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10/31/2025

Today’s blog

Lynn Murphy Mark

What week is it?

Every morning I read Richard Rohr’s meditation and I am reminded of what week it is in the calendar year. Every time he helpfully introduces a new subject he headlines the number of weeks we are into the year. This week is number 44 – out of 52. I am able to do the math on this one – there are only 8 seven day intervals left in 2025 – meaning that 2026 will be here in 56 days. Wow.

I have noticed more and more my inability to judge intervals of time. Like, if I think something happened a year ago it is more likely to have happened five years ago. I have a spotty memory anyway, so don’t ask me if I remember when we…fill in the blank. I’m not alone in this. My comrades in advancing age all complain of this very same thing. I was very surprised, though, to hear my daughter in her 40’s say the same thing. This just reminds me that every day our brains are exposed to 

My favorite stand-up comic is Kathleen Madigan. She has a bit about visiting her aging parents in Florida once when her mother invited her to play golf with her and her friends. She was fine with that until her mom said the women meet at 7 AM. So she got herself up and dressed and joined her mother and friends. It soon became apparent that morning drinking was going on and one of the women was clearly “hammered”. When Kathleen whispered to her mother that it was only 7:15 AM and wasn’t that a little early in the day to be so impaired, her mother delivered one of my favorite lines: “Kathleen, we have a different relationship with time down here.”

Yes. I have a different relationship with time at this age. I excuse myself when I learn that “Information scientists have found that the average person living today processes as much as 74 GIGABYTES of information each day through tv, computers, cell phones, tablets, billboards and many other gadgets. That’s the equivalent of watching 16 movies, reading over 200,000 words or scrolling on Tik Tok for 200 hours.” (www.minecheck.com). I have also learned that our brains have a remarkable amount of storage capacity. “The human brain’s memory capacity in the average adult can store trillions of bytes of information. In a Stanford study, it was reported that the cerebral cortex alone has 125 trillion synapses.” (Clinical Neurology Specialists).

These numbers have too many zeroes for me to comprehend. But I remain fascinated by what my brain is capable of. I am 76 years and some change old. That means when I grew up there were no computers, tablets, or smart phones. We did have a television. Because we were living in Mexico City, I got used to watching programs in Spanish. I’m pretty sure this is how my young brain learned to think in Spanish or English, depending on the circumstances.

Seventy-six years equals 27,740 days on this earth. Every one of those days exposed me to thousands of daily experiences recorded in my brain as electrical pulses. These signals are transferred to an area called the “hippocampus”, responsible for processing and shipping information bits to be stored more permanently. My brain does have the tendency to store  information that it actively pays attention to. I wonder sometimes why my brain prefers to store random bits that pop up at unexpected and sometimes inappropriate intervals. Fortunately my neural filter is still mostly in working order and I hope it stays with me as long as I live.

This reminds me of one of my favorite psychiatric patients. She was famous for the loss of her mental filter. One day when she was especially irritated by just about everything, I was watching her approach the nurses’ station. I was dressed in my business outfit. She spied me looking and stopped long enough to say, “What are you looking at, you uptight button down?” Then she handed me a small carved wooden Saint Francis with the comment, “Here, you need this more than I do. It was blessed by the Pope.” But the most dangerous thought I ever heard her utter was the day she spied her psychiatrist coming down the hall. Now this next phrase only means something when I say that this doctor was a little chubby and very aware of it. My favorite patient saw her coming down the hall and said, “I know you’re coming because I can hear your thighs rubbing together.” Oh boy, was that ever a fox paw!

Well, back to the passage of time. Remember that before this day is over our brains will be processing billions of bits of information. It’s a wonder we can walk and talk at the same time, let alone remember what happened yesterday.