Page 19 - Ruminations

17. Three psychological parallels

1. Worry and fantasy

In both cases the mind is set to work finding a path of causality
between two unconnected states, the reality of present conditions and
the (probably) unrealistic feared or desired future end. Obstacles must
be created or overcome, requiring ingenuity, absurd expectations and
tortuous logic. Such planning and plotting may involve the same
projective mental process involved in any concatenation of imaginary
circumstance, the peculiar human ability to consider future possibility.
In these two activities, however, it is dragged into mapping a course
which is unlikely to be followed. Time is wasted on figuring out how
to avoid the unavoidable or attain the unattainable, forestalling clear
thought on avoiding the avoidable and attaining the attainable.

2. Synesthesia and paronomasia

Both are involuntary experiences, but the synesthete is more often
seen as a physiological oddity and the punster as a pest. If associative
inhibition operates as a modifiable genetic capacity with socially and
physiologically inversely variable strength, then that similarity should
be demonstrable electromechanically on a neural level and mappable
on different or overlapping parts of the brain. It would be interesting
to find out if the two phenomena ever occur in the same person.

3. Forgetting and remembering in dementia

Memory failure, considered primarily “age-related,” has two aspects
that may be linked. First, and most annoying, delayed (sometimes
indefinitely) retrieval from storage of a queried word, a name, a
numeric value or other symbolic information: this is well-known to
the point of being a joke (an indication of the distress it engenders).
But for some, the brain repeatedly performs the complementary
action of retrieving such types of data when no query has been issued.
That, in turn, prompts an inquiry into the unconscious association that
triggered the retrieval, usually in vain. Is the same interface between
consciousness and mass storage at fault in both kinds of failure? The
plumbing analogies of broken and blocked pipes we apply to dementia
should be replaced by telephone imagery: wrong numbers and crossed
wires as well as busy signals and dropped calls.