Back me up.

I forget what this essay is about. You'll have to read it and let me know.

Earlier this summer, I bought myself a 22 TB hard drive. In fact, I bought two of them. I’d gotten kind of paranoid about all the different places that my digital stuff was being stored, and I thought it would be good to have it backed up in at least one place.

A few weeks earlier, I thought I had accidentally deleted a huge chunk of my Dropbox folder and almost lost my digital mind and all of its thousands of files and pictures, so I wanted to have a nice little hard drive I could put under my pillow to help me sleep better at night.

Anyway, 22 TB is an insane amount of storage. It’s basically double the amount of books that are in the Library of Congress. If I stored only music on it, I could play different songs, never repeating, for 41 years. Or if I stored movies on it, I could store enough to binge-watch Bollywood movies nonstop for almost a year.

So it’s a lot.

In fact, it’s come to make me feel like a billionaire who never needs to delete anything I ever make, write, find, watch, or listen to. I can have it all! (Mwahaahaha.) There’s always going to be plenty of room on my enormous drive. When I say ‘enormous,’ it’s physically just the size of a Stephen King novel or a box of Duncan Hines cake mix.

The thing about this humongous drive is that the more stuff I put on my digital safe deposit box, the slower it is to retrieve it.

And that made me think about my own brain. My skull has been filling with data for 66 years. (The first hard drive came out a few years before I did, held 5 MB, and weighed a ton.) And today it’s pretty full. Sometimes it takes a long time to retrieve information, and sometimes it crashes.

I’m sure you’ve had those wonderful moments when you’re at a dinner party, scratching your head to remember the stars of Hill Street Blues or Gerald Ford’s VP. We’re like old phones that no longer get operating system updates. All those crucial memories lost in our spam folders.

Usually it’s funny. Sometimes it’s scary. We don’t want to end up in a memory care facility because we can’t remember who won the World Series in 2008.

Sometimes I wake up at 3:00 in the morning, and I know that my brain is half unplugged. I’ll try to test it by recalling things like all the justices on the Supreme Court or the cast of The Breakfast Club or the seven deadly sins. The next morning at breakfast, they’ll all cascade into my cerebral inbox, and I’ll wonder how I ever forgot.

Are files being compressed in my skull and then unzipped? Is that what takes a long time? Or is it like the fluctuations I get in my internet service, where sometimes I have a really great wifi and other times my Zoom calls look like they’re beaming from 2003? Why are there some memories that have passwords that I’ll never remember, and why are some memories just not there, deleted?

I googled around a little, and I think I understand it better now. I’d better tell you quickly because I’m not sure I’ll remember it for long.

One much-repeated estimate says the human brain holds about 2.5 petabytes of memory. A petabyte is 1,000 terabytes, so my brain is roughly 114 of those drives in my closet, or something like 225 Libraries of Congress. Still, I can barely remember the last chapter of the novel I’m reading.

Then I came upon one Michael Ramscar, a scientist at the University of Tübingen. In 2014, he and his team announced that older brains slow down for one reason: they’re full. I know a lot more than I did at 20, so when I look for a factoid, my mental librarians have more stacks to search. Older people, Ramscar said, simply have more in their heads.

Plenty of other scientists quibbled. A slower brain might also just be a slower brain, they said, and one study wasn’t going to overturn a hundred years of research.

I’m siding with Ramscar. He’s telling me exactly what I want to hear. Forget the rest.

When my mother-in-law Margie was in her final decline (after she’d had multiple strokes that had left her brain like Swiss cheese), she was still able to remember exactly what happened on Pearl Harbor Day, 1941 — she came down to show off her tap dancing and the grown-ups were all gathered around the radio and snapped at her to be quiet. It was an offense she never forgot, even into her mid-90s.

There are a lot of things that I can recall quite vividly from my childhood, but there are many more things I don’t remember at all. Apparently, the reason for that is that our brains form well-worn paths that lead to these stories we’ve told a hundred times. It’s kind of like a file that you’ve opened on your desktop and bookmarked or pinned so that you can access it over and over again. It’s instantly opened. It’s not lost deep in your hard drives.

Memories are like that too, where you can easily access things because you’ve accessed them lots of times before. But sometimes those greatest hits of memory get dog-eared and distorted, like Xeroxes of Xeroxes of Xeroxes, losing details and just being generally scratchy and low-resolution.

Anyway, all of this has helped me understand my 22 TB hard drive better, and my 2.5 PB head drive too. I have a new appreciation for the wonder of my body and the value of getting older and having so much experience and so much information. Now I feel like spending more time trying to remember some of those old things so that I can build faster pathways to those memories.

It makes me think of last year’s Sketchbook Skool course, “Your Illustrated Life,” in which we made our sketchbook memoirs. People brought up incredible stories from their pasts and illustrated them, and in the process, kept uncovering more and more memories that unfolded from them, memories cascading out of memories. That’s what happens when you think hard and deeply about your past.

Journaling helps me process the more recent past too. I sit down every night before I go to bed and I just write down a paragraph or two about what I did that day. Last night I wrote about how we went to see a throwback screening of An American Werewolf in London. None of us remembered how funny it was, but I recalled Griffin Dunne as the rotting corpse, and my friend Amy remembered the male nudity. Arooo!

Your pal,
Danny

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P.S. I received more than 200 emails about my damned pen last week. I don’t know how everybody knew so much about Tom, but you’ll be glad to know his cap has been restored, and I’m using him to write this essay. He sends his deep appreciation.