A man walked into a bar. Ouch. This is the largely unmemorable educational column, ready to fight the barbarians at the gateway to your brain. It is precisely gray matter which I wish to discuss today. Memories are formed every second of life and there is no delete button. Today's mission is to show you how to reprogram your brain.
First, I am opening my brain to place some prongs on my, "commercial lobe." Suddenly I feel like chicken tonight and want to obey my thirst, but I'm wondering if I got milk. This is the brain area where all those slogans, jingles, and images of desirable products reside and fester into self-doubt. I ask myself: Is it in me? Where do I want to go today? Do my lips have a thirst for diamonds? What's the softest bath tissue for my little ones? Is my bra curvaceous? Am I unpoopular?
Sure, these memories are kind of fun and breed a certain nostalgia. Why, I remember the days when I wanted to know where the beef was and when salsa from New York City was a punishable offense. But, the future is at stake. Memory, as depicted in the film "Memento" (about a guy who programs himself into becoming a hitman) influences who you become.
For example, listening to new music is often the cause of insecurity and disorientation. Britney Spears, like her or not, provides a cultural security blanket just simply because everyone knows her. Start talking about the music of Pierre Boulez and Ornette Coleman and you're jumping off the deep end. You need a familiar groove, a riff or a chorus just to let you know where you are and where you're going.
This is called cultural laziness. After all, if someone just decided to install your computer with a bunch of gratuitous screensavers, useless programs and some viruses for good measure, you'd be kind of pissed and delete them. I'm not saying that Britney Spears is an annoying computer virus (although her pop-up Pepsi ads on Yahoo! come pretty close). Certainly many healthy relationships have been based on the Britney Spears philosophy, "Hit me baby one more time."
However, memory is largely what you've done with your brain, what you've decided to see, feel, touch and hear. It is a choice that should not be controlled by Spears, *NSYNC, or whatever happens to be out there in mass quantity. You get to choose your defining memories, so choose well.
If I place the prongs on the brain area known as the "romantic lobe" I find poems that fill the soul and woo lovers. I recite Shakespeare to my love, "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red. If snow be white, then her breasts are dun, if hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head." Warning: not all Shakespeare poems are created equal. In this case, hope that your loved one will continue listening, patiently sobbing and beating you up while you finish the punchline of the poem ("And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare, as any she belied with false compare"). Song lyrics, classic film dialogue, and lines from Jane Austen novels should also do the trick.
You should also have a sizeable amount of brain space for jokes of every sort. As I place the prongs on "jovial lobe," out comes this: "Why did the chicken cross the road? So a man is on a desert island with a genie in a lamp and he gets three wishes. There's a blonde, brunette, and a redhead. You're a redneck if … There once was a dog named Sex."
Jokes keep it light, but for more serious matters, memorizing quotes of the great masters and traditional aphorisms can help you gain credibility. Whenever you make a mistake that you're proud of, kindly remind your criticizing friend of the Icelandic proverb, "Every man likes the smell of his own farts." For a high-brow approach, you may quote Oscar Wilde's phrase, "Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes." For those moments on your deathbed, you may recite to yourself the Bible, the Quran, the Sutras, or whatever holy book rocks your boat, but these are the products of memory and almost nothing else.
Sure you could read the quotes and write them out, but, far from extending memory, writing causes forgetfulness. The psychology is that if you write it out, you don't need to remember. That's why all the stories of the past are built on oral traditions to keep it alive on the tongue and not dead on paper. In fact, monks were the computers of the past, memorizing and reciting tomes from the hard drive of their minds.
Imagine if you told Tori Amos, Billy Joel, or Elton John to play piano but they said that they needed to first consult their notes. Imagine a stand-up comedian doing his routine with cue cards. Imagine trying to be an actor but not memorizing your lines. In real life, you can't take a recess like you do in court to come up with an idea for rebuttal. Your memory is your rebuttal, your story-telling genius, your pearls of wisdom, the music you hear in your mind when your actual ears fail you. Use it or lose it.
