The human psyche or mind or soul, for all practical purposes, consists mainly of a memory management system and an information processing mechanism resident mostly in the brain. Conscious, subconscious and unconscious minds are actually three different parts of the memory. If we analyze human mental activity, this becomes quite obvious. The processing system appears to have its own field of temporary memory where all the incoming stimuli are stored pending processing. As to how the processing system logically identifies, interlinks and decides on responses for a stimulus could be similar to, but certainly far more complicated than, the logic of a spelling checking or synonym finding computer program which utilizes what is known as a relational data-base. For the purpose of our model, we shall divide the sum total of human memory into four parts, namely congenital memory, factual memory, reasoned memory and abstract memory.
1) Congenital memory - This is the part of memory with which every child is born. It contains the basic instincts and reflexes and hereditary tendencies. Part of this memory appears to be the result of the genetic codes contained in the parent cells, whereas some of it seems to be transferred from the mother's brain at some stage during the child's development in the mother's womb. The latter may be the cause of unique racial and communal tendencies. It may also have a contribution in the rise and fall of civilizations depending on the status of women and their experiences as a group. If women lose their basic feminine traits of mercy and trust, these parameters become nonexistent and the community becomes cannibalistic and self destructive. For experimental verification of this idea, birds could provide an interesting medium as the birds' congenital memory includes identification of food and techniques of nest building. In the case of birds the incubation takes place in a shell outside the mother's body, so a lot of information has to be transferred to it before the egg is laid. Whereas congenital memory is transferred from the mother, it appears that some crucial thought pattern subroutines and their triggers are contained in the father's genes; this is obvious from the observation of children born from intercultural marriages. The very rapid developments in science and industry since the induction of women in these fields could also be, to some extent, due to successive generations having congenital information that supplements their education.
Probably, this is why most civilizations have developed customs, rituals and festivals to keep the women folk busy and happy irrespective of political and economic pressures on the society. Most religions give womanhood and specially motherhood a high status of reverence. Muslim tradition attributes `hurma', meaning invincibility, to women; and places heaven at the feet of the mother.
A state of antagonism between sexes ensuing from women's liberation movements in some societies has resulted in considerable debasement of women there, and the hereditary effects may become obvious before long. The constant and unchecked sexual harassment of women and children by subjecting them to indecent exposure through print and electronic media and signboards is simply pathetic, and could be the cause of frequent cases of gender-confusion being encountered these days. In fact, the indiscriminate rush for organ transplants may be a pointer to the trend towards cannibalism. But, unfortunately, the print and screen media in most parts of the world are so distracted by political events that they have so far failed to project the views of those who may have detected this alarming possibility.
2. Factual memory - The human brain, like other organs such as the heart, lungs etc. remains active all the time. Some of the time it receives sensory information which it stores in what we call factual memory. This information is not always simple or unitary as in the case of an electronic computer. To start with, factual information received at any time consists of the external stimuli derived from the five senses as well as internal sensations such as body temperature, blood pressure, muscle stress, pain, pleasure etc. received from the various parts of the body. Now, if all this information was to be constantly recorded then the storage space requirement would be phenomenal and the time required to analyze even the simplest observation would be quite long. So, for each identifiable input mode a normalcy level is established from experience. Some of these normalcy levels are established early in life and, with some effort, many can be altered up to a certain age. The common name for this phenomenon is sensitivity. The analytical and permanent storage mechanism becomes active only if one of the information parameters exceeds the predetermined limit. Perhaps this is why if someone wants an event to be memorable he usually marks it with loud sounds such as music or bright lights or strong scents or sharp tastes or vigorous sensations or a combination of these. The maximum speed and accuracy with which the analytical processes would be carried out, however, depends to a great extent on the genetic endowment of the individual called intelligence which can be measured to a reasonable degree of accuracy by I.Q. tests.
3. Reasoned memory - During intervals between receiving and/or responding to sensory information, the brain analyses the data in the factual memory and develops generalizations which are stored and properly cross-indexed in what we shall call reasoned memory.
The logic involved in the functioning of the reasoned memory to analyze information is not entirely genetically built in, but is mostly acquired during early upbringing. Competitive or compassionate behavioral tendencies are picked up very early depending on the response patterns of parents, guardians, nurses or brothers and sisters. Children who are told often about the moral or ethical significance of their actions, or hear comments on those of others, develop an analytical approach based on moral and social acceptability of actions and reactions. In other words, there would be a high percentage of principled and brave individuals among them; invariably including a few bigots. In traditional expression, such people are said to possess an opinionated personality with a high degree of moral courage and little physical courage. Those who are brought up and trained by conditioning, i.e. a process of reward and punishment based on the judgment of their actions by others, later take their decisions on the basis of likelihood of benefit or risk involved in possible lines of actions. In other words, such individuals are more likely to be timid and shrewd. In situations where benefit and risk are equally balanced or if they are unable to understand clearly the responses of others, they suffer indecision and sometimes act irrationally. In common parlance such people would be known as being selfish and having physical courage but lacking moral courage. Those who do not receive any parental attention at all during early life, do not develop any logic for reasoning and evaluation of a situation and depend entirely on the expectation or sampling of pleasure and pain. They become socially enigmatic when their pleasure and pain anticipations are artificially generated by misdirected impulses of the abstract memory which will be discussed later. Such individuals are, often, rather unpopularly called characterless. Those who do not have a sense of right or wrong, when they realize that they have committed something unsavory, rather than regretting their mistakes they try to indulge others also in the vice in an attempt to mobilize popular justification for their follies.
The anticipation of pleasure or pain, irrespective of upbringing, generates or activates a series of temporary analytical sequences often termed drive or motivation, and it seems that nowadays a number of people indulge in all three decision making processes from time to time. However, those born with a high degree of genetic endowment of analytical capability are still able to find logic in the random responses of others to their own actions. Sometimes it comes late in life by virtue of involvement with an environment highly conducive to analytical activity of the brain coupled with tranquil or orderly surroundings different from the one to which the person is normally accustomed.
Foreign words have no correlation with early experiences and often little indexing with factual memory. Hence, among people who use a foreign language for official purposes, there is very low efficiency and a high incidence of fraud and administrative corruption. Similarly, people who study their religion in a foreign language, treat it more as a mental exercise than as a code of ethics. However, extended exposure to a foreign language in its native environment seems to produce the memory linkages necessary for forthright behavior.
In some communities primary education imparted to the masses in public schools and less enlightened homes seems to be ethicless, whereas children educated in expensive private schools and brought up under trained supervision, receive some sort of good or bad ethical conditioning and form the only group of people capable of taking objective decisions quickly, thus acquiring a dominant role. In some others the education system is used as an open elimination process to select an elite group to rule the community.
People who have to behave differently from their true feelings at an early age due to strict parents, oppressive teachers or prolonged illness, develop a logic of concealing their feelings bypassing the normal mental processes. They pretend all their lives and never experience true feeling or emotions. Many discover very late in their lives that they had fallen in love when they were young. The most objectionable and socially damaging character trait of such people is that they never appear to feel ashamed of their mistakes or misdemeanors. Instead, they try to capitalize on their own follies and failures by putting the blame for these on others. If you say "perhaps the fault was mine" to give them a lead to come clean, they will hold you to your words and try to put the blame for every felony in the world on you. Some develop a strange aberration whereby they prepare a speech or dramatic sequence of actions in order to please or influence a certain person but, in a fit of nervousness, they perform it in front of someone else. This creates additional complications in their lives. When such people develop a secret vice, they go far in it. Their mask is so perfect that they are seldom caught and even those having the best intentions are unable to help them. What is worse, they regard the sincere actions of others also as dramatics. They develop flags in their memories related to various words and stimuli which trigger the abstract memory function. These flags can often be dissipated by suggestion by a psychoanalytic procedure or in a faith healing environment. Alternatively, a new set of reference memories can be acquired by undertaking an adventurous expedition or a comprehensive course in unfamiliar environmental and climatic conditions which produces all sorts of factual stimuli at a pace that allows simultaneous use of the reasoned memory. Such lives often end in sudden or mysterious deaths.
This author has come across people who, when they feel an ache or pain do not disclose it to anyone or see a doctor, but continue to behave in an ill tempered manner until the symptoms aggravate into serious illness. According to one homeopathic-cum-spiritual healer, in most troubled or unsuccessful families the woman suffers from inflammation of or tumor in one of her private parts. Her suppressed agony results in constant irritation and bad temper which poisons the life of everyone in the family. Harrowing tales of the persecution of unlucky women are found in Indian folk history. Perhaps the world would become a much better place to live in if all bad tempered individuals could be made to undergo regular medical examination and treatment if necessary.
Those who experience little care or attention in their early lives, if suddenly showered with a lot of care and attention, tend to react in a peculiarly selfish and sadistic manner. Instead of responding with the same degree of love and compassion, they try to exploit the feelings of the other person, and even try to blackmail by taking others' sincerity as hostage. They associate authority with unpleasantness and resent it in all forms. Similarly, the children of affluent people who are controlled and occasionally insulted by servants in early life are hard on their employees or subordinates in adulthood. Early bitter experiences in negotiations often result in what could be described as robber mentality. Such people develop ambitious plans all by themselves, which are often based on unrealistic assumptions, and then try to implement them without regard to how others are likely to be affected by them. Quite often they land themselves in situations which make them quite unpopular.
As middle age approaches, the application of reasoned memory becomes more significant. If you ask a young man for comment or advice on any particular issue, he will ask you some specific questions and give you a plan of action based on his own experiences resembling the situation in question. On the other hand a middle aged person would tend to generalize the issue, ask broad based questions and offer indirect suggestions in the light of which you can formulate action suitable to your own contingencies. In an environment charged with abstraction, indeed, the comments may be quite humorous or sarcastic. This process of increasing priority of the reasoned memory continues with age until we find that, with the onset of senility, recent memory becomes quite unreliable.
4. Abstract memory - When none of the above two processes is active, the mind analyses artificial situations by combining factually unrelated events or by exaggerating or deflating to extremes, the magnitudes and proportions of variables related to any particular event. This process is commonly known as dream or fantasy and the data thus obtained is stored in what we shall call the abstract memory. An objective and scientific use of the same process is called a "What if? analysis". As time passes, unrelated events of the past get related. Just as some unrelated events of the present are liable to become related in the future; some dreams or thoughts may bear close resemblance to events that occur at a later date. For instance, if while driving through a certain lane one frequently sees a particular child playing recklessly, one may develop a mental picture of the child being run over by a car -- and eventually be faced with the reality. Sometimes, the scenery or environment may be so unassuming that one may forget about the frequent observations and only remember the disturbing probable mental scenario. This phenomenon is commonly known as premonition, vision or precognition.
In children, who have little factual memory and much idle time, the operations of the abstract memory are most prominent. They indulge in all sorts of fantasies and seem to enjoy it. They find it so easy to attach wings to horses, cause fishes to fly, blow up ants to the size of people, let the camel pass through the eye of a needle or make mice talk in English. The fact that children like fairy tales and out-of-this-world stories is simply because such things are in conformity with their usual thinking process. This tendency continues up to early youth when the increased glandular and nervous activity related to the reproductive system begins to provide sensory impulses which being of a new but factual nature get involved in both reasoning and abstract processes. At this stage the increased physical activity and broadened social contacts result in greater inputs of factual information too. In many young people the rate of information input is so great that their brains can hardly cope with the organization of this information and have little time for analytical or abstract processes. This is why at this stage, responses are, more often than not, based on recent experiences and the more sensitive youths are often confused. At the same time, if factual information is inadequate to keep the brain busy, the implication of sensual impulses on abstract analysis, which are very pleasurable, may influence the development of personality in a certain manner. They may indulge in chains of thoughts that culminate occasionally in great passive pleasure, and they may develop obsessive tendencies or narcissism, depending on various factors. People who undergo a traumatic experience due to war or communal violence at an impressionable age develop a logic whereby instead of responding to an apparent threat by conciliatory gestures, they react with bellicosity and occasionally even with violence.
This stage of life is particularly significant for girls. In mixed social environments where girls often come in contact with unrelated males, the pressures generated by temptations and advances are considerable and occasionally result in unpredictable behavior. The long term personality development may take one of three courses depending on early experiences, amount of guidance available, and tolerance limit of those influencing the girl's behavior:
1) She may succumb to these pressures and, as a consequence of conditioning resulting from pleasures experienced from unintentional contacts, may develop a permissive attitude.
2) In order to avoid male advances, she may develop a set of mannerisms and abrasive style of speech and social exchange.
3) She may develop a technique of concealing her true feelings and become flighty and romantic.
Some girls go through one or more of the above phases until they gain enough experience and develop a stable behavior pattern. Others become stereotyped in one of the three described patterns. Those who develop personalities of the latter two types usually take a fairly long period of courting before they are ready for marriage. A quick marriage, such as an arranged one, may result in considerable adaptation problems.
Girls who spend this period of life in predominantly feminine confines seem to adapt better to married life except for the occasional cases where they develop lesbian tendencies. A number who do not develop active lesbianism have occasional crushes on other women. Cases in conservative communities, where men suspecting their wives of infidelity only found that they (the wives) were in love with the neighbor's wife, are not unheard of. A few, who somehow get involved in masturbation, lose their ability to fall in love as would be explained later.
However, in the next few years, most individuals are able to regulate their lives in such a manner as to allow only an optimum quantity of factual information to reach them, and that too of the varieties most beneficial to themselves. They also regulate their behavior to allow time lags between impulses and responses to ensure that their reactions to any situation have at least some benefit of the reasoned memory.
In the case of a confrontation, one operating under the abstract memory has an advantage over a normal person. This is because the former is, to a certain extent, impervious to factual pleasure and pain, and his responses to mild symbolisms of intimidation are dulled. An impasse in negotiations is often reached because one person interprets the language used by the other in a totally alien perspective created by his own abstract memory. This is different from the difficulties encountered by two persons discussing a subject about which they have different experiences. In such cases there is a visible effort to learn the details of the other person's experiences and appreciate them with the help of one's own reasoned memory. Most reaction thinking also takes place in the auspices of the abstract memory, be it of the creative type as in the case of poets, artists, writers etc., or of the destructive variety as in the case of angry men, criminals, terrorists etc.
Quite often children, and sometimes adults too, who are obsessed by the abstract memory and behave in an unruly manner, when chastised revert to factual memory, and their behavior quite dramatically changes to one of love and compassion which is their true nature. It is also possible that the inflicting of pain neutralizes the artificial stimulation of the pleasure centers of the brain caused by the action of the abstract memory. This has resulted in the misconception among many that fear, somehow, breeds love. Even Caplow, a reputable sociologist defines charisma as "an ability to arouse love and fear", as if the two are compatible (probably what he means is love in some and fear in others). In fact, one cannot love someone whom one fears - as the two feelings are the result of opposed expectations of pleasure and pain. Instead, one fears for someone that one loves, which is concern. Charisma is the ability to gain priority in others' minds and arouse senses of responsibility and guilt. The long term allegiances that such people often enjoy are either due to a harmony of interests or because the believers are, for some reason or the other, not reached by anyone else. The indelible stimulating phenomenon commonly connoted by the word love is the result either of shared pleasures as in the case of a man and a woman or of shared pain as in the case of mother and child experienced during birth. The communal feeling among people who have been together through a catastrophe of some sort is another example of dilute love. Platonic love without any sensory basis or expressions of fondness in the hope of gaining a benefit are the products of the abstract memory, and do not last long in trying circumstances. The cause of fatherly love will be explained later in this book. However, attempts by sadists and tyrants to make others around them undergo pains and misery comparable with their own secret agonies do not win them any friends.
Abstract memory is an asset too. Artists use it to create new ideas. Professionals groom it to maintain a disinterested and unintimidated attitude during negotiations. But a healthy person should be able to enter and get out of the abstract memory at will. If this is not possible then it means trouble. However, these changes should not be too frequent or obvious, because such a person is, rather unpopularly, branded as shifty.
From a few observations of individuals undergoing psychiatric treatment it seems that among other things, memory can be related to mental illness in the following way. A person suffering from anxiety experiences a continuous and uncontrollable functioning of the abstract memory, and although he is aware of the futility of these thoughts, and wants to stop them, he feels helpless and occasionally tries to verify their validity. Those suffering from neuroses undergo the same uncontrollable action of the abstract memory but now it is no longer isolated and identified. The products of the abstract memory develop linkages with the factual memory and the patient begins to believe in them. A psychotic person not only believes in the abstract ideas but also acts on them. The commonest cause of anxiety is the lack of knowledge or information about, or apprehensions regarding the safety of persons or things that form a logical part of one's life. Even a temporary association with a remote part of the world may become a cause of anxiety for people who have nothing in common with that part of the world. Anxiety due to lack of knowledge is obvious in primitive or underdeveloped communities, evidenced by social and political volatility, which reduces remarkably with education. However, in highly industrialized communities one finds another surge in anxiety as people surround themselves with gadgetry that they do not understand, and through politico-economic ties they get related to far flung places about which they only get scant and occasional information. Hence the information explosion. Anxiety due to lack of information about relatives and friends is a common experience, and hardly needs explanation. It is important that anxiety should not be confused with worry which is a frequent recollection of a subject that requires some action on one's part within the framework of the factual and reasoned memories resulting in an inability to concentrate on anything. The only way to get rid of a worry is to do something about it.
The common observation that a visit to a good doctor cures half the ailment also seems to have cognitive connotations as illnesses often have a psychosomatic aspect or side effect too, which could be helped by the removal of some obsessions by the sympathetic and reassuring manners of the doctor. Similarly, the memory reorganization achieved during the interview recalling the events leading to and during the illness could discharge some of the pressures on the analytical system and allow greater attention to the maintenance of bodily functions. However, it would be rather far-fetched to think that psychological improvements can help directly in killing bacteria or neutralizing chemical imbalances the way medicines do; although it is possible that the patient's decision to cooperate with the doctor and the various coordinated movements during the course of the examination could lead to the lessening of tensions. The research into the interrelationships of mental and chemical processes of the body could lead to some very interesting conclusions. Some of the bizarre idiosyncrasies such as transvestism, homosexuality, gayism, lesbianism etc. could turn out to be combinations of chemical as well as intellectual anomalies rather than the influence of spirits and fairies as assumed in certain communities. Certain herbal preparations seem to be quite effective in normalizing these conditions, thanks to the chemical constituents of the spices used in them.
The above analysis defining major aspects of human character, personality, behavior and thought in terms of functions of memory indicates that a man is nothing but his memories. If the memories could be preserved externally, it may be possible to reproduce the person with a suitable projection device, and the sum total of memories could be called the immortal soul.
