Our Brains are Buckets with Holes at the Bottom
What to do about our pesky inability to remember anything for long
There is a picture of me from when I was in my early teens in which I am sitting on one of those tractor rides featured at fall festivals. In my lap is a medium sized pumpkin that I had picked earlier in the day. My hands are resting on the top of the pumpkin and my chin is resting on my hands. I’m frowning, but I don't look sad. I have a thousand yard stare that was common for me then and now. It’s the kind of look that I take on when lost deep inside my own mind, thinking about something completely unrelated to my surroundings.
Although I don’t remember what I was thinking about in that picture, I do remember that day; or, at least I think I do. If I close my eyes I can picture the cool, but not cold fall air. The smell of hay. The process of picking just the right pumpkin. I can imagine my grandparents, who took me to the pumpkin patch. But I am not confident any of those memories are real. Not just that I have forgotten details – like jokes said or order of events – but that I literally have no memory of the actual day. All I have, I think, is a constructed memory-like image in my head based on the fact that I have seen that picture of myself – pumpkin in lap, hands on pumpkin, chin on hands – over and over again. That photo has been accompanied by parents and grandparents commenting on how I was always “so deep in thought” and how the picture represented some part of my personality. With that photo and those surrounding conversations, I wonder if my mind simply pieced together a rough approximation of what that day might have been like, when the actual concrete memory of the day had long ago faded to dust.
As any avid reader knows, a similar thing happens with the books we read. When a person asks us if we enjoyed a book we read several years ago, if we are lucky enough to remember it at all, we likely base our answer on a tiny handful of scenes that managed to stick around in our memory. For example, I often tell people that East of Eden is one of my absolute favorite classic novels. But if asked to describe much of the plot in detail, I would struggle. I only remember a few key moments, and even those are hazy. I remember more the feeling of awe it gave me than the actual plot, let alone any exact quotes.
If we take notes on a book we read and save them, then pull those notes out later – to use in essays or just to remind yourself of a book you once loved – you might start to develop a false memory of the book based on the few notes you jotted down, much like we create false memories built around old photos. For example, a couple years ago I read a biography of Leonardo da Vinci. I took copious notes, filing them away on notecards for future reference. I have drawn on those notecards many times since I created them. The result is that now when I think back on what I learned from the biography, I don’t think about anything except those few quotes. I might as well have not read the rest, as far as my memory is concerned.
So, with all that in mind, what’s the point? If we are bound to forget 99% of all the books we read, and even the 1% we remember is probably misremembered, constructed, or inaccurate, then why read at all? If our brains are like pasta strainers, hemorrhaging knowledge faster than we can dump it in, then why not save ourselves the effort?
This reminds me of a Nate Bargatze joke about raising kids. Why bring a little kid to Disney world? They won’t remember anything about it in a couple years! Instead, stick them in the closet and each day open it up and shout “do you remember yesterday??” and if they don’t, slam the door shut. As singer Jeff Rosenstock scream/sings “All these magic moments I’ll forget once the magic is gone.”
But obviously to live that way is nonsensical. In order to cope with this pasta-strainer brain we’ve been stuck with, I’ve adjusted the metaphor. Toss out the pasta stranger and replace it with a simple bucket. Take that bucket and drill a small hole at the base. Not so big water gushes out, not so small it just drips, but a steady flow.
That’s your brian.
Still slightly upsetting, but we can work with it. When we pour knowledge and stories and epiphanies into it, they slosh around in the bucket of our brain for a while, but the drain at the bottom can’t be stopped. Eventually it all dumps out. The good news is it takes a little bit of time. Think about this as the time after you see a great movie or read a great book and spend the next two weeks talking anyone’s ear off about it. By the end of that timeframe everyone is sick of hearing you talk about it and you’ve moved on, partially because you’re interested in something else now and partially because that consistent drain at the bottom of your brain means you don’t remember the details anymore and now when you try to talk to some poor soul about it you spend most of the time going “Ugh I’m not going to get the numbers right… no wait that didn’t happen first, that happened later… what was that character’s name?”
In our new-and-improved metaphor, the water drains just the same, but it’s not impossible to have a full bucket. The drainage out the bottom of the bucket is slow enough that we can fill from the top at approximately the same pace, if we are digilent. By keeping the incoming and outgoing knowledge roughly balanced, we are able to live with a brain full of ideas and stories and knowledge at all times.
The problem, of course, becomes that we are doomed to relearn the same lessons, rehear the same stories, restudy the same subjects over and over again. In history, I have to take multiple passes at a time-period before the full picture starts to stick in my brain. In literature or philosophy, when I have an epiphany about a problem I have or a shared human struggle, I spend a small amount of time feeling enlightened and certain I won’t stumble in that way ever again. Until I do, and then I have to go re-learn that lesson again and again.
To apply this to our metaphor, I imagine the water we are dumping into our bucket-brains as salt water. As time passes and we constantly pour water in to make up for the water we’ve lost, salt builds up on the edges of the bucket (if this is how that would actually work, I don’t know. But let’s pretend). That salty buildup can be anything that finally sticks around in your brain after hearing it enough times. For me, this might be the timeline of European colonialism, which is finally fixing itself in my mind after a dozen times learning it and forgetting. Or maybe it’s a core belief about morality – lodged as bits of salt in the corner of your brain after the tenth book on philosophy. Occasionally, if the water you are pouring in is especially salty (read: very well written or timed perfectly in your life), then in just one pass it leaves a chunk of salt lodged in your brian that will stay with you the rest of your life.
In this view, the goal of reading is not to retain specific knowledge forever and we shouldn’t consider our efforts futile when we inevitably forget most or all of what we learned. The goal is to continually pour good water into our bucket to keep the water levels high, and eventually salt will build up on the edges. Fair warning, though, it would be a mistake to carelessly dump gallon after gallon into our bucket-brains, because we would actually outpace the natural drainage of our buckets and water would overflow out the top – wasting our extra effort. A steady pace does the trick better than vacuuming up every bit of information we can find.
Now, we’ve stretched this metaphor nearly to its limit, but I am going one step further. If the result of our efforts is a brain constantly full of good ideas and stories, with some select salt permanently fixed at the rim, we may still feel a little upset about all that water draining away, forgotten forever. And so I will expand the view of our metaphor to include the ground beneath the bucket. Once again ignoring the scientific reality of saltwater, I imagine a flourishing garden watered by our efforts. As time passes, the garden grows. Flowers bloom, vines spread up the walls, color takes over the scene. The water we dutifully poured into our bucket-brains is drained out the bottom, forgotten, but not useless. Subconsciously, that water is nourishing the garden. This garden may represent the soul, the personality, the person we are and the way we see the world. In other words, just because you don’t remember every book you’ve read, doesn’t mean they aren’t still having an effect, however small, in the construction of your personhood.
This warped and stretched metaphor, of course, applies to areas outside of books. We might ask – why take that vacation? Why go to dinner with that friend? Why go to that concert? We’ll likely forget all of it, right?
The bucket-brain metaphor helps me understand that the value of an experience does not come from our brain’s ability to remember it. Our lives require constant care to flourish. A steady input of good things – good books, good conversation, good fun, good excitement, even good fear. A moment is not about the moment itself. It is just one drop in a bucket that disperses with the rest of the water, drains out the bottom, and does its small part to nourish the garden of our lives. Each of these moments are essential; not alone, but as a collective that could never exist without each individual part. These drops are what make up our lives.
I am grateful for the countless drops of water – long forgotten – that make up who I am, and I plan to continue to diligently fill my bucket-brain with all the best stories, ideas, and experiences I can find, to build up the salt brine of core memories, to nourish the garden beneath, and to stop worrying about the hole at the bottom of the bucket.