On the New Years resolution tip and inspired by my old friend in Seattle: Don’t forget to forget.  

Neuroscientists and Google searchers know that the brain’s Limbic System, also known as the emotional motor system, has many very important components.  Inside, the almighty amygdala.  This little piece of grey determines how we experience emotion and how we process memory.  Pardon the superfluity, but I love the amygdala. [End real information. Begin strange things I will type without any knowledge of neuroscience. So let’s call it Brain prose.]

Say your amygdala is a purse and, through daily emotional living, it collects the memories of your feelings and their aftermath, sharp still frames–high resolution with zoom in/out capabilities.  They’re there in your purse when you need them.  Or when your subconscious determines you need them. But then you keep loading things in that purse, maybe a result of you being a highly emotionally sensitive individual whose quest is to feel stuff all the time.  Things get sloppy in that purse.  Resolution gets pixelated. The  disorganization merges a slew of different unrelated emotional experiences, streamlining. Conflicting emotions share the same expanse of mesh grey sponge, before being ultimately banished from the amygdala, serving such an abstruse purpose that they are virtually useless.  The emotional purge.  And anyway, real estate in the amygdala is (or should be) luxury level.  And there ought to be an emotional bouncer at the door.   

Synthesizing (my favorite higher order thinking process), this reminds me of why I love one Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a film whose setting is partly within the brain’s amygdala. Two ex-lovers get to analyze the growth and aftermath of their relationship as Lacuna Inc., a clinic which performs memory erasure to those trapped in heartache, zaps away their emotional ties one at a time.  Despite this and inexplicably they find their way back to each other.  And with the insight of their exploration, the film ends with both of them saying “okay” to each other’s flaws.  Heart beats head.  Boom!

But despite Joel and Clementine and without Lacuna Inc., what a glorious and fascinating thing: there’s an actual physical place in our brain that holds our memories, that creates love–among other emotions.  And it’s dutiful, like all our biological parts; it has its purpose.  It also creates boundaries and limitations, it redistributes power, and it erases what does not serve it–what does not serve you.  It forgets… for you.  It clears space and tidies everything up and sends you on its way.  So you can move on.  Or, like Joel and Clementine, try again.

P.S.A.: Trust your amygdala; it has your back. Remember to forget all that which holds you back.