Escape Characters

Ah, that's it

I was thinking last night, sleepless in bed due to the fact that I had gone to bed at 10:30pm (a good hour before normal), that I may very well remember just about anything I've committed to memory, provided something reminds me.

Hearing myself now, a day later, this doesn't sound nearly as profound as when I came up with it last night. My thoughts were this: for almost everything, be it a word, and image, a taste, smell, any sensation, I have forgotten it at some point. I forget my 8th grade economics teacher's name, the taste of a particularly nasty glass of water in Phoenix, where the hell Gwennie's is at, computer passwords (oh, the horror), and what I was thinking this morning when I got up.

It wasn't interesting to me last night that I had forgotten these things. Forgetting is just something I've come to accept as part of the human experience (and so I adjust by archiving a ton of things to a digital medium, and then backing them up repeatedly). What's interesting is that I remember that I forget. Yeah, yeah, I know. Bear with me.

What seems to be left behind is a memory hash. I'll explain.

In programming, a "hash" can refer to a few things, but in terms of data structures and memory storage, a hash is a type of indexed structure.

//Establish an array of numbers, indexed by numeric values
array_of_things = things[20]

//Each number has an index we can use to reference it
array_of_things[0] = 1
array_of_things[1] = “Landscape Architecture”
array_of_things[2] = another_thing
array_of_things[3] = array_of_things[2]

//And the indexes don’t have to be numbers
array_of_things[“arbitrary”] = 7
array_of_things[some_thing] = -1

Collections of data that are indexed by non-numeric values are called hashes, due to the fact that a "hashing" algorithm has to be used to turn the non-numeric index value into a numeric index value (in case you thought computers were somehow magical). The more sophisticated the hashing algorithm, the more abstract types of indexes you can have for your hashes (strings, objects, even other hashes themselves).

What I'm trying to get at: I have a collection in my mind. It is a collection of memories, ideas, thoughts, symbols, etc. It is organized however my brain decides it needs to be organized. And it is indexed however my brain decides it needs to be indexed. When I try to perform the following (or the equivalent of the following):

memories["what_i_ate_for_dinner"]

...after a while I get back something like...

("Dry cereal", "Marshmallows","Leftover Spaghetti","Edamame")

Ah, but something doesn't seem right. I forgot something. Something in my brain tells me that "what_i_ate_for_dinner" doesn't exactly "hash" to that collection. And thus something is inaccurate about the list. (For those curious, I snuck a handful of cheetos. And don't judge. There is nothing in the apartment. I'm in survival mode.)

So, based on this, I see two pieces. One is that I have the "key," what I called "what_i_ate_for_dinner." Without trying to remember what I ate, I can think to that time, that place, that idea, that symbol, and come up with what should be the index for that value. Another way to think of this would be generating a query, knowing the piece you're looking for, and knowing how to ask.

The second piece is knowing if the answer fits the question. What I stored of what I ate, in only the short hours after I ate, had already become corrupted. It was only in trying to add various pieces to what was returned that I found that "Cheetos" fit into the hash in the reverse direction.

To put this in more approachable terms, we can do two things, we can know that we may or may not remember something for the fact that our brain keeps these keys/indexes to data so that we may access them later, and we can know that based on the key/index whether or not what is returned is valid, or even exists. Essentially, we know when we remember something, and we know when we have forgotten something.

What I found interesting in thinking about this is that when we have forgotten something, we usually know what it is we've forgotten once we see it again. You remember a phone number when somebody tells you again ("Oh, right, one-five-SIX-four"), you recall a taste once you taste it again ("This totally reminds me of..."), and you finally remember what your hands felt like on the keyboard once you remember what you changed your password to on Friday. There is no exclamation of remembrance for passwords. Just cursing while you're writing it down so you don't forget it. Again.

I understand that the entire system of memory storage and retrieval, particularly in the human brain, is a "fuzzy" one, in that we can't always depend on memory to act how we expect. Being that memory is memory, any function or structure of memory is subject to the same corruption as the data stored. It is possible to forget that you knew something. And it is entirely possible to misremember something, despite any assurance from your mind that what you remember is true to an acceptable degree. The brain's hashing algorithm is definitely sophisticated, but it can always make mistakes.

But given at least a consistent trend, I wonder: given the right/perfect stimulus, what could we remember? One of my earliest memories is playing with my He-man toys in my parent's bathroom. If I saw the toy, would I remember anything more about it? Would I remember the toy at all, or has the memory degraded to badly that the symbol of the toy no longer represents the actual historical object? At what point does the key to my memories no longer represent what the originally were? And how long do I have to reach that?

At this point I had fallen asleep. Which was good, that's what I was trying to do. But I had fallen asleep with that idea of impermanence. Which has kind of stuck with me all of today. Having to come in early this morning to work, I had some time to think while I performed an upgrade. Staring at the command line output going by, and listening to my CPU fan damn near taking off from having the CPU sunk, I started thinking about gravity.

Or maybe anti-gravity. The phenomenon where despite the gravitational pull of every atom in the universe towards every other atom, things still seem to accelerate away from each other. That at this point in my life, when myself, my friends, and my family are all living or finding their lives on their own, that the distance between any person I've known and who they are now only widens with each passing day. This is going to continue for the rest of my life, until finally I start attending more funerals than birthdays, and then the distances become more constant.

It's a morose way of thinking about it, but I wasn't just being morose, despite being at work entirely too early. I wanted to combat it. I wanted to say that despite everything else, I was able to manage a constant, and if not a constant, at least be able to identify the change. I don't want to forget anything, and more importantly, anybody, whether I'll know I've forgotten them or not. And I thought to myself, "Wait, my computer! My writing, my photos, my records!" All there, saved, to the best of today's storage practices, for later retrieval. And my records would serve as a stimulus for anything I'd forgotten. Any detail I missed. I would be able to remember everything, given the right pictures, the right words, given that I documented something well enough.

But I can only document how they had been. Which was my most sobering thought of the morning. That despite documenting my life to an absurd degree, the distances between what and who I remember and what they become and are does not stop. The acceleration of error in memory due to the natural human anti-gravity for the rest of my life is a constant. The best I can do is document the phenomena.