I have the best sister in the world. Periodically she sends me articles she knows will pique my interest. Just the other day she sent me one on a new NIH study that revealed how the human brain separates, stores, and retrieved memories. This interests both of us as it was only a year ago this coming Wednesday that our Mom passed from Alzheimer’s disease.
This new study is the first to apply direct recording of neurons that generate actual thoughts in humans. Pretty exciting stuff! What they are finding is that although we live our lives as one continuous experience we actually store memories of that experience as individual distinct moments. This process is referred to as “event segmentation”.
I won’t go into the details of the study itself, but I will tell you our memories have two different cognitive cell boundaries. “Soft boundaries” that function like movie scene cuts in a single story, and “hard boundaries” that separate different stories altogether.
The study only gets more complex from there, but it got me to thinking about how fundamentally basic story is to human life. We are, it seems to me, story based creatures. We not only see our lives as a continuous story, but our belief systems and personal relationships find their meaning and purpose in the stories we tell ourselves.
As an analogy think of it this way. Your life is a book. That book has chapters. Tons of them. There’s one about your childhood, one about your schooling, one about your spouse and children, one about your working career, one about what you do for fun, one about your spiritual beliefs, who your friends are, what you’re doing in retirement, and so on.
Those chapters have cohesive moments that hang together as paragraphs, single cohesive thoughts on pages that connect to other cohesive thoughts on following pages that document the movement of story to the next chapter. All those chapters, all those pages, are all held together by the “book binding” of the cognitive cells in the library of our brain.
At the end of my mother’s life she could no longer distinguish between individual stories. The ones she had endlessly told all her life became jumbled without the benefit of those cognitive boundaries to organize them. It’s as if the binding had broken in her brain. The stitching that held the pages together had come undone. Her story pages were falling out in no particular order or sequence and there was no way to repair it.
When she died we were left with the memory of all her wonderful stories. We still tell them. They have become our stories as well. We took them in and added to them and made them our own and now we share them with those younger family members. When we’re gone they will tell them as well. That’s how it works. That’s how life is. We are all part of the great story of humankind. We write our own chapters, but that Book? That Book is going to be amazing.
Spirituality for the Rest of Us 