The Jukebox In Your Mind

[Storm.3.1.14]

  Last week, while digging through one of the storage trunks in my attic, I came across a shoebox full of compact discs. These had not seen the light of day in almost 7 years! Tingling with nostalgia, I dusted off the box and secured it on the passenger seat of my truck. I pulled a plastic jewel case from atop the stack, and I instantly recognized the artwork to the last-ever album by one of my favorite artists, who stopped making music in the 1990s. I cranked up the engine, headed out to find a long and winding country road, and I slipped the music disc into the smile-like slot-thingy in the dash.

  Now, I hadn’t actually heard the songs on this disc in about 7 years, but when the music started,   I instantly remembered the essence of the entire album! As the songs played, one after the other, I was automatically able to call forth every word of the lyrics to each song. Notes, melodies, guitar riffs, background vocals, lyrics…every second of the album was reborn in my head. What had once been hibernating was instantly waking up in my mind, and coming alive for me…vivid and bright, as if by magic!

  The human memory is a remarkable thing, huh?

  I got to wondering about how our brains can memorize entire albums full of poems (song lyrics), and can recall every single word of all that text, even after years and years and years. Well, it turns out that the musical notes of a song stimulate a select set of neural pathways that are totally different from the other pathways that store other types of memories, such as places and faces. The notes and melodies and lyrics of a song get “bundled together“ in our minds as a specialized unit of memory, and are strongly “encoded” to one another. This is why, when you hear lyrics being spoken, you can instantly hear the music that your brain expects to hear accompany it. And, when you hear an instrumental version of a song, your brain automatically supplies the missing words (and you start singing to yourself in the elevator).

  Because they are encoded in our brains in this unique and specific way,   it’s highly unlikely that any of us can   ever truly forget a familiar song, even after not hearing it for a decade. 

  Funny how cigarettes work in much the same way. 

  So, we smoked for 10 years, right? For 20 years? For 30 years? For 40 or 50? 20 times a day. 30 times. 60 times. Over the course of so much incessant repetition, cigarette-smoking got memorized. How? Well, the nicotine in those cigarettes stimulated very specific “more, more, more” nerves in our brains, and the more and more and more we smoked, all that nicotine hijacked more and more of these nerves. Nicotine “recorded” our smoking cycle onto our receptor nerves, and our years of addiction got “pressed” onto our brains, like the grooves that get stamped onto a vinyl record. Smoking got repeated a looping tape. Lasered onto a spinning disc. Craves and urges, and flashbacks, “phantom smoke” smells, and seasonal cues all live within these grooves inside us, and can be fully recalled by any number of things from our daily lives  : the smell of coffee, a rainy day, driving a car, tasting beer, a long phone call, an argument, seeing someone smoke on TV…just like every stanza of a song’s lyrics gets recalled in your memory, by just hearing the first set of notes from the piano.

  Now, I’m not a neuroscientist, but I do comprehend that nicotine commandeers specific nerves in the brain, and I believe that the encoded smoking memories inside us will never be fully forgotten. Never be wiped out completely. 

  Never be   cured.

  So, we’re doomed, right? Doomed to feel hungry in our heads, for the rest of our lives? Because we’re hardwired to crave a puff? Because we’re permanently programmed to smoke?

   NO WAY! That’s absolutely  not what recovery is about! 

  See, once we stop habitually using cigarettes every waking hour of the day, the neural pathways that cigarettes and nicotine burned through our brains…well…they get “cold”. As they go unused, they shrivel and fade, they droop and get weaker, and get sluggish, and go dormant. These addicted pathways will not always be sizzling and crackling, like a red-hot wire shooting sparks into the meat of our brains. No, my friends  : The hope - and the truth! - for us is that all of it really does get better with time! The triggers get toothless, the urges get dull, the flashbacks get foggy, the compulsive voices turn to feeble echoes. As our healing strengthens, it intensifies enough to U-turn our lives back to a state of normal living that’s more closely like that of someone who was never hooked on smoking at all.

  You just have to hold on long enough to reverse it for yourself.

  (And, to not sing and dance to the broken record in your head, every time you hear that ol’ familiar tune.)

   STORM: 1,000+

   (Extra-Credit Homework  :   Smokers’ Brains Change In Response To High Levels Of Nicotine )