It occurred to me last night around 11:35 as I tried to watch yet another gritty British police procedural that I should find out how to conjure a patronus–and to wonder what it would be if I did. Wouldn’t it be ironic to have one’s Patronus be a black dog? “Fight Depression with your own black dog!” Heh.
Before you start to close this and say “I’m not reading about yet another middle aged woman who really has nothing to complain about because she is well-fed, clothed, has a home and a husband who loves her and yet whines about being saaaaad” trust me. This isn’t that.
This is about me wondering if anyone else ever experiences this particular phenomenon of the mind. Since I’ve only ever had my own mind to live in, I am truly curious about the brains of others. (For a minute there that said “the brians of others.” Like everyone knows someone named Brian. Hmmm. I wonder about that, too.)
Anyway, here’s the story. I had an eidetic memory until about 4 years ago. As anyone (everyone I’ve ever met, I think) who has heard me whine about being ill–whaaaambulance alert!–knows, that was among the first things that fritzed out. I, who used to be able to recount entire conversations verbatim, suddenly found myself writing down phone numbers and addresses on sticky notes. Then I was forgetting meetings and production details. It made for a hairy experience in my last months of working. My brain went downhill as fast–or faster than–my body.
Then a few months ago something odd started happening.
For seemingly no reason at all, I began having perfect recall of specific moments. And not just the room and the people there and the conversation, the way it was before. I have perfect recall of the mood I was in, the feelings I was feeling at the time. It’s like my wiring goes in search of all the long-buried touchy parts in my brain and says “Hey! I know! Let’s go back there!”
So what that amounts to is that I’ll be sitting there watching tv and knitting and keeping the yarn hidden from Gob and then all of a sudden, there my mind goes…back to 1:30 Saturday morning when the person I carpooled with on the 4:30 to 1:am shift had to go bail out her boyfriend on the way home. Suddenly, while sitting in my cozy house, I’m there in my mind at the bail bondsman’s, terrified and feeling very alone.
Or I’ll be eating lunch at the kitchen table and my mind recalls a decades-old fight with my husband and the utter despair kicks me in the gut.
It’s not that I’m depressed, because 98% of the time I’m just fine. It’s these weird spot recalls that are starting to make me wonder what on earth is happening inside my head.
Now of course I am interested if that happens to anyone else–and I’m not comment trolling. I promise. If I wanted to comment troll I’d say something inflammatory about Mexico or Jesus (the Jewish one, not a Mexican one) or Democrats or Republicans.
I just wonder what it’s like in YOUR Brian.
Just Another Pretty Farce 
“I just wonder what it’s like in YOUR Brian.”
Is this “Brian” an intentional joke? Because we all must have our own Brians too. All I know about Brians is that they make good friends but not so good for dating (and I’ve tried BrIan and BrYan, so I’m an authority 😉 ).
But as for the brain, sometimes I’ll have a vivid memory that seems to come out of nowhere, but usually if I look hard enough there is some kind of trigger (often a “this thing made me think of this which reminded me of this, that made me think of this, which brought me here” type of thing.) Sometimes I can’t figure out the connection, but generally, for me at least, I assume there was SOMETHING that triggered the memory for me.
Yep. Like dolphin said, a trigger.
For me, it’s music, or a certain food or smell.
Every single time Donna Summer’s “Last Dance” plays, I can see the old Bellevue High gym lined with balloons and streamers and ninth graders, just as vividly as if it were last night. And that girl, Gina, who said, “yes” when I asked her to dance, and the subsequent feeling that the world was bursting at its seams; so exciting and scary – filled with possibility.
I hated disco then, and I’m not too crazy about it now, but 30 years later, hearing that song makes my heart leap and my stomach sink, just a little.
They aren’t always so defined, but I think triggering moments like that happen all the time.
I don’t have exactly the same experience, but there are times when my brain ambushes me with a sad or scary memory. I feel like I am reliving that moment, feeling how I felt and struggling to return to reality.
Hm….typing it out that way, it sounds a little like PTSD. I wouldn’t consider the memories traumatic, though — just sad.
For me, the memories seem to be an OCD coping mechanism to help deal any current distress.
No triggers for me. I’m nearly 51, and for the past 3 years, I’ve been experiencing that phenomenon. Most of the replays aren’t significant events or even very emotional — just, suddenly my brain is there instead of here. It’s a peculiar sensation. Makes me wonder if there’s a leak in the space-time continuum.
Huh. My various illnesses affect my medium-term memory (I can remember with enormous specificity what I did a day ago or a couple of decades ago, but run into a lot of trouble with 6-months-or-a-year-ago stuff). And stress can affect my short-term memory temporarily. But only a level of repression of which I am not capable would let me get rid of the old stuff. (Not that my memories are mostly bad ones, or anything other than delightful to recall. But it would take major repression.) But this stuff, even the very old stuff, I just pull up like any other memory. it feels very ordinary.
What I sometimes get that’s different is total visual recall of a place I’ve been sometime in the past. There may or may not be sounds, smells, or feelings associated with it, but the visual component is so strong that I get surprised that I’m actually somewhere else. I tend to think that certain angles of light/shadow elicit these moments, but I’ve never completely put my finger on how it works.
TOS: I wonder if it has anything to do with getting older. Elderly people reminisce about the old days a lot. Maybe this is a response to the brain having this sort of reaction more and more?
Jason: I’ve wondered that myself. Maybe memory synapses start misfiring occasionally later in life. It’s a very different sensation from purposefully recalling the past. Maybe lots of people experience it but figure it’s just them and don’t mention it (until somebody writes a blog post about it!)
TOS, yours is the best description of what’s happening to me. I’ve wondered if it’s part of the aging process of the brain. Or in my case I’ve wondered (just in the last day) if it’s a side-effect of one of my medications. The Tramadol I take for pain also has a mild seratonin component. I’m wondering if that monkeying with my seratonin causes periodic misfires.
Although I much prefer the ‘rip in the time-space continuum’ as both an explanation of the experience and an answer for why it is happening.
I have a friend doing neuroscience research who is looking at the way myelin works in the neural synaptic network. Judging from what she’s told me of her research, it’s at least plausible that your newest diagnosis is having some impact on allowing your neural network to rebridge some connections. Of course, I’m finding that hormone fluctuations that come with perimenopause also are doing odd things to my memory. One minute I’m getting into the minute details of Elizabethan poor laws and the next I can’t for the life of me remember where “m” is on the keyboard.