Conversations with Calliope- Brain Optimization

(Wedding Conversation)

JOE: Good morning Calliope.
CALLIOPE: Good morning Joe. How are you today?
JOE: Thinking.
CALLIOPE: About what?
JOE: Yesterday I worked on search engine optimization (SEO), what it is all about and how to do it.
CALLIOPE: And?
JOE: As I was considering what to write this morning, the term "brain optimization" popped into my mind.
CALLIOPE: What do you mean by it?
JOE: How should I know. I've never heard these two words together before.
CALLIOPE: Then speculate?
JOE: Fair enough. I found a definition of SEO yesterday, "altering and improving the natural search listings that will be returned for various keywords and phrases."
CALLIOPE: Sounds rather stodgy to me. How could it apply to brains?
JOE: We could arrange our brains to respond to others by giving something important to them.
CALLIOPE: Interesting.
JOE: I think we often tell people what's important to us and forget about their needs. Something to work on. Talk with you tomorrow.

The Impersistence of Memory

In the column above mine in The Daily News this morning Scot DeSmit wrote about his faulty recollection of characters from a book he read to his children. He remembered a rabbit and a gopher rather than a squirrel and a mole. His column reminded me of the many times I have misrecollected things and events from my past. I have remembered houses being somewhere else, people looking and acting different and events not being quite the same as others recollect them. In studying memory, I learned that there are biological traces of every memory we have. Our minds also seem to have a pastime of creating scenarios different from the ones which actually happened. Maybe there is a novelist inside each of us happily going about creating new events from the material provided by reality. It certainly makes for an interesting world.