Global Memory

Our memories are a bit of a mystery. Maybe someday science will figure it all out. There have certainly been advances in our understanding of the human brain. The brain, however, is a physical organ. We can measure it, see what makes neurons fire and do many other tests in the realm of cause and effect, but we are without a doubt investigating the physical side of the street. A doctor can't do a scan of my brain and know exactly what I'm thinking, and that's a good thing. He'd probably ask for hazard pay.

Furthermore, memory is a tricky thing and not always reliable. Watch any good crime show on TV and they'll tell you that people start remembering things differently as the days go by. Of course, I don't usually base my reality on Hollywood, but that's easy enough to verify in the real world. Memories fade, and sometimes are repressed entirely. Sometimes we remember things differently from how they went because a part of us doesn't like the true version. As with so many things when humans are involved, it's complicated.

When you're considering what a person is thinking or what their memories are, you've already got one foot outside of the scientific world. Tell someone in a lab coat that you can read minds and they'll either run for cover or recommend therapy. Memories don't live far from that neighborhood.

Since we're already on the outskirts of town, we may as well head all the way to the country. When people speak of memories, they're almost always talking about what happened to them somewhere in the timeline of their lives. Nonetheless, there are other people who believe that they've lived many lifetimes. As you might imagine, this shines an entirely different light on memories, lab coats notwithstanding.

The hippie part of my brain always wants to explore. The geek side wants proof. It's a rare day when I can make both of them happy at the same time. Since there's still a lot of scientific mystery in good old fashioned memory, the kind that normal people have when they're talking about their kid's tenth birthday, we're going to give the geek the day off. There's absolutely nothing he would enjoy about this conversation, and it's about time he used some of those vacation days anyway.

With that in mind, since there are no logical constraints, let's play a little “what if.” Because I want to look at the idea of memory as a whole, we're going to accept the notion that there's such a thing as multiple lifetimes. Whether that's true or not I can't say with certainty. I don't think anyone can. However, there have been enough people across generations and cultures who strongly believe in this concept to make it worth exploring.

General George Patton, a famous American leader in World War II, was an immensely practical person. He had to be. He was fighting a war, and the bad guys don't shoot imaginary bullets. And yet, he remembered past lifetimes. This was also the 1940s. If you think our current culture considers such people to be a bit weird, it was way over the line back then. He's just one example of many over the years, the volume of which becomes perilous for my coincidence meter. Consequently, my inner hippie is willing to entertain the notion.

If we accept for the moment that we live many lives, and that some people remember them, what does this say about the nature of memory? Ever the workaholic, the inner geek returns quickly from his aborted vacation and points out that this entire concept doesn't make sense on a physiological basis.

As best we can tell, our memories are experienced through our brains. If Patton was remembering a past lifetime, that previous person would already be long dead, the brain crumbling to dust inside of some unmarked grave. No brain, no memories. Plus, there's no such thing as telepathy. Even if the person from the past was still alive, ignoring all the other time and space issues that would cause, there would be no way for Patton to read his mind. These are all valid points.

Ever the hippie's foil, my inner geek still ends up working for the other team on occasion, even though he never intends to. I have spent three decades working as a software developer, a place where the geek feels right at home. My first love was a programming language known simply as C. I began my career working on the earliest IBM PC computers and their clones. This was the late 1980s, and the architecture of personal computers was much simpler than it is today.

Without getting into a programming lesson, the basic concepts are really pretty simple. You start out with a main routine, which does some logical tests to decide what to do next. That involves calling yet another routine. A program makes lots of decisions and calls lots of different routines, each of which does stuff. With any luck at all, it's the stuff you actually want it to do, although there are no guarantees. That's why debuggers were invented. And coffee.

I'm certainly not the first to draw comparisons between humans and software, but it's a useful perspective nonetheless. Humans get some information, make a decision, and do stuff. While we're doing stuff, we make more decisions and perhaps point our efforts in a new direction.

One of the things that distinguishes an adult from a child is the amount of experience we have to draw on. If I stick a fork in an electrical socket, it's going to be a bad experience. The adult knows this. The child does not. Some of us adults know this because of poor decisions as a child. That involves memory. And perhaps being grounded for a couple of weeks after the fuses were replaced.

A computer program also has memory, which is where it stores the data that it uses to make decisions. There are a couple of different kinds. When you go into routine A, you can have some data stored in a sort of local bucket. As soon as you leave routine A to go to routine B, that memory is gone. B has its own bucket, but anything from A is forgotten. Neither of them have forks.

The inability to remember things that happened in A when you're in B would be pretty inconvenient. Fortunately, there's another kind of remembering called global memory. This is available to everyone in the program. Any routine, anytime, anywhere. If you want to retain something you learned in routine A after you've left city limits and moved on to B, you store it in global memory. Instead of making a decision based on what's available locally in B, you grab that bit of data from the global store. In this manner, things are remembered from routine to routine, which provides continuity regardless of where you are.

This is where my bored inner hippie, whose eyes have long since glazed over, wakes up and actually starts paying attention. What if we think of lifetimes as routines? If Patton fought a battle with the Romans a long time ago as he remembered, that ancient soldier would be routine A. When he died, everything he ever did would be lost to Patton, who lives in routine B. This is because our bodies only have buckets for local memory, which is gone after you die. That's the biological reality hat we all know and love, so clearly Patton was a crazy person.

However, what if lifetimes weren't stored in local memory at all? What if, like a computer program, everything was stored in global memory? That would let lifetime B access the memories of lifetime A. Of course, it would also be a nightmare to debug. Trying to keep track of which memories belong to which human is hard enough with billions of them running around the planet at any given time. It's even more of a mess when you start adding them up across multiple lifetimes. What's to keep one person from romping through another's experiences? After all, everything's in global memory.

There was another concept in my beloved C programming language that's largely ignored in more modern times, probably because of the number of bullet holes that can be found in the average C programmer's foot. I was called a pointer, which certainly seems harmless enough.

Most variables in programming are a bit like local memory. They're a small bucket that holds data. The small bucket itself lives in local memory, but you don't care about that. If it's a number, you just talk to a number variable and don't worry about where it lives. The variable's bucket contains the value of the number.

The bucket for a pointer, however, doesn't actually hold any data. Instead, what it holds is the location of a chunk of memory that it points to. Hence the name pointer, in case you thought it was inspired by a particular breed of dog. A pointer can reference any chunk of data in global memory. You just point to the beginning of that memory location, and say how big of a chunk you're playing with.

At this point, if you're a programmer you're starting to see visions of sneakers with bullet holes. Point to a legit location that your program has permission to use, and life goes on. Screw up and point it to memory in the computer's operating system and you trash the environment, causing your PC to reboot and display a particularly unpopular shade of the color blue in the process. Some take this to mean that pointers are bad. Others interpret the message as, “don't screw up.”

Before the hippie nods off again, this is where we tie it back to humans. What if each human's internal memory, which we assumed to be local like routine A and thus gone after death, was instead a pointer to global memory? If everything I do is remembered not in my physical brain, but at a location in some kind of planetary memory, we have a whole new ball game. When I die, the experiences are still there, at least as long as the Earth keeps spinning.

The rules of the game are simple. When you're born, your brain points to your allocated chunk of planetary memory. Use it however you like. That's convention. However, as we all know, not everyone follows the rules. What if, for whatever reason, a person is born whose brain can point to more than one chunk of memory? This means that lifetime B would be able to access the memories of lifetime A.

At this point, of course, my inner geek is thoroughly irritated since he had no intention of supporting some outlandish claim about past lifetimes. It is, nonetheless, an intriguing thought. Many people have memories of other lifetimes. If I give them the benefit of the doubt, as my inner hippie is prone to do, how could that possibly work if all that we experience dies with our bodies?

However, if we're all in fact a part of the planetary consciousness, even if it's just a tiny fraction, then perhaps there's a way that our experiences survive our demise. Moreover, maybe some are able to access many different chunks of memory, an option available to those brave souls who don't already have enough trouble with one lifetime.

Do our experiences really die with our physical brains, or are they stored in some manner that exists beyond the constraints of a single life? Is it possible that we live multiple lifetimes? Are there people who can connect to multiple chunks of planetary memory and thus remember previous lives? Or am I just barking at the moon?