Memories, the Brain method et al....(a geeky title i know!!!)

Usually, on the way to work and back, the radio serves as the primary source of entertainment during our 45 minute ride. However, last week, one of the brothers of the Sheikh in Abu Dhabi passed on and as part of the mourning and a mark of respect, there was no music being played on the radio. However, our resourceful driver had an FM transmitter that could play songs loaded on an SD card. What a sigh of relief, right!! But there was just one catch… the songs that he had on were the old pop songs like Aqua, Vengaboys etc… It was hilarious to listen to these songs after about a decade, since after high school to be a little more exact, although these songs used to be kind of a rage then. But along with the guffaws came a little bit of nostalgia tugging in, with all those rushes of school and college life flashing through the mind’ s eye.

What aroused my interest as I sat basking in all those wonderful memories was that, predominantly the really great times, the fun and frolic were the memories that kept fleeting through continuously. I would be lying if I said that I had only fun and no heartaches or negatives during those “growing up” years, but it took me twice the amount of energy and more brain cells than that to actually pull out any negative memories I had, and even then I could only pick out probably a couple. Phew, what a waste of energy, I say!!!

Later on, I sat wondering how only certain specific memories remain truly everlasting, and more times than ever, they are the happy moments, rather than the hurtful ones…I know some people may argue against this, choosing to say, that the negative memories can be the more predominant in the mind. I choose to believe it depends on the current state of mind of the individual. If the mind is positive or looking forward, the memories would reflect the same as one tends to draw positive energy from those, whereas, when the mind is looking back or in a slightly negative mode, every memory seems to reflect the same.

From a different way of looking at it, does Time also play a prominent role in this exercise? The Great Healer, maybe it tends to sift, polish and clean out the brain over the years, allowing us to actually look at the negatives in a more holistic view, then choose to either discard the negative memories as total idiocy and either discards it totally or throws it into the remote corners of the brain, where these memories lie dormant. Logically this seems possible…

All these are just fleeting thoughts tried to incorporate into a blog post, but the underlying takeaway for me is the awesome ability of the human brain to so wonderfully condition us human beings’ way of life using Time as the catalyst to ensure that our memories remain truly treasured. ’Nuff said??