I See a Dark Stranger in your Future...

My mother has recently been converting her old slides of when she was a kid into digital form, and turning them into a slideshow to distribute to the rest of her family. She was quite young in some of them, as in 1-4. After a brief chuckle (or full blown laughter in my case) I asked if she could remember anything about her childhood. Nada. Her first memories started about age 8.

Now, we'll come back to that later, but now I want to explain something about electron guns, more commonly known as the colour television. Televisions do not create a solid image, common knowledge, that it is instead a combination of pixels that create an image. Sort of true. The pixels themselves do not form an image, but because of their close spacing, our brain interprets them as one solid image. Another, less commonly known fact, is that on a television with a pixel count of 100 (outrageously low, but it's an example) that the total number of pixels actually displayed is only 50. Televisions display the image in stripes 1 pixel (or more, depending on your resolution) wide, and your brain creates the image in-between, so that it looks like 1 solid image. Your brain expects what should be there, and it creates it. It is not actually there, your brain predicts what it thinks it should see.

Now might be a good time to read up on Plato's Allegory of the Cave

Since you all skipped over that, I implore you to go back, and read it.

Okay, moving on. Now we'll explain the mechanics of the eye. (Don't worry, it's all going to make sense later) The retina of the eye takes light that has reflected off of objects, transforms them into an electrical signal, and sends them zipping along to the brain. Now, that takes about 1/10 of a second. That's a considerable delay, and people don't seem to notice. Because it doesn't happen. But you just said it happened. Correct, it does take 1/10 of a second for the signal to move, but the delay never occurs. Why? Because you brain anticipates what it thinks it will see 1/10 of a second into the future. Your brain creates it's own reality, so what you are seeing is not what you are actually seeing, but what your brain expects you to see 1/10 of a second into the future. How does the brain predict what is going to see? By using things it has already seen to predict the future (see it all coming together now) This can often lead to confusion when a never-before-seen action happens, and the brain has difficulty adjusting to what is happening, as it has to predict into the future.

Back to my mom, she was having difficulty remembering things when she was young, but when she was older, she had almost total recall of many events. I'm going out on a limb here, but I suspect that all of your early experiences are erased for a few reasons. One: most of the event's will never happen again, so the brain no longer needs them to predict the future. ie. learning to walk. Or Two: The Brain has not sufficiently developed to understand some of the memories (if not most) so it filters them out as useless information.

Now, I'm going to have to assume you've read the following posts, which will help your understanding of the next bit:

- The Labyrinth

- The Helmet of Horror

- The Genetic Tree

Now, this means if the brain is seeing things it expects to happen, based on the past. Which means that the future and present are just the past, which have been re-engineered to create the present and future. Based on memories, the brain decides what it thinks will happen. Memories are made solely of the past, of past experiences and actions, so everything is the past. So we therefore, are living in the past. QED

Just a song to send you on your way