Memories are Made of These
Like the rest of your body, your brain is made up of cells - about fourteen billion of them. They operate like a super computer on less than a hundred watts of electrical power. It has been estimated that, in an average lifetime, we learn some million, billion pieces of information. Unfortunately, we only remember about ten percent of that.
There are two types of memory - short term and long term. Most of the information in our long term memory can be recalled in a few seconds, although the retrieval time often increases with age. That phone number I saved in my short term memory just long enough to dial, may never be recalled again. But I can still remember my first phone number, even though it was discarded over forty years ago.
Scientists are only just beginning to discover how and where the brain stores memories. To store so much information, the storage units must be of molecular size. One theory is that information storage causes a change in the chemicals that relay nerve impulses between cells. Another idea is that there is a chemical change in the chemical ribonucleic acid, RNA, which is stored within the brain cells. RNA is certainly capable of storing many more bits of information than we normally file away in our brain.
So next time you forget where your car keys are, take comfort in the fact that their location is still stored somewhere in your brain.
Memory is marvellous. We rely on it to know who we are. We need it to learn. We use it to bring us the pleasure of relationships and reminiscences. A person becomes increasingly helpless as his or her memory deteriorates. Many baby boomers have witnessed this up close with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of memory loss afflicting their elderly parents. It’s a sad thing to watch.
While memory allows us to enjoy pleasures of the past as we relive them in our mind, it also makes negative things like grudges and bitterness to exist. If we have had a bad experience with someone, we can keep replaying it over in our minds. This not only keeps the wound fresh so that it doesn’t heal; it can also make the wound more severe by giving it a place of unnecessary prominence in our thinking.
Memories can be triggered by all kinds of stimuli and sometimes it just seems to come out of nowhere. If you have an unpleasant memory that plagues you, letting it go or forgetting it can be a major undertaking. One of the things that you can try is distracting yourself with other thoughts. Some counsellors are able to help clients defuse bad memories by walking them through it again, looking at it from another perspective.
Like so many things in our lives, memory is a double-edged sword. We need it to exist at the most fundamental level. But we struggle to control it, either to recall things that we really want to remember, or to forget those things we would like to leave entirely in the past.
Some of us have trouble putting the past behind us, but the memories of wrongs against us won’t go away no matter how hard we try to forget. Of course the harder we try to forget, the more focussed we become on the memory itself.
There is an interesting comment in the Bible about God in relation to memory. God has a reputation as One who never forgets our offences. The fact is that while God can’t “forget” (His memory is perfect), He can choose not to remember. That’s exactly what He does for those who come to Him for forgiveness and inner peace. We read: “I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”
Do you struggle with bad memories, take comfort in the fact that if you confess your wrongs against God, He’ll never remember them again.
David Humphreys and Ron Hughes
