www.davidhegg.org

Memory

In 1986 I lost, what I easily will say was, 90 per cent of my conscious minds memory. It happened as a result of what follows: At that time I was 100 per cent mentally concentrated (in exact this context it is relevant to vary this way of speaking to exactly 90 per cent) day after day about comprehensive human complications, and without any legal or understandable explanation and total unexpected I suddenly got tremendous attacked from the police. It was against my relationship to my daughter whom I had known since her birth, and whom I most of all is fond of. The first that started up this was that my doctor did something wrong, and afterwards more and more colleagues to the doctor from different occupational groups began to help the doctor and each other to hide what became more and more wrong. They did not help my daughter and me, they helped each other. After ten months I was totally and extremely mentally ruined. My illness was rheumatism which at that time had bin a serious difficulty for about ten years. This illness was obvious. And I had not done anything wrong.

Today I have learned and understand a lot about rheumatism, and this illness has not become worse. My mentally condition and my memory of today, are also very well.

At that time in 1986 I had read several popular science books about psychology and other things. There was one book which became very important for me; Sleep, by Gay Gaer Luce and Julius Segal. And from this book there is one ting I believe in, that my detailed lifetime memory was intact. And that I could remember again. Therefore I systematic and careful started to rebuild my memory. It has been important for me to gather information about my life. When I had enough information I began to remember even more, and afterwards more and more again.

It also has been important for me to be sensible and not superstitious. The imagination is constructive but not rational, and it is necessary to be sensible and not superstitious. It is true that the lives on earth are built on more than we can see, and what we do not see is also something sensible.

My edition of Sleep has 288 pages. Here I will retell the important information for me during the last 18 years:

A quotation from the book with the title Sleep, written by Gay Gaer Luce and Julius Segal. Published by Heinemann - London. First published in Great Britain in 1967. Chapter 10, The Meanings of Dreams, at page 196 and 197 in the English edition which I have.

Quote begins: “During waking activity our ‘poor memory’ protects our concentration, for we do not have access to the detailed memories that appear to be available in dreams.

The magnitude and richness of this lifetime memory hoard, which seems to lie outside of conscious retrieval yet landscapes and populates our dreams, has been suggested occasionally under hypnosis. Just as an indication of the amount our brains manage to store, Warren McCulloch gave this example to a cybernetics conference in 1952.

We tried this sort of trick. We took master bricklayers who laid face brick and had them recall the seventh brick in the row in a given year. They were able to recall any one such brick thirty or forty items at the most. That was a brick that had been through their hands some ten years before.

These things are verified by checking the bricks. They are master bricklayers. That means they are laying face bricks. That means that even ten years later you can go to that row and look at the brick.

The kinds of things men remember are that in the lower left-hand corner, about an inch up and two inches over, is a purple stone which doesn't occur in any other brick that they laid in that whole wall.... The pebble may be about a millimetre in diameter…

One member of the conference inquired how a man could possibly remember thirty such features on one brick, to which McCulloch replied, ‘Oh, they do’. In fine detail the unnoteworthy features of our surroundings seem to be physically filed away within the brain, and we may reasonably assume that these billions of ‘inconsequential’ memories form part of the raw material of our dreams.” Quote ends.

May 20, 2004, David H. Hegg