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Listening to the living

"What is certain, though , is that mental suffering is effectively without end. One may think one has reached the very limit,but there are always more torments to come. One plunges from one abyss into the next." ~ W.G.Sebald , The Emigrants

We all go through mental suffering and there would have been atleast one moment where we thought it will be best if we existed no more or lived in a parallel world where we could change the past or future. And it is almost inevitable to not recall memories while you are at it.

"Memory, often strikes me as a kind of a dumbness. It makes one's head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds" ~ W.G.Sebald

The psychologist Jean Piaget began his book on memory with a story from his own life. When he was a young boy, he remembered when he had nearly been kidnapped in the park except for the alertness of his nanny. The one problem with this dramatic event is that it never happened. Years later the nanny admitted that she had made it up to explain a bruise he had received while playing. Piaget's vivid memory of an event that had not occurred makes an important point about the relationship between confidence and accuracy in autobiographical memory. The core of what we mean by memory is our own autobiographies, which we carry around with us all the time and are constantly updating. You may forget what you learned in school today but there is almost no chance that you will forget who you are. People have tremendous confidence in the accuracy of many of the autobiographical details that we all can recall. However, autobiographical memory is not a fixed record of the past but constantly subject to revision from the incorporation of post-event information.Autobiographical memory is organized by intentions and actions. Recall of life events is a process of reconstruction and storytelling that makes use of cues from a person's current intentions and general rules of how events are ordered to provide a coherent justification for recent and planned actions. The prefrontal cortex makes use of available cues to initiate recollection from the temporal cortex. The recollection of autobiographical memories makes use of both the instrumental system, to generate perceptual representations and an emotional response, and the habit system, to generate meaningful details. New details may be added to the semantic system at any time. Consequently, autobiographical memory is constantly being revised through the addition of post-event information to semantic memory. The habit system plays a role in recollecting semantic information for autobiographical memories. The influence of the instrumental system, hence the amount of perceptual information, is strongest for the most recent events but declines and may be non-existent for older events. However, there may be one or more reminiscence bumps for important, novel or first-time life events, which may be recalled regardless of when they occurred. The reminiscence bump is associated with the lingering influence of the instrumental system.

June's instrumental system was at a high as she recalled an event that was only partially true. An event/memory of her grandfather Edward rescuing her from a dark room where she was locked out. She pictured herself in a room which wasn't so big neither too small , a room that occupied about 12*12 sq.ft all suffocated and locked out , looking at every detail of the room so desperately for a way to get out. There she was in a merciful condition suffering to breathe , feeling almost dead. In that terrifying scenario , she heard a voice , a voice that couldn't be heard so clearly. A susurrated voice resembling to that of her grandfather , screaming "Breathe". She sighed and repeated "Breathe". She waited there breathing against all odds , calming herself down that this is not the end and she is not being led there yet. Twenty minutes went by , she woke up , finding herself in a bed with her grandfather and mother Gina on her side.

As she remembered this , she shook off all the things that seemed to be bothering her. The disappointing score card she received bothered her no more. People leaving her bothered no more. She knew from within that the key is to hold on and breathe. Listening to the living can solve it all.

She then took out all the courage in her , gasped and shot out a mail to Baidu which was an elucidation of her current research objective.