Extrasensory Perception

I'd like to show you something. You've done it many times without thinking about it. I'd like you to think back to when you were a child. Pick an event where you were seriously hurt or frightened. Get very quiet and look at it. Think about how it felt, what it looked like and who was there. Don't be impatient. Just get very quiet and let the memories come to you. Don't look away, and don't be afraid of what you might see. Look around. What time of day was it? Were you alone or with other people? Sniff the air. It may take some time, but after awhile you'll slowly become aware of more and more details. Colors, lighting, sounds, smells; all manner of sensory inputs will begin to coalesce into a single, whole experience.

Now stop. Think about this for a minute. What is it that you are actually doing? Remembering, of course; but what does it mean to say that?

The accepted belief is that the brain is like a filing cabinet where experiences are encoded and stored. The brain has lots of cells, so it takes a long time to fill up. But I have to be honest with you. My brain is not at all like a filing cabinet. It's more like a steamer trunk where I just keep trying to put more and more stuff. I think most people are like that. Yet, without effort or intent, most of us are able to remember just enough to keep going. Not all memories are important. Do they get deleted, like files on a hard drive to conserve space? Or do they just get lost, like my keys? Nobody has any idea how this really works, but it HAS to work that way. Information needs to be stored somewhere, and the brain is the only organ we know of that could possibly do it.

I might buy this argument if all the brain did was store information, but it doesn't. A large portion of our brain is responsible for processing and interpreting visual information. Seeing is learned by infants through a complex process of trial and error. So is walking. Controlling our muscles requires even more of our brain. Walking, breathing, swallowing, even making our heart beat requires precise timing. Hearing, taste, touch and smell can't happen without the brain either. But unlike memory, we've been able to identify the areas of the brain that control most of these things. Then there's the phenomenon of conscious awareness. Nobody knows how that works either. Any way you look at it, the brain is starting to look a little crowded. But wait! It gets better.

In 2010, "Sixty Minutes" did a story on Superior Autobiographical Memory. People who have this ability are able to recall every detail from every moment of their lives. When asked, "How do you do this?" one woman replied, "I just see it." Stop and think about that for a moment. All information needs a physical carrier, of some type, for it to exist. When you consider the volume of detailed information contained in the experiences of every moment of a person's life, whatever stores that much information would have to be really, REALLY big.