What's next

I recall seeing an article from 1969 about musical chord recognition: the psychologist was diligent and sought to relate her theory to neural architecture of the inner ear. I don't know if she was successful but I do know I'm not even trying. I cannot say or even imagine what the brain-cell embodiments of moments or memories, loud or soft, booming or peeping, are. That's the chief and obvious shortcoming of this model.

But that's the chief and obvious shortcoming of most psychological models. They can still propel useful inquiry. This model immediately suggests the following:

• If you can increase "volume" of present and future experiences, that will help. If "reverb" is also kept at its maximum, then, in this model anyway, one never loses track of the true present. My guess is that "volume" could be literally that - if someone isn't tracking too well, just shout at him! - but "reverb" is harder for me to define.
• If you have or get multiple experiences (and therefore, presumably) memories of the same thing, it won't change a thing if "reverb," whatever that is, is at its maximum. Again, though, what is reverb?
• You hear or read something you remember, or in the JavaScript parlance of this model, an experienceItself, e.g., orel, elicits an experienceName, e.g., That's the Slovene for 'eagle'. As the model currently stands, neither the former nor the latter feeds back to the list of moments or of memories respectively. But if they did, that could be capitalized on. It is implied here that "volume" of experiences drops with advancing age or a general deterioration attending life itself, so when an experience is repeated in one's dotage, it is "softer" and one is transported to and left at the earlier, louder version. But what if, in between, there is the same experience at an ultra-low volume? The model would find that first, determine it was way too soft to merit attention, and leave one in the true present. Thus, a proposed late-middle-age preventive therapy: cause oneself to review all one's memories, each one being a "moment" as defined in this model, but kept very very soft. I don't know how that can be arranged, but my guess is that having children when you're about 45 and raising them to adulthood just might do the trick.
• As volume and reverberation are ill-defined or undefined, so are all the loops this model depends on. Is there any evidence for looping in a biological brain? If so, can its direction be determined?

Though it is not necessarily useful for computer modeling of dementia in general, it is useful here to keep in mind what is being modeled here: not loss of memory, but incontinence of memory. That is, remembering not too little but too much, and then being fuddled by all those memories, to the point of forgetting (so to speak) that they reside in the past - they are not the present, as much as they may feel that way. That the past is always there, and is always fully recoverable, this model postulates. In early 2013, in Tabatinga, I sat at an open-air bar and a middle-aged patron who was so drunkenly accommodating I took him for an employee reminded me, for the first time, of another Brazilian bar experience I'd had, way back in 1989. That one was in Chapada dos Guimarães, and may have been overshadowed by activities the next week; anyway, I remembered it at last, the genial drinking, the sudden silence, and the stranger turning to me and asking, "Say...weren't you in Japan last year?" After an amazed interval, I answered: "No." Bringing the house down, he said, "Well, neither was I!" It was quite gratifying to see this mini-movie all over again. But viewing it, I never forgot I was still in Tabatinga. Well, Tabatinga was louder!

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