Thread by @HeatherEHeying

Memories of a Mugging, my exploration of the evolution of memory and our senses, as told through the story of being mugged at knife point in Quito, is now out. (Sp18 issue of @conlitmag, behind a considerable paywall.) Brief excerpts follow:
confrontationmagazine.org/issue-123-spri…

Memory explodes the myth of separate senses. When a young boy sees a backwards six, and says—that’s wrong, it’s too orange, six is redder—he is living the blurred boundaries of evolutionary history.

We are layers of history, our evolved selves, not fully traceable through species trees, because while species change and split, traits do so even more messily.

[As] we became human….Language processing showed up in the forebrain alongside visual processing, as well as pretty much all the other cognitive functions that contribute to making humans dominant on Earth—analysis, creativity, emotion, math, consciousness.

I was in Ecuador, about to lead 20 undergraduates in a six-week biological expedition. We had known each other for months on campus, but the trip started the next day. It was day zero. Planning to wander Quito alone that Sunday, I was happy to have three of my students join me.

Stairs in foreign cities are intriguing; they often go places you can't know. In particular, old stone stairways are an invitation. Individual creations all, sometimes they’re co-opted for a new destination, or dead-end at a wall. I tend to follow them when I see them.

Scarface in the hoodie has Michelle and me against the wall, and he takes his long fixed-blade knife and crouches, swaying, scraping his knife blade against the cobblestones in broad arcs, glittering eyes trained on us. It’s a crazy low knife dance… and is riveting.

…I don’t remember beginning to run after him, nor deciding to run. I don’t remember not remembering. But I have visual memories of watching Scarface take Michelle’s gear, while he held a knife to her; and I have a visceral-intellectual memory of thinking, at that moment: no.

Were you paying more attention to your world just before disaster struck? Generally no—most disasters provide no warning. Therefore your brain must constantly be uploading the banal experiences of daily life, and discarding them after a time, you none the wiser.

We co-opt brain space when one sense goes off-line for a long time: Some blind people echolocate to map the space around them and, at least sometimes, they use the visual parts of their brains to do so.

The neighborhood had broken out into a block party, with music, people hanging over balconies, old women coming up to congratulate us for fighting back, and to tell us that these two had been trouble in the neighborhood for a while now. Or perhaps I am misremembering the music.

We know so much of what we think we know on the basis of direct sensory experience. A splash of royal blue, notes played on a mandolin, the smell of low tide—how much is required to take us spiraling back to a moment we have not thought of in years, perhaps did not know we knew?

We had enough shared time together—in life, many months, and that day, many hours of shared exploration—to trust each other to make good decisions…. even if each of us had a major sense shift or shutter, we were a unit, and we had each other’s backs.

“We were that most human of things, the social group with both shared history, and shared fate.”

I will post the whole essay on my Medium page once it’s no longer Confrontation’s active issue. Photo by Michelle Stewart (one of my former students).