post-processing

i had an interesting experience the other day...i was sitting at my desk, minding my own business, typing away at something or other (or perhaps internetting, as i am also prone to do), and a flash of recognition erupted into me. it wasn't deja-vu, or anything of the sort...i had been sitting next to a wall (a rather thin one, it should be noted), and i picked up on a piece of the conversation in the next room. now, i hear conversations from the guys next door frequently; at least once every day. they're crazy characters, sometimes bursting into song in the middle of their little office. but i have learned to completely tune them out when i'm doing my own thing, so it's rare that i actually pay attention to anything that they are saying. the small fragment that i caught, however, happened to be about myself....not directly, but rather it was about the company that i work at. it wasn't derogatory, it wasn't praise; it was just a passive comment slid into one angle of a joke. but where it gets weird is....i wasn't actually listening to them when they said it.

despite the phalanx of distractions that surround me at any given moment, and despite the fact that i was engrossed in many other things, my senses reached down into me, like a hand, and pulled me up into the cool waters of the present moment. this means, if i understand correctly, that my mind actually has reserve storage for everything which is currently happening. and i think that this concept is amazing. despite the reality that you may not be paying attention - in fact you may be completely distracted - you are still caching information on some level unknown to your conscious mind.

i know for a fact that i didn't hear them talking as it happened....i just wasn't listening. simple fact. but, after the actual conversation had occurred, my mind decided to grind it through its economizing machine, just to see if any of it were useful to me. so it stored all these impressions that i was unaware of, packaged them up in some obscure encryption to keep them from me, and sorted them neatly into piles of relevance. beginning of a joke: irrelevant. to the bin with it. vocal inflections: irrelevant. binned. company name: relevant! ring-ring! hallo! what is this that we have here? and then my mind, sufficiently prompted, investigated the situation. it retracted, uncrumpled papers from the bin; in fact i was able to recall the joke in its entirety with no problems whatsoever. this was very odd; i'm certain all of this happened in the snapping of fingers, but still i regarded the ensuing sensation with some degree of scrutiny, and found my recognition of the thing to have happened definitively after the reality had lapsed.

and holy shit! how amazing is that?

this is encouraging, enlivening, for a number of reasons. i've always personally been fascinated with the mind...seeking ways to understand how it makes sense of this chaos that we label our world (Recursive with a capital, i know), and constantly prodding/asking it for insight into its inner-workings. rarely does it give any non-cryptic answers, but every once in a while i am present while it slips up, which offers a whole new perspective on matters. this is one such instance. i wonder how long such information is stored? is it possible that it is still stored outside of us, lingering in the atmosphere, and an uber-short timeframe is the key to being able to still disentangle it from all the other static which spins its wheels perpetually, replacing and realigning? is this something which you could train your mind to perform better and better, with more regularity, until you were able to recall, to access this liminal brain-space, consciously and actively? i could use some extra brain-bank, personally...i always describe my mental function to people as 'a little different', in that i have astounding recall for minute detail, but only once i have a serious trigger with which to work, a hook to hang my reminiscence.