I am curious about a certain part of my brain. I need to talk to Bob Jacobs and Lori Driscoll, our neuroscientists, or maybe to one of our psychology professors. Here is what I have in mind, so to speak.
It is that set of brain cells that tells me exactly what is going to happen when I do something. But then is incapable of helping me avert that very consequence.
It happened to me yesterday. I was getting in the car to drive to Denver. Jacqueline was hopping into the passenger seat. I was taking off my jacket to hang it in the back. I took my cell phone out of my jacket and placed it on the car roof, so that I could get out the car keys and handle the jacket. That little brain center that sees future consequences so vividly said something like “Don’t, Dick. You are going to forget and take off, sending the cell phone to cell-phone heaven.” “No” the everyday part of my brain said, “you won’t forget your cell phone in thirty seconds of closing the back door of the car and climbing into the front seat.”
Four minutes later as I began to accelerate onto the freeway, I blurted “Oh, no.” Actually that is not exactly what I said. Jacqueline looked at me like I was losing it. “What is it?” she asked. And I explained about my poor forgotten cell phone. She immediately called our sitter, an enterprising CC student, who sprinted out to look for the phone. Five minutes later he called my wife (I obviously did not have my phone) and explained that he had found two of the three pieces that remained. They had been punished by the rush-hour traffic.
This intimate, prescient part of the brain can be exasperating. I have a good idea for a speech tomorrow, but not pen or paper. “You are going to forget this good idea before you get to the office,” it whispers to me. No I won’t, I resolve, and try to retain the brainstorm only to arrive and sit at my desk perplexed about the idea that has slipped out of reach.
I would like to know why this gaggle of brain cells can be smart enough to issue me such a clear warning, but not smart enough to protect me from the outcome. Actually, on rare occasions I can outfox this maddening warning system. This blog is an example. I got the idea for it while I was shaving this morning, but you guessed it, no paper and no pen. Immediately, that tiny red flag went up: this train of thought won’t survive the walk to the office.
But I knew better. In my pocket — and now on my desk in front of me — are the crushed remnants of that poor cell phone. Now, if I can only remember, Sam wants me to bring it home so he can explore its battered microchip.
6 Comments
President Celeste: I work with John McLaughlin, President of the University of New Brunswick in Canada. He has asked me to investigate presidential blogs and their impact, and yours was recommended to me by Michael Stoner, a technology guru. I have a few questions about your blog, if I may. What is its purpose? Whom do you consider your primary audience? Do you get many comments? Do you respond to them? Are you generally pleased with the medium and will you continue? I realize this is a very busy time of year, so I thank you for your help and consideration. Susan Montague, Senior Advisor for Advancement
Well, it would seem that the moral of the story is that we really shouldn’t have cell phones! :)In short, we are distractable creatures, and yet our brains also ignore most of the sensory stimuli they are exposed to. Your prefrontal lobe clearly noted the problem of leaving your cell phone on top of the car, but in the short period of time it took you to close the doors, etc. you clearly got distracted by some of the incoming sensory input, or by thoughts that had been in your head previously. We have to make a conscious effort to keep particular things in working memory long enough to act on them. Perhaps, in many ways, we are creatures of the moment, and the whim and mercy of each fleeting second. Parents have left babies on top of their cars before under similar circumstances…so perhaps a cell phone isn’t so bad!
Is it a prescient part of our brain, or a wishful part? I’ve had the same experience, but I wonder if it is akin to deja vu. A deja vu experience feels like we’ve had it before, but likely because the signal for the event got misguided somehow to a path that feels like recollection rather than current experience, so we feel it as recollection and get blown away by the “this has happened before” sense. Maybe the prescient brain is really our brain inserting a wishful note back in our memory, something like “I should have known that” even though at the time we really had no such thought? Or maybe that’s just me trying to avoid responsibility for not heeding my prescient brain more often.
Susan, I want to respond to your inquiry. I do the blog as a way to capture a particular line of thought and share it with our campus community, including our alumni. I know that folks who are not associated with Colorado College may read my blog, but they are not my primary audience. My hope is that I can convey, from time to time, an experience or point of view that strikes a responsive chord. You can see the responses that I get if you review this page on the website. If I had a firmer grip on my schedule I would blog more frequently. I enjoy the notion that I am conducting a conversation with a self-selected company of CC enthusiasts–even when my topics often are unrelated to the college.
As a ’self-selected C C enthusiast,’ may I support President Celeste’s comment of 9-19-06. I am not alone in enjoying the conversation he conducts — all the more so on topics unrelated to the college. Reading those entries, one is struck by the depth of reflection, the range of knowledge, the clarity of writing of a leader who clearly gained the life of the mind and the spirit a liberal arts education is intended to provide. That level of knowledge, skills, and wisdom is exactly what we as parents wish our student to gain, when we send them off to Colorado College. Our daughter, class of ‘06, obtained them beyond any level we hadexpected. Quite ironically, then, even when President Celeste chooses topics ‘unrelated to the college,’ one is pressed to find anything more enlightening about the College than his conversations about them.
Did your cellphone “forget” its numbers? The electronic memory of that small “battered microchip” (now perhaps in the hands of Sam), is an interesting irony in your story. Will we ever operate with electronic memory support? When I look around, I’m convinced we already do. Our cell phones hold all those numbers becuase our minds cannot. PDA’s instantly record tasks and those “little details” (often not so small). Digital recorders can grab a verbal memo instantly and dish it back with perfect accuracy of the original message. I just got finished with an interesting book by Michael Pollan, “The Botany of Desire,” where he posited that more important than the synaptic process of memory is the neural process of forgetting! If we remembered everything that came in through our senses…we would be completely overloaded. Maybe forgetting something every once in a while is more valued than the alternative of remembering everything…So here’s to forgetting!:”The wind blows out, the bubble dies; The spring entomb’d in autumn lies; The dew dries up; the star is shot; The flight is past–but man forgot.”- Oliver Wendell Holmes