Chapter 10: Fictional Memory Management

The other day I was listening to an ad where it was being said "handwashing" can reduce the spread of germs etc by a lot! Got me thinking... Is handwashing a term we should have around? Its not a concept... It's just... Washing one's hands! Brainwashing on the other hand, is a concept.. You don't take the brain out and wash with water..

So instead of handwashing, I'm gonna write about brainwashing.. Just because I find that more interesting. Now before we dive into what that is, let's try to recap what we know about human body.. And compare that to a computer..

You have inputs like sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste etc etc which continuously feeds your brain.. The brain takes all that.. Refines the inputs into what it thinks is correct and passes it on to either the memory or the logic. Now the sensory organs are all third parties.. The brain don't trust them blindly.. So much so that you come up with statements like "I can't believe what I'm seeing".. Or.. "Is that a dead rat?".

Like most detergents it doesn't remove all the dirt in one wash.. And you have to go through a couple of rinse & repeat cycles, the inputs from these input devices slowly refines what mr brain knows to what it has to be. This is why it's called a brainwash when a constant banter of similar inputs usually inferring the same thing is constantly fed to a person. This slowly modifies what he or she knows into a different form. And like washing, it's not 100%.. The more cycles result in better results!

I was thinking hmm.. That's interesting... when there comes along the movie "Inception". That one literally revolutionized the brainwashing industry by avoiding the middleman.. The input organs are not completely trusted by the brain.. So let's bypass it. The concept is based on the fact that when a new idea is introduced into the mind, the thinking would mutate the idea into a measurable knowledge pretty quick! With hardly any loss so a refining is not required here. Instead, information is fabricated... And since the fabricator is the brain itself, the trust factor is way too high. Thus some bits of this information are recorded as baseline facts. As with the nuclear physics from controlled fission to the atombomb, the key is that the seed needs to be a very low amount of charge so as to keep it in control from wrecking the whole setup. In fact this post is in itself a mutated for, of the seed which was my disagreement with the term "handwashing". Thus with that i guess it is self-illustrated on how the mutation can sometimes completely change the nature of the seed.

That's for introducing data or logic into the head! Now what if they wanted to undo something? Unfortunately this is one of the scenarios where making is easier than breaking.. But how do you break it? The first step towards the same was probably by the creators of "Eternal sunshine of a spotless mind".. Any memory of a segment of knowledge is spread across the brain in an amalgamated form I'd like to think. This doing the reverse of brainwashing is definitely not an easy task. Thats where they have to find all segments where the memory was and to delete from those. This like removing the skin of an apple... It cuts out from some of the good memories as well. Which is sad but hey., that's better than nothing right!?

Well that's with fixing the memory.. Now what happens if some logic has gone wrong and u need to get hat fixed. The age old "shock treatment" is what they employ. Maybe it tries to short circuit some logic in brain and hopefully with positive results. Very crude way but might have worked in a few cases purely by luck. I usually do not say anything occurred because of luck. Here I am using the word because specific to administering the shock, the doc probably doesn't know what the dose is gonna do. He gave it a shot and it worked maybe. Maybe there are some studies and they target a certain area of the brain who knows.. Maybe like in "Analyze this", the doc should try to get to the root of why the abnormality came into being and administer a dose of fix by any of his methods of therapy. But not former crude ways hopefully.

Now there's the question of short term memory. Like in "memento". I am yet to come up with a theory on how the guy could have effectively lived his life in the movie with the condition. Unfortunately in the lack of long term facts, the brain assumes the figments of information analyzed on a realtime are actually facts! Thus he really believes in them as low as it lasts.

Since we have gone across all the good & ill effects of external manipulation, maybe letting the person be is the best thing to do. Let the person be a result of his surroundings than as a result of what you want him to be. Maybe he'll learn better than what we preach. Maybe If you want to still guide a person/child/a patient, fix the surroundings and the brain fixes itself..

Pseudo doc signing off... :-)