What shape is time when it is inside your mind, and how do your memories fit in it?

Don’t blame me for this one. Someone asked.

First of all, what shape is time to begin with? Personally I go for it being a one-sided loop. From everlasting to everlasting, and all that. And a big bang. Maybe that should have come first.

I like to think of time as a limited dimension. It’s like we are monopoly pieces (I am the hat) and we are going around our temporal board so we are in time. But from the perspective of the player we can see the eternal possibilities, the round and round. But, we are caught in the rat race.

So, inside my mind, that is what time is like: there’s a notional beginning BANG! There’s a notional end BANG! and together these make up the space-time continuum on which I am living. God, however, is everlasting to everlasting so can jump about the squares on the monopoly board as he sees fit. Actually he’s not generally on it. More transcendant, apart from during the incarnation.

So, my memories, I guess 1973 was “Go!” and the 70s were the brown and turquoise properties, the 80s are the burgundy and orange, the 90s are the red and the yellow, and the noughties are the green and dark blue. And then as 2010 hit, I was back around the corner (Hey, Life begins at 37!) for another Go! at it.

Memories in my brain are in a kind of association soup. If anyone starts with an anecdote, all my relevant memories start to bubble to the surface and I can then weed out the gems for a game of anecdote trumps.

One annoying thing about memories is how the real memories can be hijacked my memories of photographs or the actual photographs – and how all I can remember about an event is the bit that was photographed.

So saying, my memory is ridiculously good. Encyclopaedic, even.

I used to think of my memory system of being in Mac like folders, from when I had a Mac Classic II back in the dark ages. You could keep folders within folders. However, memories can have multiple triggers, so I reckon the internet is a better model for a memory structure. Someone throws me a memory trigger and I internally google memories.

So, what’s the relationship between my internal construction of time and my memories?

Some years and dates are kept of a time line and I remember it in a kind of linear way. For example I can remember 1997 for gazillions of reasons: trip to India, Diana and Mother Theresa died, I worked in a couple of random places and so on.

Other things are not on a timeline, probably because I have passed Go! on them before. For example there will be a cafe or a street or a place and layer upon layer of memories are associated with that place. It’s like zillions of translucent images going down and down.

OK. That’s half an hour of my thoughts on this topic.

🙂

And to the person who asked – this is my gift to you. You have to keep it FOR EVER.

Actually, I’ve just thought of the answer.

It’s all to do with how we access information. When I used a mac, my memories were kept in mac folders. Now I am internettastic, I use an internal google function. At one point I used to visualise a filing cabinet in my brain. And now I am a wife and mother, I use a boiling of soup as an image for memory storage…

So, where does the person access their info? That is how they will construct their memory retrieval system. I suggest that time will be a timeline with gaps. Or a Monopoly board.

🙂