So now the best current model had it that memories were encoded (somehow) as standing patterns of quantum-coherent oscillations, set up by changes in the microtubules and their constituent parts, all working in patterns inside the neurons. Although there were now researchers who speculated that there could be significant action at even finer ultramicroscopic levels, permanently beyond their ability to investigate (familiar refrain); some saw traces of signs that the oscillations were structured in the kind of spin-network patterns that Bao’s work described, in knotted nodes and networks that Sax found eerily reminiscent of the palace-of-memory plan, utilizing rooms and hallways, as if the ancient Greeks by introspection alone had intuited the very geometry of timespace.

In any case, it was sure that these ultramicroscopic actions were implicated in the brain’s plasticity; they were part of how the brain learned and then remembered. So memory was happening at a far smaller level than had been previously imagined, which gave the brain a much higher computational possibility than before, up to perhaps 1024 operations per second — or even 1043 in some calculations, leading one researcher to note that every human mind was in a certain sense more complicated that all the rest of the universe (minus its other consciousnesses, of course). Sax found this suspiciously like the strong anthropic phantoms seen elsewhere in cosmological theory, but it was an interesting idea to contemplate.

So, not only was there simply more going on, it was also happening at such fine levels that quantum effects were certainly involved. Experimentation had made it clear that large-scale collective quantum phenomena were happening in every brain; there existed in the brain both global quantum coherence, and quantum entanglement between the various electrical states of the microtubules; and this meant that all the counterintuitive phenomena and sheer paradox of quantum reality were an integral part of consciousness. Indeed it was only very recently, by including the quantum effects in the cytoskeletons, that a team of French researchers had finally managed to put forth a plausible theory as to why general anesthetics worked, after all the centuries of blithely using them.

So they were confronted with yet another bizarre quantum world, in which there was action at a distance, in which decisions not made could affect events that really happened, in which certain events seemed to be triggered tel-eologically, that is to say by events that appeared to come after them in time… Sax was not greatly surprised by this development. It supported a feeling he had had all his life, that the human mind was deeply mysterious, a black box that science could scarcely investigate. And now that science was investigating it, it was coming up hard against the great unexplainables of reality itself.

Still, one could hold to what science had learned; and admit that reality at the quantum level behaved in ways that were simply outrageous at the level of human senses and ordinary experience. They had had three hundred years to get used to that, and eventually they had somehow to incorporate this knowledge into their worldviews, and forge on. Sax would have indeed said that he was comfortable with the familiar quantum paradoxes; things at the micros-cale were bizarre but explicable, quantifiable or at least describable, using complex numbers, Riemannian geometry, and all the rest of the armatures of the appropriate branches of mathematics. Finding such stuff in the very workings of the brain should have been no surprise at all. Indeed, compared to things like human history or psychology or culture, it was even somehow comforting. It was only quantum mechanics after all. Something that could be modeled by mathematics. And that was saying something.

So. At an extremely fine level of structure in the brain, much of one’s past was contained, encoded in a unique complex network of synapses, microtubules, dimers and vicinal water and amino-acid chains, all small enough and near enough together to have quantum effects on each other. Patterns of quantum fluctuation, diverging and collapsing; this was consciousness. And the patterns were clearly held or generated in specific parts of the brain; they were the result of a physical structure articulated on many levels. The hippocampus, for instance, was critically important, especially the dentate gyrus region and the perforant pathway nerves that led to it. And the hippocampus was extremely sensitive to action in the limbic system, directly underneath it in the brain; and the limbic system was in many ways the seat of the emotions, what the ancients would have called the heart. Thus the emotional charge of an event had much to do with how fully it was laid out in the memory. Things happened, and the consciousness witnessed or experienced them, and inevitably a great deal of this experience changed the brain, and became part of it forever; particularly the events heightened by emotion. This description seemed right to Sax; what he had felt most he remembered best — or forgot most assiduously, as certain experiments suggested, with an unconscious constant effort that was not true forgetting at all, but repression.

After that initial change in the brain, however, the slow process of degradation began. For one thing, the power of recollection was different in different people, but always less powerful than memory storage, it appeared, and very hard to direct. So much was patterned into the brain but never retrieved. And then if one never remembered a pattern, never recollected and rehearsed it, then they never got the reinforcement of another run-through; and after about 150 years of storage, experiments suggested, the pattern began to degrade more and more rapidly, due apparently to the accumulated quantum effects of free radicals collecting randomly in the brain. This was apparently what was happening to the ancient ones; a breakdown process which began immediately after an event was patterned into the brain, eventually hit a cumulative level where the effects were catastrophic for the oscillatory patterns involved, and thus for the memories. It was probably about as clocklike, Sax thought glumly, as the thermodynamic clouding of the lens of the eye.

However — if one could rehearse all one’s memories, ecphorize them as some called it in the literature on the subject — from the Greek, meaning something like “echo transmission” — then it would reinforce the patterns, giving them a fresh start and setting the clock of degradation back to zero. A sort of longevity treatment for dimer patterns, in effect, sometimes referred to in the literature as anamnesis, or loss of forgetting. And after such treatment it would be easier to recall any given event, or at least as easy as it had been soon after the event happened. This was the general direction that work in memory reinforcement was taking. Some called the drugs and electrical devices involved in this process nootropics, a word which Sax read as “acting upon mind.” There were a lot of terms for the process being bandied about in the current literature, people scrambling through their Greek and Latin lexicons in the hope of becoming the namer of the phenomenon: Sax had seen mnemonics and mnemonistics, and mnemosynics, after the goddess of memory; also mimenskesthains, from the Greek verb “to remember.” Sax preferred memory reinforcer, although he also liked anamnesis, which seemed the most accurate term for what they were trying to do. He wanted to concoct an anamnestic.

But the practical difficulties of ecphorization — of remembering all one’s past, or even some particular part of it — were great. Not just finding the anamnestics that might stimulate such a process, but finding as well the time it would take! When one had lived two centuries, it seemed possible that it might take years to ecphorize all the significant events of one’s life.