I've been thinking a lot lately. I haven't really been thinking about anything of worldly importance, but thinking nonetheless. This is a cyclical occurrence, by the way. It doesn't follow any specific schedule, no truly predictable peaks and valleys on a perfectly crafted chart. It just comes and goes.
Then I had this thought. What if we only had a limited amount of resources for thought? I'd be running out of CPU cycles long before my body reached its own limits and ceased to function. I'm sure my autonomic functions would persist, but the rest of me would be a listless bag of meat and bones with an organic storage medium that had met its capacity with no room left to buffer or shift things around to make more efficient use of space. That's a scary thought.
Imagine living in a world where we all know roughly how much free storage our brains had remaining, or at least had a way of guesstimating how much was left. How many people would still go forward, eager to experience life to its fullest, knowing that at any point their capacity for retaining new knowledge could suddenly cease? Would people be more careful about how much detail they exposed themselves to? How would this effect the arts? How many people would find themselves scrutinizing their choices for entertainment? Would there be a home for people who can't take care of themselves because their brains are reliving seasons of Big Brother or Real Housewives?
I wonder how people would attempt to cope with this newly discovered reality. Would people be trained at an early age how to filter input? What do you remember and what do you forget? Would there be people who, due to their self imposed criteria for data retention, simply choose to filter out color, brightness, or hue? What about removing sounds from experiences all together? Imagine a sector of the population that had been raised with a monochromatic filter, knowing only shades of gray and going to school to be mindless worker drones. What about differences in tone? Imagine the masses of people that avoid works of fiction, because it clogged the mind with artificial memories of events and places that never occurred. I find that disturbing.
On the flip-side, though, if the human mind is able to delete items it sees as non-essential, I suppose that leaves a lot of wiggle room. I'd like to think that all of those memory engrams are permanently stored, and that we just lose the little bits that tell which synapses to fire in order to follow the complex branches to reach minutiae like the color of the eyes of the checker at the grocery store, or that golden apple that is Junior's third word, rather than his first, which will hopefully always be a retrievable memory.
Well, screw it. I'm just going to keep thinking. I can't shut it off anyway. Perhaps I have some sort of thought disorder. Am I in a minority, a small percentage of people who are subject to thinking about things they don't want or need to? I'm pretty sure most people I know just shift gears, but I find that difficult to do. Hmm... I should probably stop thinking about this so I can think of something else to post later.
If you have your own thought about this, or thoughts if you are more daring, feel free to share in the comments, even if it's just to tell me how crazy you think I am or to offer your mental health services. Again, it's all just my random thoughts.
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