Dear Science,
I need answers. Why does my mind suddenly, and often, flash back
to random memories? Like right now, I’m sitting at work, and my mind
flashed to a small patch of grass with a blackberry bush that’s next to
a creek and a historic brick building in the tiny Trinity County town
of Weaverville. I was in this exact spot like 10 years ago. I can’t
think of anything that triggered it. It happens to me all the
time—not this particular memory, of course. I get all sorts of
random flashbacks spanning my entire life. Does this happen to
everybody? What the hell?
These memories probably aren’t quite as random as they seem. Rather,
some small trigger is probably resurrecting them from deep in
your brain. A smell, a sound, a pattern, or color of light connected
your present moment to the past.
Memory, particularly this sort of associative memory, preceded even
intelligence; it’s operating on a very deep level in your brain and
thus able to interject itself into your conscious mind, flooding out
your thoughts at the present with recollections from the past.
Take just about any vertebrate and expose it to a paired stimulus (a
bell) and event (some food), and the brain of the organism will
start making connections, bringing up the memory of the event when
the stimulus hits again. This sort of memory is incredibly useful as
a scratch pad for life—allowing organisms to adapt to new
environments with ease. After smelling something, eating it, and
getting sick, this is the way a beast can remember to not eat after
that smell in the future. Science suspects the smell of Axe body
spray will soon induce similar feelings of revulsion in straight women
everywhere, by the same mechanism.
B. F. Skinner, an American scientist, made a career out of fussing
with this sort of memory, creating an entire scientific
philosophy—radical behaviorism. The magnificent bastard
came up with a delightful experiment showing how powerful this
mechanism is in animals. He placed hungry pigeons in a box. After 15
seconds, no matter what the birds did, they received food;
nothing the birds did made the food more or less likely to appear. The
pigeons developed little rituals anyway—desperately
spinning around counterclockwise, tossing their heads back, or swinging
their whole bodies generally in one place in the box—falsely
associating these prior actions with the appearance of food. People are
animals. (Like clockwork oranges, some might say.) When there’s no
explanation for this or that happening, people also become
superstitious. Indeed, Skinner’s experiment with the pigeons may
very well show the real source of religion.
Science idly wonders if this is why intelligence
evolved—to sort out the true connections from the
false. Once you start considering causality—did this really
cause that to happen—you’ve got a powerful filter to clear out
all of the junk.
Causally Yours,
Science
Send your science questions to
dearscience@thestranger.com
This article just triggered a memory from 15 years or so ago when I read BF Skinners “Walden Two”. A novel by a scientist, go figure.
No Proust reference? Madeleines have quite the opposite effect of Axe body spray.
I just read a really fascinating book that covers a lot of this territory, called Brain Rules. I think the author is local? Don’t remember though…
I’m sure Golob doesn’t mean to imply that the operant-conditioning response develops more slowly in straight women than in everybody else. Maybe he’s discovered the existence of some tribe of people, other than the frat boys who adorn themselves with it, who actually enjoy the stench of Axe body spray.
For this gay man, that horrid stench has been an emetic for many years.
Associative memory preceded intelligence!? It operates deep within the brain and is thus able to interject itself into our consciousness!? That you see consciousness as an separate observer somehow distinct from basic memory function reveals that you need to be reaching out to students/faculty in the relevant fields before submitting your columns. You’re probably a couple of important decades out of touch with this one.
I need to point out that “the real source of religion” would be very complicated, not as simple as one psychological theory… I imagine you meant “the real source of superstition”.
Religion is really complicated (which is why it’s fun to think about), and includes a whole lot more than just superstition (such as ethics, history, identity, etc etc). Come on, Science, you know that!