The Brain Being Selective.

Here in the UK we’re getting the first properly low winter temperatures this week (first ice on the birds’ water bowls this morning, and tonight the temperature has dipped further.) And so those rooms in my house which have no regular heat – which is nearly all of them – feel uncomfortably frigid.

It surprises me that it comes as a shock every year to walk into a room that feels icy, even though I know I’ve experienced the same thing every winter since I’ve lived here. It seems the brain is capable of remembering the fact of a situation, but not the sensory experience itself. I’ve heard the same thing said of physical pain, and I know it to be true from personal experience. I wonder what that says about the reality of sensory experience.

So then I turned my attention to the experience of pleasure and questioned whether that can be remembered. The answer was: yes it can, and here’s how I know.

When I was a teenager I watched the film El Cid three or four times, and it remained my favourite until at least into my early twenties. I derived enormous pleasure from all aspects of it – the glory, the romance, the valour, the environment, the ultimate victory, and even the colours and the modes of dress, both courtly and martial. And then it faded as I grew older (and wiser?) until it became a mere memory of a long distant fact.

Until last night when I discovered in my YouTube recommendations a short excerpt of the music from the film, composed by Miklós Rózsa. The pleasure I felt on first seeing it came flooding back into my memory, fleetingly perhaps, but it was there.

So why is the brain incapable of remembering an actual sensory experience like cold or pain, but can recall something as abstract as pleasure? In this case it was music which triggered the phenomenon – because music is an immensely powerful trigger to abstract experiences – but it doesn’t explain the mechanics. Or does it? Maybe somebody will tell me one day.