Fringe, Memories and Reliability
Its hard to predict what will trigger a memory association, or whether a triggered memory will stand up to hard evidence. With memory, as with gambling, it's easy to focus on the fortuitous, and forget the frequent failures.
This post itself was inspired by RoxyBisquaint's Fringe post and subsequent comments about how well the Peter and Olivia characters would remember each other, if they had been childhood friends. I've had some experiences with this sort of thing that seemed almost mystical or supernatural at the time.
Back in late high school / early college years, I met a young woman while on a charity bike ride in another town. She was really nice, we traded names and phone numbers. A few days later, I was tanning (yes, broiling under the actual *sun*), mentally drifting near sleep, when I had a lucid dream about a flute player from my middle school concert band. The name hadn't meant anything, but my brain, working behind the scenes, had come up with a face match: the *sister* of the cyclist I'd just met. This was so amazing to me that I spent a lot of time learning about research on telepathy and precognition.
Many years later, I met a man at a technical seminar, and felt confident enough to ask if he was "one of boys". He was, but I had no idea which one. Their dad had been a friend of my dad, and I'd only met them a few times, as children. What probably triggered the recognition, was his resemblance to my memory of his dad.
Failure is always an option though: a few years ago, a middle-aged Indian man walked up to me at a conference and knew exactly who I was. He had been a worker in a lab in my University. I could blame it on his 'eating well' during the intervening years, but I didn't even remember knowing him when at first when he told me his name. Eventually my brain matched him up with a certain skinny guy who used a certain portion of the lab. That was disappointing memory performance. Another college friend of mine has only vague memories of shared times that I remember very acutely. Memory fail.
Recently, I realized that one of the woman-child's archery teammates reminds me of a woman friend from my college years. An old photo album put that association to rest. They have similar hair, stature, and build, but their faces are very different. Memory fail? Yeah, probably.
Scanning the faces at weddings and funerals, I find myself recognizing the children of my friends, who are now more similar to my memories of their parents, than the parent are themselves. The parents, my friends, have become OLD people.
Even though I'm not a follower of Fringe, I wanted to say that I'm inclined to believe just about anything writers want to say about memory. The human mind can perform some astonishing feats of recall, recognition and association, as well as completely losing other memories, even important things like ATM PINs, or the spelling of simple words.
I just wish I could do a better job clearing away the OLD phone numbers, and make room for NEW ones.