Count on your precious memory for time travel

Lakshmi Kothaneth -

lakshmiobserver@gmail.com -

Do you ever get an urge to go on a trip? A trip not to a faraway destination, but on time travel.

It can even be a short trip, but it would do wonders if we could go back for a while and revisit our childhood, school, and college and most importantly have a conversation with the ones who are not with us anymore.

I hear the footsteps of a lady in stilettos, it is my colleague but the sound takes me to the time as a young student in the boarding school waiting to go home and the sound of my mother’s footsteps make me leap to rush out to her. Just the sound took me on a short trip.

Sounds, colours and smells, all connected with the senses, contribute to the short trips we get as special treats. Of course scientists have always talked about time travel and speed of light. I wonder how fast our thoughts travel.

Scientists also say one of the best ways of time travel is to take off to the space or hang out near the black hole for a while and when you come back, the earth would have gone through many more years. Now all those are theories and this is not the time travel I want.

In fact, this specific travel plan needs lots of memories and stimulations that take you back in time. Scientists are also pointing out that our memory capacity at present is far worse than any other time because of the dependence on smartphones and other electronic gadgets.

Sitting in the office I can hear the clicks on the computer mouse and the tapping on the keypad. Even communicating on line gives you such narrow vision of the person on the other side. A traditional meeting and conversation has been left far behind. Interestingly, etiquettes of holding a conversation has changed too. We do not have the patience anymore because living online gives us the option to choose whom to speak to and when. We search exactly what we want to read about.

We do not have to learn by heart any phone numbers and the very fact that we know the details are out there make us lazy to memorise numbers to names. Now according to scientists, it is the short memory that is mainly being affected.

For the travel back in memory, we need all the skills to recollect precious memories. Then again many might consider living in memories is old-fashioned. But at a time when we celebrate events to be showcased on social media, an old-fashioned conversation is much needed. Once again, scientists say that while we are so busy taking pictures and especially the selfies, we quite often fail to see the big picture. So definitely, we do not have much to recollect in the next few years.

Recently I had an opportunity to meet Professor Ibrahim Noor al Bakry from Sultan Qaboos University. He is an artist with a passion for history. His collection of Oman’s landscape is so vast and quite different from what we might see on a typical day.

This is because he captures the moment with the details and for this he arrives early on location to capture the lighting. In many cases he begins his journey around 3 am when most of us are still in the dreamland. This is for photography and if it is for a painting he might easily go to the same location more than 20 times as he did in the case of Jabal Al Akhdar.

“I go as many times as possible until I have it in my memory,” Professor Ibrahim explained in his interview.

He does not depend on smartphones. Ask him about the scenery and I am sure he will be able to describe the smell and sounds of the places too. We find our world so busy that we are often buried under five thoughts at least at the same time. We complain about the noisy world without realising it is our mind that is noisy.

If we want to travel back in time and that is in our memories, we have to learn to capture the moments with details. Childhood memories are sharper as we get older we still want to create memories but this is also the time when our minds have got tuned to lots of internal and external noise — demands of the lifestyle and thoughts.

But we can continue to focus on the big picture. It also has an advantage — many times it will put matters in the right perspective.