End date

The death of David Bowie 18 months after he was diagnosed with cancer - and the way he used that time creatively - made me think how I would spend my last months in a similar situation.

This prompted me to start an experiment as I can clearly visualise the period of 18 months thanks to this process of remembering every day that passes. I'm imagining that my time runs out half way through next year.
http://lembransation.blogspot.com/2016/01/mortality.html

Of course, I don't really believe it will happen so there is an artificiality about the exercise. But when I refresh the memory tags from 18 months ago, I tell myself this is how long I would have. That is the stretch of time to fill.

I am trying to value the days as if they are my last. Spending a bit more time with people I love - and giving them more attention when we are together. Being more cheerful with shop assistants and waiting staff. Doing - or planning to do during the next 18 months - some of the things I've always intended.

This would be my last full year to fill and I'm already approaching the end of the first month. I look to the right and there is the end date I have selected for this experiment.

Something happened today as I ran my refresh technique, recalling two images per month from January 2014 (days 27 and 28 of the month - see the refresh technique link under "about me" for details).

First the years lost their anchor. I've always felt the current year is centrally placed in my mental landscape. I step onto the calendars to my left to go to earlier years. This can be a little disorientating at the turn of the year when everything moves (read about that here). As I've started looking to my notional end date in this experiment, I suddenly thought this calendar is the whole of my life. And it lost its anchor, became detached, floating beneath me as I floated above it in my mind's eye.

Then I thought that my real end date was somewhere there. I couldn't know where the memory tags would stop and I would leave no further mark, but somewhere down there on those months was the transition.

Then it struck me that time would end for me.

My calendar would end. It does not stretch forever to my right, but at the end date, there is no more calendar.

I know the sun will continue to rise after I have gone. There will be people who remember me, at least for a while. But I won't be there.

If I am somewhere, then there is infinity ahead of me and time would lose its meaning - as Amazing Graces says with proper understanding of infinity, "We've no less days to sing God's praise than when we've first begun." Everyone I know, the solar system, the universe itself would pass away. For that to be bearable, the new experience would truly have to be amazing - or how could it be grace and not torture? Days could no longer exist. This life would surely fade into a different perspective, a brief flicker, a different reality, a dream that has passed.  

With that it felt like my calendar was floating in a void, with me far above it. There was my beginning and my end and that was all there was.

This is all obvious, of course. These are the days of our life and we should live them to the full.

Now I have felt it in a new way, thanks to this process and this experiment. It feels profound, but it is still a new feeling and I still have to learn the lessons it brings.

Mega memory capacity

How soon will our brains fill up?

A new study by scientists at the Salk Institute published in eLife has generated studies around the world claiming: The human brain can store 10 TIMES as many memories as previously thought, says study (Daily Mail).

That's one petabyte of data, or 1 x 10^15 bytes (1 followed by 10 zeroes). One of the researchers (Terry Sejnowski) is quoted as saying this is the same ballpark as the World Wide Web.

The above report says: "One petabyte is about the same as about 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with text or about the same as 13.3 years of HD-TV video."

The reason for the 10 fold increase (in my take on the research) is the researchers believe that the synapses that effectively code information can exist in 26 different sizes, instead of 3 (small, medium, large) as previously thought.

This finding comes from fine measurements of the volume of the synapse spine head in the rats brain investigated: "Spine head volumes ranged in size over a factor of 60 from smallest to largest while the coefficient of variation of volume of any given size was 0.083 and was constant across the range of sizes."


That's 26 different sizes, each with a tolerance of about 8%.

In a computer a byte of data coded in a semiconductor gate, or a magentic domain on a storage disk, exists in one of two states.

A synapse can exist in one of 26 states.

The researchers say this is equivalent to 4.7 bytes of data. A byte is either in the state 0 or 1; it has two states. Two raised to the power 4.7 = 2^4.7 = 26.

The theoretical storage capacity is staggering. Though we don't seem able to retrieve the contents of 20 million filing cabinets, I should at least be able to fill a few more years of mental calendars with memory tags in this process of remembering every day that passes.

Mortality

I had already pre-ordered David Bowie's new album Blackstar and had it waiting on my phone when the same phone flashed up the news he had died. His music was the soundtrack to my teenage years: I bought the albums I had missed then everything he released. He was one of the few major artists I ventured to see in concert.

I've listened to Blackstar now and watched the video. It was released on Bowie's birthday, 8 January. He passed away two days later and the world learned the shock news the day after.

Tony Visconti, long-time producer of Bowie albums said, "He always did what he wanted to do. And he wanted to do it his way and he wanted to do it the best way. His death was not different from his life — a work of Art. He made Blackstar for us, his parting gift."

Not only that, a theatre work called Lazarus, co-written by Bowie and featuring his music, opened in New York in December.

It seems Bowie was planning more recording, but was interrupted.

His cancer was diagnosed 18 months before. Strangely, my last post here, just a few hours before the news reached me, I called "Almost a sense of mourning", about how with the turn of the year my mental calendar shuffles to the left. Images that were "this year" are now last year. "Last year" slips away to be a more distant completed page.

These pages now stretch back, covered in images, to when I began this process of remembering every day that passes on 17 December 2011.

What struck me is how clearly I can now see 18 months. Standing on my mental calendar, I look to the right and there is the spot to step on to. That's how many days I would have.

A niece, my wife's sister's daughter, died of cancer a little over a year after it was diagnosed. Those key dates are in the images on my calendar, together with the days when I saw her. It is a way to never forget someone.

I don't know how and when I will die, just that somewhere in the pages to my right, there is an end.

Maybe there will be a diagnosis and time to prepare. Maybe it will simply be a day that began as any other.

When I was a young man at college, having my horizon's expanded, for a while I thought it clever to say that we are all terminal cases really and should live every day as if it could be our last - though not as if it is going to be.

I can see 18 months now. I can walk over the days that have not yet been filled. As an experiment, I am imagining they are all I have left. What difference will this perspective make to how I live them?

Almost a sense of mourning

2015 was a year full of events, like those that came before.

Even days of routine exist separately in my memory since I began following these techniques to remember every day that passes. They are not merged into one smudge, representing a week or a month doing the same things thanks to the images pinned to my mental calendar that make every day unique.

I recall the images with the full date, including the year, necessary as the years have piled up. Even so, I realised today that it makes a difference when a year ends and a new one begins.

In my long run through of past years, I remember two days per month. Yesterday, it was the 9th and 10th of each month in 2011 - 2013. Today the same days in 2014 to the present.

It struck me that I recalled the dates in 2014 as being last year. But they are that no longer now we have entered 2016.

I felt the year slipping away. Yet, the days are still fresh when I call up the memory tags, just more distant. Like departed friends.

The turning of the year reminds me these days are gone and only live on in my mind.

Four full years covered with memory tags

Happy New Year! It's 2016.

Another year of my mental calendar has been filled. The year 2015 has a theme of travel between my wife's country and my own, punctuated with elderly relatives suffering with their age (a broken femur, blood pressure out of control and increased memory loss in three of our parents).

It was the year I continued the annual progression in road races to marathon distance, though not in April as planned, due to another injury, but October.

I have still not lost a day, though had an issue with one. The memory tag for 19 February 2013 suddenly eluded me. I tried to tease it out using all the techniques I have developed, but it was gone. In the process, I remembered other things about the day and those surrounding it, so I still had memories to fit into my life story. From these I created a new memory tag to pin to my mental calendar. Perhaps my original choice will come back to me one day, but the tag is not important, it is the memories of the day, for which the tag is just a catalyst.

I changed my review technique a year ago and it has served me well. I have a two-day process. On the first day I recall the images for consecutive days of each month of 2011 - 2013. On the second day, it is two days per month for 2014 to the present, then a run through every day of last 31 days. Today being the 8th January, I have recalled the images for the 7th and 8th of each month from January 2014. Sometimes the sequence switches to start with an even day - it depends on how many days in the month.

I still do a separate more detailed review of the past 6 months, calling up two days per week. It is Friday, so I recall Thursday and Friday of each week since July 2015. But I'm becoming much more relaxed about this. In the past, the windows would overlap: tomorrow my window would be Friday and Saturday. Now I sometimes leave it for a day and dispense with the overlap.

I've not done a memory reboot for a while. This is when I've dumped the longer review and gone for sequential days from the very beginning, covering perhaps three or four months per day until I'm up to date.

But there is something special about going day by day and sometime I interrupt the longer review to go sequentially through a particular month.

The final change this past year is to relax more into the process. I try to see each year as a landscape that is familiar and welcoming, rather than a string of days where I fear the chain breaking.

My aim for this year, my fifth calendar year remembering every day that passes, is to become more adept. I tend to distract myself with interesting memories, then life intervenes and I have to grab another slot of spare time to continue. Then I run the risk of being distracted from the present by trying to complete the review. My hope is to become more confident in the landscape of the year so I can hop through it quickly, firing up and refreshing the memory tags, keeping them fresh and there if I want them.

The process continues to be enriching in so many ways. I cannot imagine returning to living in a fog where I cannot remember what I was doing last week or last month, let alone five years ago.

Navigating the landscape

I’m approaching four years remembering every day that passes and to my own amazement have still not lost a day.

I have recently made a philosophical change to the way I range over my mental calendar to refresh the images pinned as memory tags to each day (for details of the practicalities of the method, see the ‘refresh technique’ post - link under ‘about me’).

Looking back more than six months ago, I recall the images for two days per month. Today is the 23rd, so yesterday I recalled the images for the 22nd and 23rd of each month from 2011 to end of 2013. Today, I recall the images for the 22nd and 23rd of each month from 2014 to the present.

This moving two day window brings the same days up each month, which is enough to stop them fading. Generally, I orientate myself if the images do not come immediately to mind by looking back to the preceding days, which will have been refreshed recently.

This linear approach sometimes left me a little panicked when the associations were difficult to find, as I could only see it would get harder as the days pile up.

The philosophical change is to look at my mental calendar as a landscape. From the beginning, I have visualised the dates on a month-per-page calendar, with the months stretched out from the numbers of the year. I have travelled these pages so many times. I realised the landscape as a whole should be familiar. The year as a whole has its story. A month, its place. Any particular day should locate me in the familiar landscape, even before I try to recall the specific memory tag. Instead of scrabbling around for the image and connections, I now try to feel the reassurance of familiarity first.

It is working. I am moving from this being a feat of memory linking consecutive images, to viewing a picture I have seen many times before.

Visualisation and memory

I ran a half marathon on 30 August 2015.

In preparation, I watched a video clip someone had posted of the route. This enabled me to think about how I would approach the run to pace myself, particularly with there being a long uphill section at the outset and the prospect of slower runners to overtake.

On the day of the race, I told myself to enjoy it. This was the race for real, not the visualisation.

It struck me that the memory I would be left with would be very similar to the visualisation, if everything went to plan.

Of course, the memory has real moments that I could not have imagined: the runner dressed as spiderman, the spectator who thought it hilarious to shout 'take your feet of the brakes' as the runners streamed past, the extreme weather during the last 5 km.

But much of what I recall of the race could just as well be from the visualisation. My memory tag is stopping at a prearranged point along the route for a photo with my wife. That image was already in my visualisation.

Visualisation and memory are both proxies.

The reality was the experience.

I have my next race already booked.