In my school years, when I first read about Eric Kendel's work on memory formation and learning, it gave a weird sense of closure that I understand something about myself and others that's quite fundamental. However, I recognize that that sense of understanding was heavily skewed. The more I learn now, the less I feel I know anything. Either way, the Nobel laureate's Aplysia experiments inspired me to think about memory. Aplysia - an animal whose consciousness would seem questionable to Aristotle does something similar to humans. Probably, it does it better than us. If you give it a shock, it sensitizes to it. The response to the trauma is aggravated the second time compared to the first one. That's Aplysia's way of telling itself - "Do not do this fucking shit again!" It memorizes and learns. It relies on memories to stay away from tragedy.
But beyond what the individual neurons or even people retain as memories, recent times have bothered me about the flawed public memory. Collectively, our ability to forget seems to be responsible for much higher devastation than we usually recognize. Anything happens, and people get all riled up. For a few days, that's all that occupies their heads. They talk to each other only about that. The media, social media, the living rooms, the breakrooms, earphones, and speakers are all filled with the same utterances. An arbitrary period goes by, and there is nothing. Then something else happens, and the cycle repeats. It does not matter how big or small, how useful or useless, how noxious or innocuous that event is, we just forget. The public forgets about the rights of other people, their misery, the hate crimes, the rapes, the atrocities, the lives, and the deaths alike. The public memory for anything seems so short now that the goldfish must pity us.
A lot of us feel that the pandemic, its experiences, and its memories are going to stay with us. For the neural cells and the individuals they might. But I am almost sure that in public memory, we are already ready to forget all about it. Soon, politicians will fight about the same mediocre things (if they aren't already), soon the employers will remember the pleasure of mistreatment, and the universities will re-realize that the well-being of students doesn't matter at all. Once everyone is vaccinated, the world will be again about dollars and not lives. And we need not find a target to blame, except our poor public memory of a tragedy.