Bechdel and Foer

ormation is the 21st Century currency. People with all the right information can utilize it for economic and social gain. However, it is difficult for all of humanity to be endowed with similar information.  For example, a student who is in his final year of undergraduate studies may not remember every detail he learned in the first year. Does this mean that such a student is uninformed or unprepared in his discipline of study? I think, not.
As more and more tools for storing information are developed, we are
confounded by the problem of selecting what to recall in an instance and what to ignore. Foer and Bechdel seem to recognize this conundrum. Students spend almost a quarter of their lifetime in schools trying to understand phenomena, yet when the entire process is completed, we realize that we can barely remember all the information we have been bombarded with. The intriguing part of it all is that we seem unfazed by our collective amnesia because at the back of our minds, we know there are means of accessing this information again. What if thus was not possible? The question seems rather moot given the fact that the information we consume has been disseminated courtesy of man’s ability to remain innovative and develop means of storing this information.
 For people with the impatience and desire to not to miss anything in their lives, Bechdel (85) shows us that it is futile to consider even knowing everything in life. Even sheer dedication in keeping a diary of our everyday activities cannot make us remember everything. The human brain was not configured to capture every little nugget of information. As Foer admits, the present efforts by technology companies to develop means of accessing information through artificial intelligence seems to have been inspired by the desire to capture everything in an instant.
Applications such as Siri that use sophisticated algorithms to read the minds of users are intended to understand the thinking capabilities of man and then respond by supplying the right type of information.  The frustration of the daughter in Bechdel’s Ordinary Mother in her bid to understand her mother’s thoughts and past experiences serve to prove that we cannot store everything in our minds. Most importantly, we cannot expect people to remember things at a go since the process of remembering requires patience and “deep investment in memory,” to use the words of Joshua Foer.
 It seems that as Bechdel’s plays tricks on her, the more inquisitive and self-reflective she becomes, with the final result that she can finally lay her ghosts of yearning for remembrance to rest. Fantasy has this warping impact on reality, confusing and interfering with the process of trying to discern dreams from facts. However, self-reflection seems to be useful in retrieving these hidden memories.  In the conundrum of self-realization, Bechdel can piece together portions of her childhood in a painstakingly slow and tedious process.
 Foer seems to recognize the importance of committing our mental resources to reason if we are to retrieve hidden information. He posits that we should consider the individual aides memoire if we desire to remember things we have come to forgotten. He suggests using tools such as personal journals and reading books to refresh our minds. Through a disciplined process of reflection and a shift in attitudes towards the acquisition of knowledge, we will finally recreate our memories and end up like Bechdel in her delightful comic drama.