived; or its connection with others; or finally, its significance and importance to our personal life”. This aspect of attention is utterly fascinating. For instance, in Gulliver’s Travels, the main character comes in contact with a group of people known as Laputians. These people are so interested and consumed by their own thoughts that they are completely unaware of their surroundings. Most of the Laputians have ‘flappers’ follow them around to swat them in the mouth or ears when their attention needs to be brought back to their surroundings. Why are these people completely unconcerned with the environment around them and what allows their attention to be completely focused on thoughts and ideas? This is an especially good question because this process is actually putting them in danger (the Laputians could sometimes be so involved with their thoughts that they would walk right off the edge of a cliff). Why do our brains focus full attention on certain objects or stimuli when it could put us in danger or allow us to miss something that could affect us fully? Why do certain people pay full attention to items that other people would not glance twice at? To me, attention is very interesting, and I hope to comment on this entry when we discuss it more in class and I gain more knowledge on the subject.

Response to David Lodge's Consciousness and the Novel

In Consciousness and the Novel, David Lodge approaches the subject of human consciousness. He uses supportive literary works of other researchers and novelists to attempt to determine whether consciousness is the product of the human soul or is just a product of normal brain processes. He uses evidentiary facts supporting both sides of the argument, which I will later describe when I discuss the critical question the work raised for me. One of the key concepts Lodge uses as support numerous times in his work comes from The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion, and the Making of Consciousness” by Antonio Demasio. Lodge writes, quoting Demasio, “What happens when an organism interacts with an object is, he says, ‘a simple narrative without words.It [has] characters. It unfolds in time. And it has a beginnng, a middle and an end. The end is made up of reactions that result in a modified state of the organism.’” Demasio is explaining that humans have many experiences that are much like short stories, and those experiences can affect or change the self of the organism. Obviously, the main question this reading raised for me is this: Is self consciousness (specifically that portrayed by characters in novels) due to the possible presence of the human soul or just a normal human function? Self consciousness consists of many phenomena, including logic, dreams, likes and dislikes, empathy of others, the ability to predict the actions of others, and much more. Each of these phenomena are based on humans observing the world as a self that is based inside our heads. Humans are conscious of those phenomena and experiences and can be changed by them. Our experiences and the unique traits we display can change how we act with others, how we make decisions, and in nearly all aspects of our everyday lives.  Is that simple fact evidence that a soul or spirit exists? Or could that possibly be explained by knowledge gained through everyday experiences? Much of the evidence from literary works Lodge uses to support the fact that self consciousness is centered around normal brain functions is that knowledge gained from everyday experiences govern our very nature. Science explains that this is how our brains are wired: to learn from our mistakes or successes and allow this learning to affect how we act in the future. Science claims that how we are raised and how we are treated by society affects our relationships and actions with others. I believe this central question will never be truly answered. Scientific evidence somewhat proves and simutaneously disproves the existence of a human soul or spirit. For instance, there is no concrete or even circumstantial evidence that a soul exists in the human body; there is no designated ‘soul space’ in the body, there are no chemicals, proteins, or enzymes supporting the idea of a soul, and most importantly, there is no physical structure representing the soul. However, there are many phenomena in the human body that have not and possibly cannot be explained by science, and could therefore be explained by the presence of a soul. Many, but not all, of these phenomena include  those that I listed earlier: logic, reasoning, emotions, dreams, values, morals,and empathy. These traits obviously go above and beyond the limited amount of survival instincts explained by normal brain processes. These traits are portrayed extremely well in fictional and nonfictional novels. Novels consist of characters having a variety of experiences, moving them through time and space. The characters in most novels express the traits listed earlier. They are able to empathize with other characters, logically think through a situation, and depict a range of emotions. The writers of these novels, as well as the readers, can relate to these mannerisms because most fictional characters are based off of real life individuals or the human race. The fact that humans can even relate with fictional characters or other people could, in itself, be evidence of a soul, or just an evolutionary adaptation. As I said before, this question may never be truly answered. However, I believe that the fact that humans have a high enough intelligence level to even consider the possibility of a soul or spirit may be evidence in and of itself.