Christmas morning

COMMENTARY

But our wondrous brain keeps on making memories every moment we endure, courtesy of special neurons in our brains called ‘time cells.’

Corporeal silence infuses most chilly early mornings of Christmas Day in the city and stretches into the late morning.

Most likely, the still morning world curtsied as most were up past Christmas Eve, kept awake by pleasurable reassuring rituals of the midnight mass, of the festive Noche Buena and the family, warmed by carols, gathering in genial banter.

But if one happens to be a habitual early riser — as I presume you are since you're with me now — I'm quite sure one has already embraced the stretched hours of real corporeal silence spreading out from a winter solstice dawn and into Christmas Day's subdued morning sky.

Admittedly, some are troubled by the habitual early riser, whose internal clock dances to a different human tempo and who, despite a previous raucous evening, promptly gets out of bed on the appointed dawn hour.

She or he relishes the introspective hours as occasions for serious dialogues with himself or herself.

Conscientious early riser French poet Paul Valery, for instance, always rose before dawn and spent two or three hours, in poet W.H. Auden's phrase, "studying the interior maneuvers of his freshly-awoken mind."

Getting out of bed early and engaging in an intimate confidential conversation with oneself and trying to capture from the inside what it is like to be human then is an inviolable pursuit, and a quiet Christmas morning extends such a rare benediction.

Still, as French essayist Michel de Montaigne observed, "it is a tricky business to follow so meandering a course as that of our mind, to penetrate its opaque depths and hidden recesses, to discern and stop so many subtle shifts in its movements."

But existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir argues by dismissing the past, saying "with regard to the past, no further action is possible." She instead advocates of fully inhabiting our present.

That may well be. But our wondrous brain keeps on making memories every moment we endure, courtesy of special neurons in our brains called "time cells," which neuroscientists have lately discovered.

US-based non-profit media outfit NPR (National Public Radio) reports, quoting neuroscientist Marc Howard, that "when the brain detects a notable event, time cells begin a highly orchestrated performance."

"What we find is that the cells fire in a sequence," Howard says. "So, cell one might fire immediately, but cell two waits a little bit, followed by cell three, cell four and so on."

And, each time a cell fires, it places a sort of time stamp on an unfolding experience. And the same cells fire in the same order when we retrieve a memory of the experience, even something mundane as opening a gift.

As time cells keep track of the "when" another group of cells called "place cells" keep track of where one was when the episode occurred.

Nonetheless, both "time cells" and "place cells" are merely parts of the brain's system for organizing episodic memories, which means "our personal egocentric memories — what happened to me, where, and when" says neuroscience professor Dr. Gyorgy Buzsaki.

Episodic memories, however, are distinct from our semantic memories, which deal with ideas and facts.

Now that we've differentiated our memories perhaps, we can be more attentive to our semantic memories henceforth.

It's for the better since it allows us to proceed with the difficult tasks of understanding that our thoughts are all about going through various contradictions between how things seem to be, and how they either actually are or could be, over time.