by LAURIE NEIDERGAARDEN, Alternate Reality News Service Medical Writer
Memory. How can we forget it? Ha ha.
But, seriously, as our population ages, more and more people are doing just that. It starts with not being able to remember where you put the car keys. Then, you forget where you put the car. Then, before you even know what's happening, you cannot recall who won the battle of Westphalia, marking the beginning of the end for Gebhard Truchsess von Waldburg's tenure as archbishop and prince-elector of Cologne.
Oh, yeah. Memory can be funny that way.
Previous theories were predicated on the idea that memory loss is inevitable because over time the brain turns into mush, much like the way a turtle in a blender on the edge of a tornado gets mushy, but without the vague sense of being watched by alien beings. (I may be simplifying a bit for a general audience. I may have also watched one too many episodes of The X-Files. Damn you, boxed set!) However, one man is challenging this prevailing wisdom with a theory that the greatest threat to human memory is art.
"But, not in an Aristotelian way," said Horsch Gappa, chief proponent of literary neuroscience theory studies (LiNTS). "I'm not saying that media is making it unnecessary for us to remember things. I'm saying that when somebody writes a piece of fiction, they erase the memory of the events that inspired the work in the minds of those who actually experienced them. It is no coincidence that, as the number of media outlets has grown, people's memories have gotten worse."
Doctor Grappa may have been simplifying his theory a bit for a general audie - "No," he said, "that really is as complicated as it gets."
"By the way," he added, "I find the headline of this article to be unnecessarily provocative and vulgar."
I...I don't write the headlines, I weakly defended myself.
The process is known as literary memory obfuscation (LiMO). "This is no celebrity vehicle," Doctor Gappa wrote in an unpublished paper he doesn't let anybody read that was co-written with graduate students Exaltini McTate-Andropine-Elurbian, Gerald Flubb and Flubb's Alsatian Puppy Stiggs McNasty. "The act of one person writing about an event reaches through 12-dimensional Dilbert Space and plucks the corresponding experience out of the minds of the people who actually lived it."
"Bollocks!" roared Miguel Rolando Covian, an actual real life not at all made up or in any other way fictional (except, perhaps, for the size of his nose) neuroscientist. "There are more holes in this theory than in a toon filled with buckshot! How, for instance, do we account for people who lose parts of their memory even though they never inspired a story?"
"Gossip," Doctor Gappa replied. "It is a form of storytelling, after all. It is also possible that descriptions of geographical locations may have an effect on memory. People who live in New York or Los Angeles, for instance, may be more prone to memory loss than people who live in other places because so many stories are based on those cities. "But, we will need funding for much larger research studies before this hypothesis can be properly explored."
"Surely," Covian insisted, "there must be people somewhere who have suffered memory loss without ever having been referred to in a story!"
"How would we know?" Doctor Gappa shrugged.
"By the way," he added, "couldn't you have found a neuroscientist to quote who hadn't been dead since 1992?"
I...I probably should have spent more time searching Google, I allowed.
Doctor Gappa stated that the first issue of The Quarterly Review of LiNTS, which will contain writing by Jonathan Safron Foer, Steven Pinker, Camille Paglia and Terry Eagleton, will be published "just as soon as I convince them to agree to write articles for it."
The implications of this theory are staggering. Can you kill somebody by killing off their fictional counterpart? "No. LiMO doesn't work that way."
If you write a story from your own life, do you cause yourself to lose the memory? "Oh. I hadn't thought of - hold on a second while I get my notepad."
Does the story have to be fictional to cause memory loss? "There is some debate among LiNTS researchers on this question. The three of us believe that an event takes on fictional characteristics the moment it is remembered, so documentaries and news articles would have a similar effect, but Stiggs McNasty is adamant that it has to be fiction, and we don't want him chewing up the furniture, so we're going along with him until he gets...umm...F - I - X - E - D."
This is how our store of scientific knowledge progresses.
If his theory is true, why would Doctor Gappa be so eager to publish his findings? Wouldn't that lead to a reduction in his own memory?
"Oh, I have a great response to that question!" Doctor Gappa respo - answered. "Academic papers, you see, they're more like a...like a...I mean...you know, only minimally a...a...a...uhh...narrative, so...so...so...oh, shit!"
Doctor Horsch Gappa was unavailable for further comment