memory – Gonzo With the Wind

Earlier this year, National Geographic reported that the average attention span had dropped to an alarming 40 seconds. You can read more about the research, and even learn some strategies to restore your attention span, in the article by Vittoria Traverso by clicking anywhere on this sentence. The headline begs the question; just how much are we missing by jumping from one thing to the next too quickly?

You may wonder what prompted my sudden urge to look into this. Well, I’d enjoyed my first real autumn day – you know, when it feels as if the slight drop in the evening temperature has miraculously purified the air, yet it’s still warm enough during the day for a light jacket and trainers – when I woke up to find the sound of wet splashes against my bedroom window was in fact sleet and not a more season-appropriate type of precipitation. Stupefied, I asked myself: had my favourite season come and gone without my noticing?

Thankfully, the winter weather cleared after a couple of days, but my rather rude Saturday awakening (on World Mental Health Day, no less) had me worried. First of all, of course, that this meant a semi-loose plan of an Autumn catch-up with a friend was now out the window. Then, when I’d managed to snap myself out of such futile speculations, I started to worry about everything else that seems to pass us by when we’re no longer able to stay in the moment long enough for it to register properly. I’ll give you an example:

I’m lucky enough that I occasionally get to attend conferences and events through work, during which there’s often a good selection of interesting lectures. This year was no exception. Always keen to learn something new, I signed up for a couple and mapped out my day accordingly. When I arrived at my first lecture, though, the room was full of people that seemed to have stumbled in there looking for somewhere to have their lunch or an outlet for their phone charger, reminiscent of an airport Costa Coffee during public holidays. Kicking myself for my obsessive compulsive time-keeping habit bringing me there 15 minutes early, I found a seat with no feet and/or bags on it and tried convincing myself that the chaos and chatter would surely come to an end before the lecture was due to start.

I could not have been more wrong. You’d think that the introduction of the speaker would be a hint strong enough for anyone to realise this was their cue to shut the fuck up. Yet, instead of directing their attention towards the person on the podium (and, indeed, stopping their incessant talking), the majority of the audience took the intro as a sign to go get their phones from their respective charging stations and start snapping photos of the lecturer’s PowerPoint presentation. No stranger to social faux-pas, and quite frustrated I couldn’t actually hear the lecturer over the constant chatting around me, I made a few fruitless attempts at shushing the people closest to my seat.

This, however, provoked the same infantile reactions you’d expect if you’d done the same thing during a secondary school assembly. Which, of course, exacerbated my frustration. If they didn’t want to listen to the lecture, fine, but surely they could see that a few of the other people that had signed up for it might like to? Also, what good would taking photos of some slides with no text do them, if they weren’t going to listen to what was said about the illustrations?

Surely, filming or sound recording (with permission, of course) would have been better options for anyone looking for anything other than mere proof of their own attendance. Or, you know, they could have just asked the lecturer to email them a copy of the presentation to save themselves from having to unscramble pixelated copies of its slides on their phones. But, again, without paying attention, there was no way they’d be able to understand what the slides were meant to represent without any context or the lecturer’s own notes.

Long story, I know. So, to narrow it down… Whilst what irked me initially may have been the lack of respect and empathy in my unruly colleagues, the growing concern the experience left me with is what is still eating away at me now; the concern that this is a prime example of human devolution. Being taught that relying on shortcuts is preferential to actual learning, it seems that taking a photo has been accepted as a perfectly decent replacement for knowledge. A sort of human screengrab; as if looking at a picture would help you conjure up a non-existent memory of something you weren’t paying attention to in the first place. If your focus is on taking the photo, rather than on the Kodak moment itself, I’d argue the only memory that’ll crop up is that of you doing just that – not of what was said in the lecture.

Are you really willing to rely on your technological devices to document your present, rather than living it and actually making real memories?

Obviously, I am just speculating here, but I keep making observations that support my concern that critical thinking has become somewhat of an anomaly with artificial intelligence now forcing its way into every nook and cranny of our fragile existence.

Now, if you’ve read some of my previous posts, you may have already guessed that I am far from excited about AI. Nor am I particularly fond of its popularity and how its usage is welcomed, adopted and enforced by certain industries; with complete disregard to the potential harm it may cause if they fail to properly educate themselves and their employees in regulating its use.

So, while the reason for my reluctance and/or defiance shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, I’ve come to realise that it is not as obvious as I’d like it to be. Thus, to clarify, I can see how AI can be a useful tool for some and that it can be a real timesaver in certain processes. I have done my research to properly understand (and use) it, I have experimented with it enough to know that not only does it impair the quality of my work, but the fact-checking its usage requires severely slows me down. Therefore, I can conclude that I am better off without it. So, on the back of what I mentioned about the lack of critical thinking earlier, my issue lies not with the tools themselves, but with the constant misuse of AI, the lack of understanding why usage needs to be regulated (for both professional and personal use) and the dangers of letting AI ‘do the work’ for you without checking its validity.

I see myself as a creative person. I’ve an education in the arts and humanities. I’ve more than a decade’s worth of vast amounts of content, from audio to film, photos to paintings and all sorts of written word media, from speeches to manuscripts, blurbs and articles in every genre, that demonstrates production ability and autonomy. I stopped applying for jobs I’m not qualified to do more than 15 years ago. So, you will understand my frustration when, as a qualified jobseeker, I am eliminated from recruitment processes due to my ‘lack of demonstrable experience with AI’ after the second interview. More often than not, I’ve been told I was the most qualified candidate for the job. Pardon my French, but who the feck decided proficiency is a negative?

Despite my need to air my frustrations, they are not the point here. Rather, the point is that we’ve grown too impatient and lazy to hold our horses until we know something is safe enough to let loose onto the unsuspecting masses. As we all know, research takes time. Protocols must be followed and boxes must be ticked before something can be regarded as a scientific discovery. Read this article, if you don’t believe me.

If you’re born before the mid-80s, you may remember a time when asbestos and its heat and electricity resistant qualities was all the rage? Then, research showed some disturbing links to deaths and illnesses, subsequently leading to controlled removal of such materials from schools and office buildings. I’m not comparing AI to asbestos (mainly because I think AI is a lot more damaging to society as a whole), obviously, but I’m just pointing out that something can be rolled out before we are aware of its lesser qualities.

If critical thinking has gone out the window, it seems to me, we no longer have the luxury of time to wait for research findings to be published. There are a lot of interesting articles online about AI and its impact on critical thinking, many of them regarding chatbot use specifically and its “potential harm” to critical thinking online. I’ll link to three of them below, for those of you who’d like to cut back on your sleep:

The Guardian, June 2026: Over-reliance on chatbots can diminish critical-thinking skills, study finds

US National Library of Medicine, 2025: The cognitive paradox of AI in education: between enhancement and erosion

Time Magazine, June 2025: ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study

For those of you longing for a less serious rant next week, I shall see you next Tuesday. Until then, enjoy this classic piece of fine comedy from a time where artificial entities were most commonly found in sweeteners and experimental drugs, not intelligence:

It is safe to say that the term repression has been rather dirtied since the emergence and popularisation of Freud’s psychoanalytical theories. When it comes to the human psyche and how we store memories, I quite like the third of Collins Thesaurus three definitions; to “subdue, abuse, wrong, persecute, quell, subjugate, maltreat” – opposites of ‘liberate’ (p. 237, 2008).

(Yes, I own a physical copy of the Collins Thesaurus because I am a big nerd. Also, I like the way it smells.)

I am writing this not to discuss or critique freudian views, but to have a closer look at what we know about these so-called repressed memories and, to some extent, the treatment of psychological symptoms that may be rooted in traumatic events, from which the brain decided to ‘quell’ the circumstances because it didn’t seem productive to dwell on them at the time of their occurrence.

Firstly, the repression of memories is largely understood as a defense mechanism. In my own words; the unconscious makes the conscious existence more tolerable by hiding something that may be too difficult to grasp, or even live with, when the event occurs. It is not a conscious decision to forget something – that would be ‘suppression’.

I found myself thinking a lot, when studying pedagogy and special education, that whenever my books or professors mentioned resilience in children, repression was part of the package. As in, resilience was synonymous with a natural ability to unconsciously ignore otherwise unbearable trauma by blocking out their occurrence. This may be true – I never managed to investigate outside of my notions – but I find that resilience is more of a fight or flight response in that it enables you to get through something. When the trauma turns into a prolonged event, however, there is no telling when or if you’ll come out of it.

I theorise that the above creates an accumulation of unwanted/repressed memories that in turn start to fester, ultimately manifesting as symptoms of depression, anxiety, paranoia, PTSD – a disease that makes every waking moment drip with existential fear – and no way of finding out where the symptoms stem from when the pressure is released and you finally have a second to sort your head out. Thus, you’ll find yourself in need of professional help. However, if you cannot explain to yourself what caused your view of the world, or your coping mechanisms, it is almost impossible to put into words and efficiently communicate that which is left of these events – mainly the ambiance, smells, the emotions you felt – to someone that can actually aid your becoming a functional adult.

I have struggled with this myself, in different scenarios, and I’ve also been very aware/fearful of the fact that the act of trying to bring forth a repressed memory can create an unreliable or ‘false’ memory due to the suggestive invocations facilitated during EMDR, or awaken something that one is not yet ready to deal with, at least not without accompanying memories to the event that may remain repressed after such a session. Psychology Today has an interesting article about the debate over repressed memories, where you can read more about how trying to force the re-emergence of a memory may not have the desired effect by clicking anywhere on this sentence. It’s an interesting read.

I found another article on the same site, where the headline simply read “There’s No Delete Button in the Human Psyche – Fortunately”, which is something that I found to be true this morning, when I was sent a document that highlighted something that I, from June 2002 and up until that moment, had absolutely no recollection of. What’s more, it dislodged a few other bits from the same time period. This is what possessed me to write about repression, rather than the topic I’d planned on writing about initially (just keep an eye on the blog next week – you’ll discover what that was then).

Our brain’s memory – our hard drive – can be a complex entity. I find that my own, very much like the Cloud or One Drive, oftentimes cannot be bothered telling me where it has stored something. It’s there, but elusive – it only shows up when I’m not paying attention – more often than not in the shape of a flashback that makes my whole day go topsy-turvy, spurred on by a familiar smell or scenario (or when I am trying to attach one of my most recently used files to an email, on my computer’s hard drive).

So, I think there’s certainly a link between repressed memories and childhood trauma. There is a good chance that we need to accept and acknowledge the fact that these memories remain inside of our brains as shadows, rather than perhaps trying to force them to come out, in order to heal our repressed adult selves. And I am sure there is no universal solution to how one should go about it either. But I reckon finding a professional hand to hold for the especially bumpy parts of the winding road that life can be is as good advice as any.

Learn more about Repressed trauma by clicking this one.

I also have a theory about the connection between repression and Alzheimer’s disease, but we will have to save that for another day.

As always, please go check out my book if you enjoyed my writing – you might like it.

I’ll leave you with a link to a YouTube video of one of the finest songs ever to be performed in a musical, by the great Elaine Paige.

See you next Tuesday!

Tag: memory

Blink and it’s gone

Understanding repression