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Showing posts with label Memory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Memory. Show all posts


I recently stumbled across a blog post discussing the idea that a lot of people think that there are 52 states in the United States of America. Apparently, the purpose of the blog, “The Mandela Effect”, is to consider why it is that different people remember the same event or historical fact differently. The blog’s author has a theory that people may have different memories because they slide back and forth between alternate realities (or something like that.) I think that the author is serious about this idea - but to be honest, I’m not entirely sure.

In the post in question, she wonders if people might think the US has 52 states because they mistakenly believe that Puerto Rico and Washington D. C. are states. She asks “is this simple confusion or a glimpse into alternate geography in another timestream?” [sic] To stimulate the conversation, she provides illuminating anecdotes from a number of readers.

I would have just left this alone, but, after a brief internet search I found that the question of 50 vs. 52 states has come up repeatedly. You can find it on Ask.com, Yahoo Answers, and even a site entitled “Debunking the Mandala Effect”. Even though I am not a cartographer, sociologist, or psychologist, I couldn’t resist throwing my ring into the hat.

As on The Mandala Effect blog, in the attempts to answer the question, “why do people think that there are 52 states”, one of the most common themes is that some people believe that Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. are states. [FYI – they aren't. At least not yet... in this time-stream. ] I find it highly unlikely that misunderstandings about Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia is the right answer. Here’s why: the intersection between the set of people that believe there are 52 states, those that know that Puerto Rico is related to the USA in some way, and those that know that Washington D. C. isn’t just a city, is vanishingly small. Here is a Venn Diagram to illustrate:


The intersection isn't zero, but it's pretty close.

Granted that my only qualification for answering this question is that I possess a functioning frontal lobe, I believe that this has more to do with two other factors. The first is visual. Here is a fairly ordinary map of the USA – the kind that people run across all the time:



If you have heard that there are 50 states, but you don’t really know much about the geography of the US, you see this big blob cut up into pieces. It is unlikely that you are going to count them. It is easy to assume that there are 50. Then there are two other sets of blobs. I doubt that many viewers think about this consciously, but, somewhere in the back of the mind, over time, it is easy to turn a blob assumed to be made of 50 pieces, plus two other blobs, into 52 states.

The second factor is the way peoples' memories work. Our brains are bombarded with vast amounts of information, some important and some not. It is normal for humans to remember approximations, unless, for some reason, they really need to know a fact with precision. If you don’t have a compelling reason to know how many states make up the United States of America, your brain is likely to store it as a fuzzy "50-ish". This would be true for a great many non-Americans, and a terrifying number of American citizens as well.

So why 52, and not 51, or 53, or 766? First and foremost, there are 52 weeks in a year. We learn this early in life, around the time that we learn all about calendars. Furthermore, in "western” nations we have the number “52” trained into us, because there are 52 playing cards in a standard deck. This exact number is stored because you learned it while playing cards - especially if your father ever taught you “52 pickup.” (Aside: why do I say "your father" and not "a parent"? Because I don't think many mothers are that cruel, and besides, they know that they might be the one that has to "pick up.")


If someone asks you how many states there are, you may recall that it is about 50, but, of course, you want to give a precise number. Your brain’s memory systems start looking for the number. Along the way they bump into the big, bold, shiny number "52". You don’t want to appear “slow”, so as soon as you come up with a number that seems right, you use it. Fifty-two is about 50-ish, so that is the answer you give. If questioned about your answer, self-justification circuits kick in which solidify it in your mind. Also, you just heard someone say that there are 52 states. Even though that someone is you, brains sometimes don’t realize that, and furthermore, as far as your brain is concerned, you are an authoritative source. If you said something, you can believe it.

Voila. A pair of really solid  reasons why a person that doesn’t need to know how many states make up the USA could easily think there are 52, and feel quite convinced that they are correct. No need to slip into a different timestream, the answer is right here.


Five or six years ago my neighbor Bill suffered a very unusual stroke. The stroke destroyed his ability to form new memories. I am told that this is extremely rare. I don’t know how long he is able to remember anything, but it appears to be no more than a couple of minutes. Interacting with Bill is very strange.

A while back Bill visited with me for a couple of hours. At the time I did not know about his condition. It was disconcerting as Bill told me the same stories from his life over and over again. He told me about the salon where he works (or, as I later learned, "worked") as a hairdresser. As soon as he finished describing the salon, he started over again telling me about the salon and his job. He told me about his kids, then about the salon, then about his kids, then about his first wife, then his kids, then the salon, then the salon again, then his first wife again… and on and on. On the first couple of repetitions I was completely confused. I wasn’t sure if he was repeating himself for emphasis, or if it was some sort of a peculiar joke, or the world’s worst case of egotism. Eventually I realized that there was some pathology involved. It was later that I learned from another neighbor about Bill’s stroke.

On another occasion I was in my garden when Bill came up and asked if he could use my phone. He told me that his car was at the local gas station being repaired. He wanted to call them to ask when his car would be ready, but his phone wasn't working. Of course I invited him in to use the phone. He called a number that he had written down on a piece of paper, but the number was wrong – God knows how old the piece of paper may have been or what that phone number really was. I helped him look up the correct number for the nearby gas station. When we reached them, they told him that his car had been done and delivered the day before. They said he would find his car in his garage. Fortunately they must have been aware of Bill's condition, so they took it in stride. I wondered how Bill remembered having his car serviced at all, or if he brought his car to them years earlier and now calls them every day to check on its status. After hanging up the phone, Bill thanked me and went home. I watched him walk back towards his house desperately hoping that he would forget about his car completely. I would hate to think of him trying to drive.

I see Bill walking around my neighborhood several times a day with a care-giver. Sometimes they are walking side-by-side chatting, sometimes the care-giver is trailing behind. Every time I see Bill I have the peculiar experience of deciding whether or not I feel like bothering to interact with him. After all, we’ll just have the same conversations over again, and he won’t remember that we’ve ever met. I could be nice to him, or I could call him insulting names, or I could just walk right past as though he was a total stranger. As far as Bill is concerned, a minute later it would make no difference.

The other day I was walking my dog when I ran into Bill. I said, “Hi Bill, how are you doing?” Of course he didn’t recognize me, so I introduced myself and pointed out that I lived in the house around the corner. We talked a bit.

I said to him, “Wow, Bill. You really do walk a lot. I see you walking around the block all the time.”

“No, you must be mistaken,” he replied, “I only walk once in the morning and once in the evening.”

Of course it was he who was mistaken. He just didn’t remember that he does his morning walk three or four times, and his evening walk three or four times.

As strange as it is to experience Bill from the outside, I can’t begin to imagine what it would be like to be Bill. What must it be like to wake up each morning and look in the mirror to discover that you are much older than you thought? How shocking it must be to brush your teeth, shower, shave, and dress to get ready for work, then learn that you haven’t worked for years. I can’t imagine the conversation that must ensue each day as a total stranger enters Bill’s home and explains that he is the care-giver, that he has been taking care of Bill for years, and that the last half decade of his life is effectively gone.

What are we if not our memories? Bill has all of his memories from before the stroke. He seems quite happy and he is in excellent health (no doubt from all the walking.) He joyfully recalls his memories from the first 60-some years of his life. But, from a purely philosophical standpoint, I find myself wondering what it means to be alive if you cannot create new memories? In some abstract sense, is Bill alive?

This is the strange imponderable that I am pondering this morning. I have no idea what it means. If I should happen to come up with an answer, I can only hope that I remember it.

The Dogs of my Youth

One day mom brought home a puppy. We called it Honey Patch because of its markings. All I remember is that it cried all night and shat all day. It didn’t last long. At that age I’m pretty sure I did the same thing, but they didn’t get rid of me.

It was summer when King the Collie arrived. He showed up all on his own. He knew how to cross the street, I didn’t. He had no collar and no one had reported him missing. He just walked up to the front door and came inside. Orange, brown, and white with majestic flowing hair and kind brown eyes. The strong, silent type, he rarely said a word. He stayed with us for a while, but one day he decided his visit was over and moved on.

Spot was my sister’s dog. My aunt and uncle foisted him off on us when they couldn’t deal with his neuroses. They didn’t tell us that. Spot was king of the high-strung Dalmatians. He came from a long line of champions and was the most beautiful Dalmatian anyone had ever seen. His fatal flaw was that he had a little bit of pink coloration on his nose, so he couldn’t compete. Dalmatians must have completely black noses be show dogs. That was ostensibly the reason my aunt and uncle got rid of him – he couldn’t be shown or bred. I suggested we could fix him with a magic marker. His full name was “Johnny on the Spot”, but we called him either “Spot,” or “Spot on the johnny” because he liked to drink from the toilet. One day I was playing with a toy that made an annoying whizzing sound. It drove Spot crazy. After a while he couldn't take it any more, so he bit me. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that biting me was his fatal flaw.

My first dog was Seymour. Nearly 60 pounds of torso covered in acres of smelly brown and white coat, Seymour was the biggest English basset hound our vet had ever seen. His legs were so short they were almost vestigial. In his later days he needed a push to get running… unless he spied a female German shepherd. One whiff of shepherd and Seymour was transformed into super-dog. None of us could image what he expected to do if he ever caught one. We assumed it was the legs that turned him on. Seymour lived well beyond the normal life expectancy for a Basset; based on the smell we were pretty sure he’d been dead for a long time before a car helped him on to that place in the sky where bassets endlessly frolic with shepherds.

After I moved out of my parent’s house, my Aunt and Uncle entered the picture again. They convinced my mother that she really needed a dog to keep her company and for protection. Careful study of a multitude of dog books indicated that black Labrador retrievers were the most faithful dogs. My mother found a breeder where she bought “Truffle” for a small fortune - plus kennel, food, drugs, collars, leashes, bones, beds, combs, and special doggy toothbrushes.

Truffle loved my mother. Oh did he love her. She was the apple of his eye, his sun, his moon, and his stars. He loved her with the simple, unquestioning love that only a puppy can possess. And he loved the vitamin enriched, protein fortified puppy chow. And he grew. And grew. And grew. Before long my 5-foot tall, 100-pound mother had a 75-pound puppy that loved her. Truffle would stand on his hind legs, put his front legs on my mother’s shoulders and try to lick her face. In short order he would knock her over. People would come to the house to find my mother on the ground with Truffle ecstatically licking her face.

One day Truffle chased a car. The car won. Truffle broke his left front leg, which the vet dutifully set and bound in a cast. Thereafter people coming to the house were likely to find my mother flat on her back with Truffle licking her face while simultaneously clubbing her with his cast. The breeder cheerfully accepted Truffle back, free of charge, along with the kennel, food, drugs, collars, leashes, bones, beds, combs, and special doggy toothbrushes.