External Experiences

Internal vs External Experiences: The Evolution of Human Thought

Human thoughts are formed when neurotransmitters are sent through the dendrites of one microscopic cell to the axon terminal of another. Memories are when the neurotransmitters that were sent during a particular thought or experience are sent again. Unfortunately, signals cannot be resent in exactly the same way, therefore altering what we remember. Eventually, if one remembers something enough times, that memory is completely altered; nothing like what originally had happened. People have been trying to fight this inevitable loss of memory since the beginning of our existence. The only thing is, we are designed to forget.

Before the normalization of writing, books were used to keep an official record of facts and historical events; as Alison Bechdel describes in The Ordinary Devoted Mother, external experiences. These texts were studied by people for the information they held because “they only had a few books – the Bible, an almanac, a devotional work or two – and they read them over and over again…so that a narrow range of traditional literature became deeply impressed on their consciousness” (Foer 166). In that time, majority of the population was only exposed to the

Through this work she was able to express some emotion she could not deal with any other way (Wikipedia, Bechdel 90). Similarly, Alison Bechdel, in her work The Ordinary Devoted Mother, struggles with ideas such as family relationships, childhood, and psychoanalysis. At the end of the story though, Alison focuses on the different relationships she had between her mother and her father. She finds a series of photos of her and her mother making faces at each other, and a single photo where she is looking at the person holding the camera, with a very different expression (Bechdel