My Wacky Brain

This is one of the papers I've written for psychology...if you can't tell, I had too much fun with it.

My Wacky Brain

I’ve heard that most students take psychology and develop some paranoia as they find all the disorders that describe them. Not for me, that experience—I was thankful, after feeling all my life that something was wrong with my mind, to discover exactly what was wrong. You see, I am now quite convinced that my neurons were distracted.

Sometime after my conception, as those multiplying cells organized into heart cells, skin cells, blood cells, etc., my neurons missed the orientation session and refused to read their instruction manuals. I suppose they were male. All those cells that are supposed to go to the cerebellum and the motor cortex to coordinate movement and reflexes? Well in my brain, they all decided that explicit memory sounded more interesting. It takes me weeks to learn simple physical activities, near-constant focus to keep from stumbling, and I have reflexes that would leave something to be desired even in tortoises.

On the other hand, I need only see, hear, read, or smell something once to remember at least 50% of it exactly later, and after the second time, my recall is more like 80%. But all those rogue neurons, they don’t just encode; no, they make countless connections to each other, more than any person really needs, I’ve found. I need the barest minimum of retrieval cues to activate thousands of neural networks. No sensory information is neutral...my neurons connect it to something, no matter how remote the connection seems when viewed logically. The most boring statement will remind me of something, and often more than one thing. My mom calls this “Google brain”, but unlike Google, where information is pulled up from keywords but left without any meaning attached, my brain finds fantastic connections to everything new and anything in my past.

Now, this description might seem more accurate of oversensitive neurons, but I maintain by my diagnosis of “distracted”. Because, also unlike Google, my neurons don’t pay close attention to which neuron fired just before them (I’m finding them a bit too human, really), and so I suffer from extreme source amnesia. Someone will say something, and I suddenly have a quote or piece of lyrics pop into my head and sometimes out of my mouth...but then I have to pause and wonder where it came from? I’ll laugh when someone else says the same quote I was thinking of, and then have to ask them: “Now, what is that from again?” In many ways, it would be nice to have a true “Google brain”, so I wouldn’t have to constantly use the computer version to check sources.

But worst of all, my neurons are incredibly distracted when it comes to what is important to remember. Books, movies, and songs need only one or two times through the hippocampus to be indelibly printed in my long-term memory, while I have to repeat the one thing I need from the pantry at least 30 times on the trip down the stairs to ensure that I won’t forget it. I’ll have to start using that loci technique more often and hope my neurons don’t figure out that I’m tricking them.

Another nice thing that this class has cleared up is my disturbingly frequent experiences of déjà vu, which I’m starting to think are those quintessentially distracted neurons not paying attention to which file those memories go in. I wake up remembering everyday, possible sort of dreams, and then find them actually occurring shortly after. No, I don’t work part-time as a fortune-teller...who wants to know that some day in the future I’ll end up seeing one of my friends at the library?

But now, I know what they are doing, those pesky neurons, and how to fix it. With my pegwords and the self-reference effect, I’m confident that I can train them to remember what I want to remember. And hopefully those myelin sheaths will multiply on all of the connections for coordination and reflexes...I’m really tired of tripping down stairs. But no worry, with knowledge comes power, and now that I understand what’s going on up there, I can fight it.

Well, it did make a nice picture, really, a nice visual image: little neuron people up inside my head, constantly distracted. I could see the file cabinets of “dreams”, “events”, “everything else”—mislabeled, as I could see. Equally clear I saw those lazy neurons sitting around and just looking for connections to make. “Look Bob, that tone of voice is just like the tone that Anthony Hopkins used in scene twelve of The Mask of Zorro!” And I could see the lonely faces of those neurons in the cerebellum, stretching out their hands to make the networks necessary for movement while gazing longingly up at the overcrowded memory sections. I know in the end it’s just an image, but it was fun for a while.