Geology...

Shaving mirror --- pointing at the ceiling. He adjusted it. For a moment it reflected a second bulldozer through the bathroom window. Properly adjusted, it reflected Arthur Dent's bristles. He shaved them off, washed, dried, and stomped off to the kitchen to find something pleasant to put in his mouth.

Kettle, plug, fridge, milk, coffee. Yawn.

The word bulldozer wandered through his mind for a moment in search of something to connect with.

The bulldozer outside the kitchen window was quite a big one. 

He stared at it.

``Yellow,'' he thought and stomped off back to his bedroom to get dressed.

                                                   - Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy


This week I caught myself doing something that I could not immediately explain.  Tuesday morning, on the drive to work, I was trying to go through my mental list of what I had to do at work, and the word "Geology" floated across my consciousness.  And then was gone.

For some reason, I took note of the fact, and stopped my mental perusal of my task list long enough to think about it.  It was a familiar word.  Not in the I-have-a-vocabulary-that-includes type of familiar.  More of a secret passage sort of word.  The kind of word that digs deep into memories of childhood challenges at the door to the clubhouse.  The familiarity of a pet name that your first love used to call you when whispering sweet nothings in your ear.

Where had that come from?  Why is 'Geology' showing up on my to-do list?

When I figured it out, I was amazed at what it said about my memory.

My sister and I have had a couple of interesting conversations about neural pathways.  She became interested in it, I suspect, because as an actress, she had to understand how her won brain worked to shove monologues and commercial lines and dialogue and soliloquies down specific rabbit holes, carefully nestled where she could access them when she wanted.

Meanwhile, my mother-in-law has been struggling with her short-term memory.  In an unexpected discovery, and I have found that she can detect lying with relative ease (her BS detector is on high alert when she is around me) and she actually remembers details better when she is processing them, rather than trying to remember them.

Case in point: On a recent trip, she asked me what my mom was up to.  I told her.  A short while later, she asked me again.  I gave her the same answer.

The third time she asked, I answered:

"You know, she has actually taken up mixed martial arts, and is competing quite well on the local level.  It is great cardio exercise, and she is doing some weight training besides.  The only difficulty is that she has to explain to her sunday school class where the cuts and bruises are from."

She looked at me, eyes narrowed.  "You are lying to me."

Twinkle in my eye, I agreed - yes, ma'am, I am lying - and told her what my mom was really doing.

AND SHE REMEMBERED IT.

I suspect that because she is processing the information, evaluating it for truth, and then associating it with a devious son-in-law, she has far better recall of that fact than she does when she is simply presented uncategorized data.

Back to my story.

When the word 'Geology' floated across my mind like a bulldozer looking for something to attach itself to, I stopped and looked at it.

My first year of college was the first time that I had to work to keep up with my classwork.  High school had passed without much of a need for any system.  But that first semester, I found myself making mental lists of the things that I had to complete for my classes.

My first class was Geology.

My list would start, Geology, I gotta read chapter four and prepare for the quiz.  English, review essay notes, Psychology, nothing to prepare....

...and so on.  But the first class of the semester was geology.  And it was always at the top of the to-do list.

The super cool part was that I realized that I have been using the exact same list since 1988.  I have not thrown away that piece of neural paper and grabbed another; I have simply added to the list and (maybe) crossed stuff out.

I always figured that my memory was taking the new list and putting it somewhere similar.  Going down the same neural pathway, because that is the way my brain processes to-do items.

But it is not.  It has not updated the list.  The list is not a bunch of Post-It notes in one room of my brain.  It is a scroll stashed on my desktop.  And every time I pick up the scroll, the word Geology is at the top of the scroll.

When I thought about it, I was pleased and amazed to realize that I had been saying 'Geology' under me breath every time I made a list.  The reason the word was so familiar was because I had been using it every time I made a list.

It was my memory, whispering sweet nothings in my ear.