A Star Fall, A Phone Call, It Joins All

(Originally posted 20th March, 2007)

Ever noticed those times when you’ve been thinking about something and not long afterwards you run across the very thing that you’ve been thinking about? Or perhaps you’ve been thinking about someone you haven’t spoken to for a while and all of a sudden, you either run into them or they phone you up?

Welcome to the wonderful world of synchronicity. Carl Jung described it as an “acausal connecting principle”. By acausal, he means there’s no direct cause-and-effect link between the two topics. And yet, to the subjective observer,there’s very much a connection between the two.

Is it just a coincidence? Well, perhaps, at least from a logical perspective. But human beings aren’t particularly logical creatures most of the time. We’re often ruled by our emotions and feelings, and its through the filter of our feelings and beliefs that we see the world around us. If we’re calm and relaxed, we’re more likely to see the beautiful things in the world around us. If we’re angry, we’re not going to notice things that are calming and beautiful as much, but we probably will notice things that are going to upset us even more.

That’s one of the good things that synchronicity can do for us: it can act as a barometer for what we’re currently focused on. If you’re starting to notice things that are ticking you off all the time, then chances are that you’re holding a lot of anger or negative expectations. You’d be far better off if you found a way to relax. If nothing else, it’s better for your health and it makes your day a whole lot more pleasurable.

But there’s more to it than just that. Sometimes, when we’re embarking on a new stage of our personal journeys, synchronicity helps us out. We meet the right people who can help us with things we need. We might read something that gives us the answer to a problem we’ve been wrestling with for a while. It can bring old friends – and perhaps enemies – back into our lives to let us clear away some old baggage or to perhaps give us the opportunity to share what we know in order for us to help them through a rough spot in their lives.

How does it work? Honestly, I have no real idea. I believe that world is what we think it is, and that by focusing on something, we can bring that thing into our conscious reality. It might actually take a while if it’s something big that we’re focusing on, but the law of attraction does seem to work. The more you focus on something, the more you notice it around you. On the other hand, if you’re concentrating on something and it’s not starting to show up in your life, then that’s a sign as well that you could well have other issues that you need to deal with before you can manifest that reality.

Thing is, does it really matter how it works? I don’t think so. For me, it’s just a cool thing that happens. It’s like the universe is giving you a sign. If you listen carefully enough, you’ll hear the things that you need to hear and see the things that you need to see in order to get to your life’s goals. Sometimes the universe shouts pretty loudly – and sometimes it just whacks you upside the head with the cluestick if you’re really not getting it.

The other odd thing about synchronicity is that once you start to notice and go with the flow, it starts to happen more often. The more you concentrate on what you want, the more likely you are to notice things around you that will help. You may also find that things – like extra money – show up in your life right at the times when you need it the most.

So hey, if you’re starting to notice little coincidences around you, enjoy it. It’s a good thing.

Life Moves Pretty Fast…

(Originally posted 13th March, 2007)

A wise man once said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it.”

It’s struck me this evening just how true those words really are, and it reminded me why Geoff In the Morning came into being. It was for me to stop, look around at what’s really going on around me and to find an outlet to express the appreciation I have for the small things in life.

But along the way, I forgot that. Life got in the way, as it has a habit of doing. It’s been over a year since I’ve been on the air here. I had all the stress of a separation and divorce to deal with, stuff with work and getting used to being on my own again. It hasn’t been easy, but it’s been worthwhile. Somewhere along the road I’ve walked, I’ve started to discover me again.

One thing I’ve learned from the photography I’ve done over the past couple of years is that we don’t often see the world as it truly is. We see what we think is there and that often blinds us to the reality. Robert Pirsig —in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — talks about how Phaedrus set a writing assignment for one of his students. He asked her to write a short essay about the United States. She found she didn’t know what to say. So he suggested that she write just about the town she was in, and she was still stuck. So he said, just write about the main street of the town. She went away, then came back in distress, saying she still couldn’t think of anything to say, so he said she wasn’t looking and that she should start looking at one building in the street and just write about it, starting from the top left hand brick. She went away and started writing and kept writing and was able to finish the essay. She couldn’t explain it, but it was a relief to her.

Phaedrus pondered this for a while and realised that until she wrote about the brick, she’d been trying to regurgitate all the things she’d been taught, because that’s what she thought he wanted to read. It wasn’t until she started writing about the individual brick that she had to look with her own eyes at what was really there and find a way to express her original thoughts on it.

That’s what it’s like for most of us too. We’ve been taught that the world is the way it is and we just go on regurgitating that day after day. And then we wonder why we get so bored and feel like we’re stuck in a huge rut. It’s because we’re seeing what we think is there, and not what’s really there at all.

When was the last time you went outside and just stared at the moon or the stars? When did you last go for a walk through the forest and enjoy the sounds, sights and smells of the bush? When was the last time you sat down and played the way you did when you were a kid?

Chances are, if you’re like most of us, then the answer’s probably going to be “years ago.” And when you think about it, that’s really a crying shame.

Maybe it’s time for all of us to stop regurgitating what we’ve been taught about the way the world runs and found the time to actually take a long, close look at the world and to come up with some original thoughts about the things around us, and about our own lives. Start with the top left hand brick in your own life and take a long hard loook at it. If you closely examine the rut you’re in, you’ll start to see the footholes you need to climb up out of it.

So, do like young Ferris said. Stop and look around once in a while. Life really is too good to miss.

And while you’re out there, say “hi” to the Moon for me…

On Friendship…

(Originally posted 13th November, 2005)

A friend of mine commented earlier today that he knew that people liked him, but he couldn’t figure out why.  So, I responded to my friend and said that the reason I like him is because he cares; he’s one of the people who really has genuine concern for the emotions that I’m feeling, even if he doesn’t quite grok where I’m at at any given moment. He just accepts me for who I am and where I’m at and to me, that’s something damn important.

My friend’s conundrum is one that I guess we’ve all struggled with at some point in our lives. I know I certainly have. I’m my own worst critic, because I know all my faults only too well and, to me, those things stand out above all the positive qualities that others might see in me. But I know there are people out there who do like me, despite my faults, even if I don’t understand why sometimes.

It’s all too easy these days to go through life thinking that there isn’t anyone out there who cares about us. Life’s become so superficial and shallow and the solid relationships between people aren’t as solid as they used to be.

But I think if you stop and think about all the people who you consider to be your closest friends, they’re the ones who care the most about you, and they’re the ones who you can count on to support you when life starts to get a little – or a lot – tough. They’re the one’s who won’t try to nullify what you’re feeling, but they will give you a shoulder to lean on and offer counsel to help you see things from another perspective, hopefully one that will let you see the way out of whatever mess you happen to be in at the moment. They don’t judge, they don’t criticise, they just offer their support and their sympathy and offer to do whatever they can to help you get through whatever pain you’re going through.

To me, that’s what real friendship is all about. I’ve written before about the spirit of Aloha – to love is to be happy with. A real friend is one that is happy with you and loves you right where you’re at. Sure, they may think that you could be doing things better than the way you’re handling things at the moment, but they’re the ones who don’t make a big deal out of pointing out how wrong you are. A real friend’s love is non-judgmental. They see past the mistakes that you make and appreciating the good things that you do.

If you stop and think about it, I’d bet there’s a good chance the people you consider to be your closest friends are the ones you can see the good in as well. They’re the ones you just accept, despite the flaws and despite whatever mistakes they happen to make. They’re the ones you’re prepared to help out when they call on you. And chances are, deep down, they love you for that, even if they can’t articulate it that way.

So, friends, I guess the moral of the story is that if you want to make some more friends, go find people to care about. If you want to be a better friend to someone, accept them where they are at and let them know that you care. If you’ve got friends you haven’t spoken to in a while, give them a call and let them know you’ve been thinking of them; I’m sure they’ll be grateful for it and you might be calling at the precise moment that they need someone’s shoulder to lean on for a while.

But if you can’t just call them, for whatever reason, bring them to your mind and let them know there that you care and that you’re thinking about them. Somewhere, somehow, on some level, they’ll feel it and be grateful that you’re on their side.

And you know what? It’ll make you feel good too.

The Ruins Of Babel

(Originally posted 21st April, 2005)

I should start by saying it feels good to be back on the air again. It’s been a very long time since I sat down to write one of these, or even felt like sitting down to write one. Please accept my apologies for that; sometimes life just gets in the way of thinking.

But hey, sometimes life has to get in the way, just to give you some more stuff to think about. Maybe that’s a column in itself for another day.

But not today. Today I want to talk about something that’s been lurking in the back of my mind for a very long time indeed.

I’m sure all of us have heard the tale of the Tower of Babel in the book of Genesis in the Bible. It’s the story that’s always quoted as to why there’s so many languages on Earth.

It starts out saying that at one time, there was only one language and everyone could understand everyone else. That’s when some people decided that they wanted to build a tower to the heavens, so they could reach God. Now, God wasn’t really fussed with this idea, so he apparently struck down the tower and caused everyone to speak in different tongues so they couldn’t understand each other.

Now, naturally, because it says it was a tower, people have traditionally got to think that the building physically existed at some point and so people have been running around the Middle East for centuries, looking for the ruins of this once mighty tower.

Thing is though, I don’t think that is a story about a physical tower at all. I think the story of the Tower of Babel is really a metaphor for human understanding.

Several hundred years before Christ was born, a Chinese sage named Lao Tzu penned the now famous Tao Te Ching, which went on to become the basis for Taoism and probably a bunch of other things besides.

Now, the Tao Te Ching is a collection of poems, containing some amazing wisdom. But it has always been the very first line that piques my interest: The Tao that can be written down is not the true Tao. To me, that always says that as soon as you try to describe something, you automatically miss parts of it. You can explain most of it, but if someone just read what you had written, they wouldn’t have a full understanding of whatever it was you were writing about. It wouldn’t be until they had experienced it for themselves that they would have a real chance of understanding, and they might not even understand it then.
Robert Anton Wilson, in his book Quantum Psychology, talks about the danger of saying something “is” something else. As soon as you put a label on something, it automatically narrows people’s thinking about the thing in question and they can end up missing the point of whatever it is that you’re talking about. They stop looking at it is it really is, and only look at it in terms of the label that you’ve stuck on it.

That’s another problem with human understanding: no two people can understand exactly the same thing. They’re both going to be filtering it through their own knowledge and understanding, which is automatically going to remove some or all of the nuances of what they actually talking about. If the subject is only small and they both have a good understanding of what it’s about, then the differences aren’t going to be big factor.

The problem comes when you’re dealing with a complex and enormous problem. Like life, or even a subset of it, like religion or politics. People aren’t going to be understand a sizeable portion of the subject matter and because of the reality of human nature, that’s going to lead to differences of opinion, which can lead to ideology clashes – or worse.

That bring us back to the story of the Tower of Babel. Like I said, I don’t think they were trying to build a physical tower at all. Instead, I believe it much more likely that they were trying to define and codify what God is. They wanted to make sure that everyone was on the same page, so to speak. But remember what good old Lao Tzu said about the written Tao: it’s not the real thing. Even worse than that, people are going to have differences of opinion about such weighty matters and sooner or later, they’re going to dig their heels in and not budge on a particular topic. Once that happens, it’s game over, kids. Whatever thought structures you’ve created to help define your topic are going to come crashing down like a house of cards – or the Tower of Babel.

To me, that’s why we have so many religions on Earth. If you can set aside your prejudices and look honestly at several of them, you’ll actually find a large overlap in what they believe. There’s a certain subset of beliefs that’s common to just about all faiths across the world. They just differ in what you do with them, or the precise nature of what a worshipper is supposed to do. With humans being what we are, we get all caught up in the differences and miss the underlying commonalities. As soon as that happens, you get religious wars.

Go to any big meeting in a corporate environment where issues are being discussed. Or go visit any level of government or the United Nations. As soon as people start arguing over details, they’re picking through the ruins of Babel again.

Expectations

(Originally posted 12th September, 2004)

You know, it’s funny what people think sometimes. They have all these high expectations about how things are going to happen and how other people around them are going to act and all sorts of stuff like that. Thing is, life often doesn’t turn out the way that we planned it, folks. Call it fate; call it God’s sense of humour. Things just happen that throw a spanner in the works of whatever carefully laid out plans we have.

A few years ago, I was doing some meditating on the nature of anger. Back in those days, I was a seething cauldron of emotion, bubbling away under the surface, just waiting for the trigger that was going to cause me to explode. They were tense times. Even little things used to upset me, stuff that should have really bounced off had I had my screwed on right.

It took me a while, but I came to what was for me a startling revelation: anger is nothing more than the reaction you have when something you had been expecting doesn’t come to fruition. I  mean, think about it. Something you really want to happen does come out the way you wanted. It doesn’t matter if that thing is wishing someone you care about would ring you, or something that you think is blindingly obvious that you think that the government should be doing. If it doesn’t happen, you get upset or ticked off, right?

Anger is a natural reaction, friends. It’s not a bad emotion, if you’re using it the right way. It’s there to make us aware that something we planned isn’t working out, and to spur us into action to take steps to do something about it. It’s an early warning system and when you use it like one, it’s a very effective tool.

Thing is, people don’t know how to use it that way. It’s not something that we’re taught how to do. Instead, when something doesn’t go the way we want it to, we get the angry signal from our subconscious that we need to do something about the situation. But instead of doing something about it, most of us look at the situation through the original expectation that we had – the one that wasn’t fulfilled. But as soon as we do that, we trip that emotional early warning system again, because our expectations aren’t being met, and the anger increases. So we go round again, and look at the situation the same way again. And guess what? You just get angrier and angrier.

That’s not how it’s supposed to work and that was something of a revelation for me. Anger, like I said, is the subconscious’ way of saying “hey, you need to do something about this situation, because it’s not going the way that you want.” At that point, there’s two things you can do. You can either change the way you’re approaching the problem, and activate some sort of contingency plan so that you can work your way around the issue, or you change the expectation you have of the desired outcome. The first case is what you need to do if you’re in a situation you can change; the latter is what you need to do if you’re in one that you can’t.

This is not to say that expectations are bad things. Quite the contrary. Unless we are able to believe that the choices we make are going to bring something to fruition, life becomes one great, depressing hopeless mess. If we the only expectations we have are negative ones, that something bad is going to happen to us, then that’s all that’s going to happen, and strangely enough, we’re never going to be let down.

But people have the wrong sorts of expectations. A good expectation is a positive one that gives you a good outcome to focus on and work towards. A bad one has the same outcome, but it specifies precisely how that outcome is going to come about and that’s where most people come unstuck. Like I said earlier, life has a habit of throwing obstacles in our paths when we’re in pursuit of our goals. If your expectation includes the details of how something is going to pass, then if it doesn’t happen that way, then you’re going to end up disappointed and bitter, even if you get the end result you’re looking for.

What you need to do is just keep your eyes on the end result and don’t let things stop you from getting there. If something comes up that blocks one approach, then back up a bit and find another way of getting there. That way, the journey to your end goal becomes an adventure and you’ll probably learn a lot more along the way.

Under Cover Of Darkness

(Originally posted 30th August, 2004)

What is it about the night that makes people so nervous? You hear stories of people all the time who are afraid of the dark — or at least partially disturbed by it — and who have to have all the lights on all of the time.

Back in ages past, when life was much more of struggle for survival than it is now, being afraid of the dark makes a certain amount of sense. Human eyes are better suited to the ambient light levels during the day and at night we can only see in black and white. That makes it so much easier for predators to sneak in unobserved. When we lived closer to nature, this cautiousness was probably justified.

This evolutionary instinct isn’t so necessary any more. In most civilised countries, we can stay safely indoors at night, locked away from the predators in a place where no one’s going to disturb us. So why is it that so many people still can’t handle the nighttime and they become edgy as soon as the lights go out?

I love the dark; it’s my favourite part of the day and I look forward to sunset every night. For me, it is a time of introspection, when the inner world comes out to play. All of my best thinking happens at night. When I’m writing, I love to turn just about all of the lights out and just pace around the house in the dark, listening to music. Ideas just seem to flow better when there are less distractions around.

Night is also normally when people sleep and dreams are a usual part of the nightly sleep cycle. As Carl Jung postulates, dreams give the subconscious mind a chance to process repressed emotions and thoughts, and get them out into the open where they can have an effect on the person’s consciousness.

So if the nighttime is when our subconscious mind has greater power over us, are people just afraid of what’s going on inside?

Perhaps. It’s something to think about anyway.

The Need For Mysteries

(Originally posted 30th July, 2004)

Have you ever wondered about some of those famous mysteries,things like the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs or Bigfoot? Are they real, or are they just figments of our collective imagination?

People have spent inordinate amounts of money trying to get to the bottom of these things and science is always looking for ways to explain them away rationally. But sometimes I wonder if there actually is a rational explanation and what it will mean if we actually find out what it is.

As technology develops, people are figuring out more and more about the world around us. For the most part, this is a good thing. We have better medicines, longer life spans and diseases that used to be completely fatal can now be recovered from. The Internet lets us communicate with people on the other side of the planet in real time, allowing solid friendships between people who have never even met. GPS systems let us know where we are in the world to within a few feet, meaning that people never have to be lost again.

But all this advancement does have a cost. Where is the wonder in people’s lives these days? All this science and technology has completely removed the need to even think about what lies over the next hill. There’s not much in the way of exploring to be done anymore either; just about every square inch of the planet has been mapped by satellite or aerial photography.

The thing is though, not knowing something is what has traditionally driven humans to explore and to dream new dreams. Trying to figure out what might be is actually more enjoyable than knowing what is. Exploring the possibilities of a situation with our imaginations gives us insights into other factors of our lives, and sometimes we can learn some surprising things about ourselves in the process.

I suspect that even if scientists manage to come up with explanations for nearly everything, other things will pop up to provide our imaginations with something to wonder about. UFOs are predominately a product of the twentieth century. Are they super-secret planes, or are they visitors from another planet? Even if the explanation for UFOs is found, I’m sure that something else will take its place.

After all, we’re just one small insignificant planet in an awesomely vast universe. Once we figure out how to get off this rock, there’s going to be a massive amount of exploration and explanation that needs to be done as we head out from our own solar system.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the maps that get produced have the modern equivalent of “here there be monsters!” on them.

Life Changes

(Originally posted 1st July, 2004)

Sometimes, as we travel through our own personal journies, life can throw some really curly things at us. Most of the time, they’re the sorts of things that can cause everything that you held near and dear to our hearts to come crashing down around our ears.

The vast majority of time, it’s a normal human reaction to freak out and bitch and moan and generally complain that life’s not fair and ask “why is this happening to me?”, right?

The thing is, what happens to us in our lives are the direct result of the choices that we make. Sometimes we make good choices and find our lives enriched in way that blows our minds. Sometimes we make some not so good choices and find that we get into trouble. But the thing is, what we get out of any experience — either good or bad — depends entirely on the choices that we make when we’re going through them.

Negative emotions like fear and anxiety aren’t meant to rule our lives. Instead, they’re actually there to wake us up and make us understand that the decisions that we’re making aren’t the right ones and that we need to change what we’re doing if we don’t want the end result to be bad.

But it’s like I said a while ago — an event, in an of itself, is neither good nor bad. Those values come entirely from the way that we interpret the event itself. It’s the way that humans are programmed by our genetic makeup. How we interpret the event is usually a subconscious decision, although sometimes it can be a conscious one.

I’m not saying that disengaging from the emotions you’re feeling in a particular situation isn’t easy. On the contrary, it’s often incredibly difficult when you’re caught in the middle of a situation that’s freaking you out. The trick is to realise that you’re freaking out and trying to understand why. As soon as you can do that, you can normally find another alternative, another way of looking at the event which may not be as bad as you first thought. Sometimes it’s a realisation that the changes the event is going to be bring are going to be better in the long term. Othertimes it may be that it’s just a sense of relief that a not so good situation is over and you’re actually free for the first time in a long time.

When a life change comes along, it’s best to not to deny or resist it. It’s here, and the sooner you can embrace it and move on, the easier your life is going to get. And really, an easy life is what we’re all after, right?

The Legacy Of Eden

(Originally posted 28th May, 2004)

A few years ago, I received a copy of Sting’s Brand New Day CD. Like most albums, I quickly gravitated to a couple of tracks on it, and in particular, the second track, Desert Rose. As is my wont with such songs, I put it repeat on the stereo and just lay back on the lounge room floor, closed my eyes and soaked up the song’s atmosphere.

Now, those of you who are familiar with the song will know, it’s quite an atmospheric number. It didn’t take me too long before the song had my imagination picturing myself out in the desert at night, staring up at the stars with my arms flung out wide, as the “camera” just circled around and around.

That’s when one of the last lines of the song struck me as being particularly significant: it says, “the legacy of Eden haunts us all.” That one line intrigued me and got me wondering just what the legacy of Eden really is. It also brought to mind a revelation I had had several years earlier.

I’m sure most of you are familiar with the story of the Garden of Eden in the Bible, and in particular the story of the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3. We often hear of the “original sin” of how Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate the fruit that God had specifically forbidden them to eat.

Back in about 1995, I’d been mediating on this story for a while, looking at it not in its literal sense, but seeing if it was worthwhile examining it as a symbolic parable for the state of the human psyche. That was when I had what was for a startling revelation.

You see, if you look at the story before the serpent convinces Eve that it’s OK to eat the fruit, both Adam and Eve are blissfully happy in the Garden. If you read on a bit further after they eat the fruit, you find that’s when they develop modest and try to cover their nakedness and their imperfections.

The difference is because of the fruit itself: “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (Gen 2:17, emphasis mine). It’s the name of the tree that struck me as being the most significant part of the whole story. Before Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they had no knowledge or even understanding of the concepts of good and evil, but once they ate the fruit, they started to make value distinctions.

A person, when they are completely mentally, physically and spiritually relaxed, is able to roll with the punches easily and to accept whatever life throws their way without being fazed by any of it. They just adapt to the change of circumstances without worrying and just continue on without getting hung up about it. To my mind, this is pretty much indicative of what the mental state portrayed by Adam & Eve before they ate the fruit.

But as soon as you start putting labels on the experiences we have, and classifying them as either “good” or “bad”, that’s when you can start to run into trouble. You can tend to get blinded by your own beliefs, particularly when you’re in the middle of a negative experience, which can prevent you seeing any other way of looking at the situation.

The problem we all have is that the habit of evaluating everything as good or bad is so ingrained into our psyches that it may even be hardwired into the way our brains actually function. Being able to just accept everything that happens is an extraordinarily difficult thing to constantly achieve, and I think that the people who have actually managed to attain that transcendent level of though would normally be looked on as “enlightened.” While I’m not sure if it’s possible for most of us to ever achieve this in our everyday lives, it is possible to practice conscious awareness of what we’re thinking and how we can change our thoughts to change the way that we see the world.

So for me, the “legacy of Eden” isn’t so much the way the original sin is normally viewed as disobedience against god, it’s the ingrained habit we all have of evaluating everything as either good or evil.

And Sting was right; it does haunt us all.

Memory

(Originally posted 16th May, 2004)

Have you ever stopped to wonder how we remember something? Is it more than just a random connection of neurons firing in our brains, or is there something else to it? And where is all the information stored?

I find mysellf constantly amazed with some of the stuff that I can remember. Somehow, information gets stored away in such a way that I can often bring back to my consciousness almost instantly when I need it.

This fact came to my mind when I was wandering a shopping centre last week. I saw a guy I hadn’t seen in probably three or four years. He’s not a friend, but I know him from the gaming conventions I used to go to. As soon as I saw him — which literally was just in passing in the supermarket — his name leapt into my mind.

How does that happen? I started thinking about how information can be stored in such way that even when it isn’t accessed for several years, it’s still available for split second recall as soon as it’s needed.

But there’s more to it than that. Somehow, I can remeber people’s faces and even if I haven’t seenthem in many years, I can still remember their names even if they have changed physically in the intervening time.

Trivia’s another thing that I find pretty easy to remember. I have no idea how I can remember this tuff, but I do find that certain words trigger recall of bits of information that do come in handy at times.

But there’s a lot of stuff that I find very difficult to remember. Shopping lists and small mundane day-to-day stuff just doesn’t seem to stick.

Is it just a function of importance? Are the things that we can remember easily tied to the things that we put the most stock in? Sometimes people wander through their whole lives without realising what’s most important to them, never connecting the fact that the most important things to them are the ones they have the most mental connections to.

Computer Science in recent years has developed artificial neural networks, computer programs that are created in the same way that the human brain works. Each element in the program takes a number of inputs and depending onthe values coming in makes some sort of decision and sends one or more values to the output. If you string a bunch of these objects together you can get the program making some intelligent decisions all by itself.

But is that all there is to memory? I’m not so sure. It seems to me that if memory was just a function of connections between neurons then eventually all of the connections in a human brain would be filled up and you couldn’t remember anything else without forgetting something. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. People, with the right prompts, can apparently remember everything that they’ve ever encountered; it’s just a matter of doing enough digging to be able to get the information out again — the right set of inputs if you will.

We’ve all got a precious thing in our minds, so regardless of the actual mechanics of how it works, let’s tip a glass to the mysteries of the human mind and how it can manage to remember stuff for us, whenever we happen to need it.