Long great day.  I was moving.  Up and over Max Patch Mountain, Walnut Mountain, and Bluff Mountain before a 7.5 mile gradual descent to Deer Park Mountain.  I set up near a water source and had the place to myself for the night, though many other hikers were set up within walking distance.  It was nice to have the water and the frogs for company.

This was the first day I put the earbuds in and listened to anything from my phone while I hiked.  Hey- I lasted a long time (5 weeks) out here listening to just the birds, the wind through the trees, the rushing of the waters over the rocks in the green glades, (and, when I lay down at night, I can hear the mice just outside my tent making un-Christian-like comments about my ancestry [since I hang my food bag up in a tree]).  

I listened to an interesting podcast for a good hour today; it was a conversation between the great Sam Harris (an American neuroscientist, philosopher, author, critic of religion, blogger, and public intellectual), and one Daniel Kahneman (notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making).  This conversation added an interesting postscript to something I’ve been thinking about recently.  I’ll tell you about it, but strap in, this doesn’t go in a straight line.

What I’ve been thinking about recently is:  the ‘Q’ word.  If there are delicate ears in the room, please feel no shame in leaving, –and by all means, usher the women and children out.

Ready?: The word is ‘quitting’. 

I don’t now (remember this word) believe I’m going to quit this AT thing, but I’ve been thinking about the concept, and the role it’s played in my life, in the past and recently.  The reason it’s a recent line of thought-inquiry of mine is because I was recently privy to an email wherein my brother Keith expressed pride to a couple of my friends that I didn’t quit after the sickness episode.  And I was indeed proud that my older brother Keith, known as the ‘responsible’ twin (and nothing in all these years to disprove it), was proud of me.  Yet, I have a couple of things to say about this issue, and I believe I am well-positioned to speak upon it given how many times in my life I have been tested in this regard.  First, everyone thinks of quitting.  Indeed, I was a little shocked when I started going to great Army schools with high attrition rates and saw people quit, and occasionally thought about quitting myself.  I sought out every tough Army school they had, and went to most of them, and never quit.  But, I did often think of quitting.  Now- here’s the main point to my recent ruminations over it:  although I remember wanting to quit, I don’t really remember very much the long sequence of experiencing the misery that drove me to that point.  I can intellectualize it, I can quote the attrition rates, I can tell you about the food and sleep deprivation, I can tell you about getting hurt, freezing in the mountains, passing out in the jungles, the morale crashes and despair, but I don’t really feel it very much . . . now.  I more-so feel the happiness of having graduated that school, that test of whatever sort.  I just know that I ended up always not quitting.  I know that I learned the adage long ago to ‘never quit on a bad day’.  Many people did, but I try to wait a day.  If everything’s going great and you really want to quit that thing, then you really want to quit.

Now, to bring this full circle:  I’ve wanted to quit twice already on this AT trip.  When I couldn’t walk and was sitting down in the middle of the ice-rain massaging my calf, and limped 2.7 miles to a shelter over the course of several hours, I arrived fully hypothermic and was convinced that if I warmed up- that was it! That one didn’t last very long . . . I eventually warmed up and the calf healed quicker than I thought it would and it turned out not to be a permanent injury. 

The second one was the sickness of course …when the Forest Service people showed up, I was convinced that I was going home, and, believe me, it seemed like a decently defendable position.  I was really actually mentally helpless balanced perfectly on the top of a peak, where the merest breeze of despair or hope could push me over on one side or the other of giving up. 

But . . . a couple of days later… I was back on the Trail.  And when I saw Keith’s email, I began to wonder how we so much  ‘forget’ the misery over time, and often even over a very short time, of bad experiences.  They say that a woman will never have a second child if she really remembers the pain of labor, but somehow it is diminished over time.  People forget.  So, I was walking these past days occasionally wondering how people can forget bad times to such an extent and even:  does it serve a useful purpose?  Does this also go back to Cave-Man days?  Note that I am no more an anthropologist than I am an astronaut but,- isn’t there something good in remembering the feast at the fire after the kill versus remembering the terror of being charged by a giant mammoth before it was felled?  And remembering that feast would keep one hunting and serve survival. Always back to survival!  So, you can see that I’ve framed the issue in my mind as one of ‘Forgetting’ . . . how is it that we forget bad experiences so, not even conveniently I’d say, but deliberately, as a process of the brain and the way we’ve evolved?  How/why do we forget like that?    

And now the relevance to the Podcast:  The intellectuals discussed the idea of The Experiencing Self and The Remembering Self.  Absolutely fascinating.  Here’s how it works.  We all have our selves that are actually in the world experiencing things, it is heretofore what I’ve always thought of as simply ‘me’; I’m experiencing my life every day and that is me and that is all there is to it.  But, ah, there is also The Remembering/ed Self, which is the way you remember things about your life versus what actually happened.   They don’t perfectly overlap.  Here is the concept as not only proposed, but proven in controlled scientific experiments:  

The 60/90 rule. (On a scale of 1-10, 1 is the least pain and 10 is the most pain.)  If you give a person 60 seconds of pain at level 10 and stop, that person will remember that event.  If     you give another person 60 seconds of pain at level 10, followed by an additional 30 seconds of pain at level 5, that person will remember that event. And, you guessed it, the person who endured 90 seconds of pain versus the 60, will have a much better memory of the event–despite having endured 50% more time of pain! 

And here’s how it worked on me recently: the thing I most remember about the hypothermia event is when, in the sleeping bag, I felt like I was turning the corner from hypothermia to warming up.  And more revealing, in my recent blog post about my recent illness I state, not knowing this podcast was coming, that the thing I’ll really remember was the IV hanging above me with medicine, lights and compassionate ambulance people about me!  That ambulance ride was 35 minutes but I’d been throwing up in misery for three days!  (I really won’t milk this sickness episode any further- but I hope you can see how it fell nicely into the context of this essay.🙄)

This actually presents an ethics question for doctors:  should you let a person experience more pain in a procedure (do the 90 second thing), actually rendering more pain overall if you know that the person will have a better memory of the event for the rest of their lives than if you had spared them this Experienced-Self/Remembered-Self trickery? If you can manipulate someone’s memory of an event to the better, should you do it, at all costs?  (And my thought is that weighing decades of the memory against a short worse event is dispositive toward manipulation; how weird is this territory now?)

Another question: is this self-trickery useful as a human tool?  I’d argue it has outlived it’s usefulness.  Shouldn’t we make coherent decisions based upon our experiences, as they actually happened, versus how we remember them?  Isn’t that the rational course?  Example:  aren’t addictions this concept run wild?  People will remember the highs and not so much dwell on or remember stealing money from Grandma’s purse, or throwing up all night, or other humiliations attendanct to severe substance addictions.  Perhaps erasing this Remembered-Self dynamic from the addicts’ hard-drive would lead to more rational behavior.

Of course, the Remembered-Self dynamic might be positively contributing to having babies and not quitting Army Schools or the Appalachian Trail.

I give up. 

I’ll bet you thought you spent most of your time experiencing things versus remembering them disingenuously.  Not so fast!  Congratulations, and Welcome!  I introduce you forever to your Remembered Selves!