R is for Retrieval
As memory increasingly becomes externalized, the hunt for memory has become a cultural pastime. The idea that nature has a memory is not only evident with the fact that cells have a memory, like a computer has a memory that can be stored and accessed, or for that matter that stem cells have the capacity to memorize the form and function of all cells, allowing blood cells to become muscle cells and so on, but that memory may be an inherent property of all matter and space. Physicist John A. Wheeler mentioned to Sputnik that on his windowsill at his Maine cottage there was a rock that came from the garden of Academia in ancient Athens and that it was his wish that one day, there could be a mechanism that could unlock its sounds so that he could hear the discussions between Aristotle and Plato. The animistic capacity of nature to remember extends itself to the theory of morphic resonance in which biologist Rupert Sheldrake suggests that memories are no more stored in the brain then sitcoms are trapped inside our TVs, that the brain is a tuning system that taps into the collective memory of nature, located invisibly in and around all organisms. Then there’s the idea that memory could be stored as a hologram, one of the leading hypotheses of neuroscientist Karl Pribram, suggesting that memory is not stored in specific brain sites, but distributed throughout the brain, and considering that neurons are so packed together, these expanding ripples of electricity operate like a wavelike phenomenon, constantly crisscrossing one another to create interference patterns, giving the brain its holographic property and allowing memory to be stored and activated by wave frequencies. Thomas Goodwin’s research at NASA also signifies an important link between field phenomenon and memory, as studies show that human cells exposed to the electromagnetic field of microgravity grow in three dimensions, as if they are remembering their natural state inside the womb. Moreover, Goodwin’s research suggests that the genetic composition of all cells remember their evolutionary history and, in the future, science may be able to find the right signals to “turn on” specific genes to get a cell to express behaviors or forms it hasn’t shown in millions of years. Whether or not we’ll be able to grow dinosaurs in space or whether or not Proust was visiting the past or creating the past in the present when he dipped that Madeleine cookie into his tea is unknown, but if we are programmed to forget, as other theories suggest, well, we just may never know.