Eyes Half Shut

"It's extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts.  Perhaps it's just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome" -Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad 

So, in my last post, I was discussing memory and how memory, like a dream, is shifting all the time.  If we can cause such a shift on purpose, should we?
But this is not that post.  This post is about forgetting.
So.
Some studies have suggested that people are more likely to remember emotionally charged events, and further, are more likely to remember positive events than negative ones.  Other studies have implied that pessimists are probably more realistic, and yet others have shown that humans are bad at probability and so play the lottery, etc.  The prevailing thought here is that this is what keeps us sane.  If we couldn't forget all the bad things, if we really knew the odds against us, we would go mad.  We wouldn't be able to cope with life. 
It reminds me, really, of this video: (Fair warning, it's about 10min long and made me bawl my eyes out.)

The gist of the video is that this autistic girl wasn't able to speak or really function at all, had outbursts, banged her head on the floor, etc.  Then someone taught her to use a typewriter and she can now communicate.  It was astounding.  She was trapped inside a body that wouldn't let her communicate with the outside world.  Though she could understand what people were saying to her, she had no way to express herself.  The main thing I latched on to, though, was the way she described feeling.  It sounded as if she had a gateway problem.  That all those little sounds and smells and sights and textures that we take for granted, she could feel all the time.  
We learn to tune things out all the time.  A country girl who moves to the city hears cars and sirens at night and is unable to sleep.  After a few months, she gets over it.  After a year or so, she goes home and can't sleep because it's too quiet.  Then she gets over it again.  For this autistic girl, however, she never got over it.  With her, it wasn't just street noises at night, she was consciously hearing the hum of the air conditioner, the low voices in another room, the sound her feet made on the floor, the birds outside.  She was consciously feeling her socks and shoes, her tongue in her mouth, her eyelids blinking.  Her brain took in the visual images of the everyday objects around her and didn't blur them out, like it normally does, but treated every thing as if it were new and interesting.  It created a sensory overload for her that she lived in every day.
Even on the less-severe end of that scale, a lot of the symptoms of Asperger's are similar. One girl I know described it like this; "Imagine you're at work.  You have something you need to do, there's a deadline, you have to focus.  But people keep throwing ping-pong balls at you - sometimes just 1 or 2, sometimes a whole bucket, and there's no way of knowing when or how many will hit you.  It doesn't hurt, it's just distracting, annoying.  What would you do?"  Answer: you'd snap.  You'd scream "STOP IT!" 
Take Sherlock Holmes, for example.  Although he's fictional, he's become kind of the Aspie poster boy.  He sees so many details because he can't shut them out.  What seems brilliant to other people is just him making the logical conclusion from the massive amount of information his brain collects.  His brain is so taken up with these things, however, that other functions are taken away.  He's insensitive because his brain can't handle dealing with emotions on top of all these other things it's doing.  He comes off as cold because if you're thinking about how you breath with every breath, it's hard to also think about what emotion your face is making.  I have an Aspie friend who refers to it as "min-maxing" - a gaming term that means pouring all your points or resources into buffing one stat (like intelligence, for example) at the expense of other stats (like charisma).  He figures the INT gain is worth the CHA loss, especially in today's society, where much of the interaction can be done over the internet.  Still, it sometimes gets in his way.  He's terrible at job interviews, for example.
Now, granted, I'm not a psychiatrist or a psychologist or a psychoticpriest, so most of this stuff is just stuff I've read here and there and latched on to.  But I like it, so we're going with it.

My point in all of this is that for all people focus on remembering things, maybe forgetting things is just as important.  Maybe what keeps us sane is the ability to forget, to block out, and to become accustomed to bad things.  With myself, for example, my dad went to prison when I was quite young.  When people find out, they're always sorry, that's awful.  I don't like that.  It was so long ago that yes, it's bad, but I'm used to it.  It has become a part of the background noise of my life.
I'm not saying we should try to repress our horrible memories.  Not in the least.  However, once we've had a chance to work through things, we do need to put them behind us.  The forgetting I'm mainly thinking of, though, is the forgetting of the little things.  If you remember every bad thing and every good thing a person's ever said do you or done to you, you probably won't like that person.  Not because they are necessarily bad, but because forgetting the little bad things leaves room to remember all the little good things.  Forgetting all the little bad moments of life leave a memoryscape with more hills than valleys.  We could all stand to be a little more positive.
I think there's a House episode about that...