Listening to the silent majority

[47]

Don Mattera concluded his book by stating that nothing could be hidden from the mind. He wrote, ‘There is nothing that memory cannot reach or touch or recall’ (p 151). So he postulated that his memory was his most effective weapon. But I disagree with this assumption. I rather look upon memory as a booby-trap locked into our heads, and continuously exploding psychological limpet-mines that impair our ability to think clearly or relate healthily to the environment and others. To me, the mind is a permanent no-man's-land, like the plains of Ovambo. It is littered with psychological explosives. Without the memories of his sad, hurtful time in Sophiatown, Don Mattera would not have the ego he does in 1989. It is true when he says that without memory's ability to store and retrieve experiences, we would not have a life story at all; but at the same time, our minds actually know more than we could ever consciously recover. If Neumann's calculation is to be believed, our minds are incapable of giving us total recall.

So for Don Mattera to state that memory can reach back to anything it has gathered and stored contradicts scientific evidence. The 20 billion neurons in the brain constitute our own private data collection that shapes the ego, and in Mattera's case provided the information for his memoirs. A neuron is a minute thinking-apparatus that converses with other neurons through a number of chemical substances called neurotransmitters. The amount of work these billions of neurons have to do is mind-boggling.

But Don Mattera didn't seem to have any qualms about the reliability

[p. 57]

of his memory, the perfect functioning of his brain and his ability to keep reality and interpretation apart. Of course, most people in the world are unaware of how memory functions and what the odds are in trying to recover the truth from among 28 trillion bits of information. Instead, they will be unshakably convinced that what they remember is the absolute truth while in fact their memories are nothing but a mixture of imagined certainties. Most of our minds are on joy rides that result in casualties of thought and truth all over the place, and inflict unintentional damage on ourselves and others while posing as the truth itself.