Where They Wait

by Scott Carson

Was memory loss a tangible thing? Did you turn and reach for something with the certainty that you knew where it was, only to find fog in its place? Then whirl back to reorient, only to discover that the most recent landmarks were also gone?

Our brains don’t allow us to press ahead without paying the toll of memory and making at least a short trip into the past. You can’t drive to your next meeting if you don’t remember where you parked your car. Can’t remember where you parked it if you don’t remember what kind of car it is. It’s all simple until it’s impossible.

Good decisions often mark the death of wild dreams.

I think we always push back hardest when we’re called out on the truth.

You don’t verify something you know. It’s a scary idea to think that you might need to.

Emotion is the enemy of objectivity. It’s the very reason that memory researchers had such rich material to work with on studies of eyewitness accounts of traumatic events.

The more emotionally charged the moment, the less objective one feels.

“It is the worst of all worlds,” she said. “A weapon that combines the most futuristic ideas of neuroscience with a ballad that’s older than this country.”