I Think I Have a Leak in my Brain

I was sitting at the dining table last night, spooning cherry yoghurt out of the pot, when an image popped into my mind. It came from nowhere apparently. One minute I was at home in my dining room sharing a meal with my husband on Saturday night and the next it was summer and I was sitting at a table in the garden of a rather nice seaside café in the Welsh resort we frequented whilst on holiday just this year. I was eating a cream tea.

Why do these things happen? Or perhaps they only happen to me. I don’t know. Maybe you haven’t experienced this particular weird phenomenon. There seemed to be no reason for the sudden flashback. I wasn’t thinking about Wales, about cream teas or even about gardens. It was a dark, rainy, autumnal evening and I was sitting indoors with the curtains drawn, thinking about clearing away the meal and settling down to another episode of our current, favourite DVD series. A few days previously the same thing happened, first to me and then to my husband, who confessed to finding himself momentarily in a car park in Tenby, also on our Welsh holiday, where we had parked the car overnight close to the guest house. So I’m not the only one. We discussed the subject for a while and then gave up trying to understand it. Now it has happened again.

The mind seems to be a strange thing. More and more it seems to me like a sophisticated computer. Sometimes when I cannot remember something from the past I mutter in frustration: ‘wrong disc’. It seems that much of the information we amass from the previous years of our lives is stored in our brains on separate discs, one per subject or theme. It sometimes seems if only we can access one half-remembered fact from a particular ‘lifetime’: a previous job, a group of friends, a former school we once attended, then the whole ‘disc’ opens up and a flood of related information pours out. Suddenly, when once we have remembered the name of one former school friend, we can remember almost the entire class from that era, as if it were only yesterday. Isn’t it strange?

Similarly, I have a whole album of photographs and images stored somewhere in my brain – a bit like my very own Google images folder. It is this that appeared to be leaking the other night. Suddenly, an unsolicited image from my past escaped from the folder and leaked into my present day consciousness. I never asked it to. I never clicked on it. The mind is a fascinating thing, but I never realised before that it leaks. Maybe it’s because it was raining. Any ideas?