A Fascinating Insight



MOM-NOS has a post with a very interesting idea about autism at its core:

"Collins wrote, We forget all the time. We forget nearly every single impression that passes through our minds. What we ate for lunch: who our roommate was ten years ago: what we paid for a soda in 1982: what we just came from the living room to the kitchen for. It is constant and vital, and we only notice it if everyday useful things go missing. Every moment gets thrown out like so much garbage - which, in a sense, is what the past is. Memory is a toxin, and its overretention - the constant replaying of the past - is the hallmark of stress disorders and clinical depression. The elimination of memory is a bodily function, like the elimination of urine. Stop urinating and you have renal failure: stop forgetting and you go mad. And so it is that the details of nearly every single day that we have lived, nearly every single moment of each day, nearly every person that we have met and spoken to, the exact wording of the paragraph that you have just read... Gone.

So, what if I've been looking at it backwards? What if Bud's "splinter skills" - remembering volumes of video dialogue with appropriate inflection and dialect, remembering the lyrics to every song he's ever heard, remembering the track number of every song on every CD, entering a store he was in once before several years ago and knowing instantly what he played with there - what if all these things are not because of an extraordinary ability or even an obsessive compulsion to remember?

What if they are because of a diminished capacity to forget?"

The full post is here , and it is well worth reading. The earlier post which stimulated this thought is here .

Posted: Wed - November 9, 2005 at 12:13 AM        

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