Solaris

by Stanisław Lem

Maybe the ocean was responding to the radiation with another kind of radiation, maybe it was using it to probe our brains and get them to release some kind of mental encystments.” “Encystments?” This was beginning to interest me. “Right, processes separated from the rest of the mind, enclosed, suppressed, walled in, sore spots of the memory. It was treating them as a recipe, as a plan for reconstruction… I mean, you know the close resemblance between asymmetrical crystals of chromosomes and the nucleic compounds of cerebrosides that constitute the substrate of memory processes… After all, hereditary plasma is plasma that remembers. So it took it from us, made a note of it, and next, well, you know what came next.