Our Memory – The episodic memory refers to events and developments in our personal lives. I go to the movies and watch a great movie. The following day I can tell my relatives at home what I saw, and I can discuss the plot with my friends two months later.

The interesting thing is that my account is a description with different details every time I tell the movie. My description has a new text every time I play it.

At each event when my senses pick up the information, they are forwarded to the hippocampal regions in the two temporal lobes. The hippocampus then takes care of dividing the various items of the recorded scenarios and distributes them across several areas of the cerebral cortex.

In the movie I watched I remember a young woman in a wheelchair, a red car and a rainy day. The hippocampus places these episodes near the regions where similar scenarios are filed. It was already the second movie I saw with a red car like that.

Of course, the brain work to memorize is more complex than my example with a nice movie, but it's enough for us to know what I wrote down and to think about interesting incidents "out-of-the-brain".

A Spiritual View - Two interesting phenomena are often described by patients I take care of (I am a neurologist). One is the "lucid dream" that occurs when the person dreams with a clear perception of the scene and its incidents, with the conscience informing that he is living a dream.

The second is the "out-of-body experiences". In falling asleep the patient says that he leaves the body and experiences involvement in different environments, be it at home, in a hospital, in a meeting with other Spirits, or in activities of relief to the needy.

The spiritual memory - The interesting thing in the reports, both of lucid dreams and of “out-of-body” experiences, are their mnemonic records, their memorization.

I have heard these patients say that perceptions are very sharp, alive, and perhaps because of the emotional intensity they cause, they remain in the memory with the same intensity as when they were experienced.

We have the impression that our experiences that reach the physical brain are fleeting, but those that take place within the level of the "spiritual body" (perispirit) are engraved by mechanisms that we do not yet know and remain with the same qualities and intensities forever.

New Perspectives - It is worth checking the memories in the sleepwalker trance and the hypnotic records, and how they behave after an emotional experience.

Homework - We learn in Spiritist lessons that the Spirit remembers the past with the same intensity as if it is living the episode in the present again. Neurology has intensely been developing the study of memory and, if we add the Spiritist knowledge to Neurology, a very interesting field of research is opened to confirm the existence of the so-called "extra-cerebral memory".

Color vision - There are three objects in front of me: a red apple, a black pen and a blue hummingbird. How can I see the color of each of them?

First, the light they reflect reaches my retina where they stimulate small nerve endings that we acknowledge as cones. Chemical reactions take place there and they produce an electric current that reaches the optic nerves. This current enters the brain in search of the occipital areas where specific regions are located to record the stimuli that came from each of my objects.

How will the three objects be "seen" by the brain?

They are here presented together in front of me, but in the brain they will not be kept in the same drawer. The key word in the brain is distribution. Each object will go to one place. And surprising findings have shown that the properties of each object will be fragmented and filed in specific locations.

Thus, as each object has different forms, its own colors, particular dimensions, movements and purposes, possibilities of being already known, each of these characteristics will mark groups of different neurons. More surprising still is that the image of my red apple is also filed in black and white in a certain place other than where it appears colored to me.

Theoretically, I can have independent access to each of these records and make independent associations with each apple resembling mine. In patients with epilepsy, at the time of a crisis, they may register the colorless apple, its dimensions, and whether it is far or near me.

For the pen, I have even an area to record the day I won it as a gift from my grandson; as for the hummingbird, in addition to its physical properties, which will also be fragmented and distributed by the brain, I have images of it flying in my yard.

Clairvoyance and clear-seeing - These are two excellent models to understand what is going on in the brains of mediums when they relate their visions of spirituality.

This mediumistic phenomenon is not the same visual phenomenon we report regarding the nerve pathways and the physical brain that we all use in this world through which we move.

It is popularly said that mediums "see with the eyes of the mind". Scientifically we know that it is the spiritual body (perispirit) that is capturing the images. Allan Kardec teaches that the Spirit obtains the properties of objects - more or less as we mentioned above about the fragmentation of objects that reach our vision. However, after the spiritual brain records it, we need to know what was seen. And from the perispirit to us, it is our brain that will have to be activated for our perception to proceed.

How does the perispirit transfer the information to the physical brain?

There is only one way: by distributing the characteristics of the objects so that the brain can understand what was seen on the other side of life.

How then does the medium see?

On the other side, in the spiritual dimension, there is an apple, a pen and a hummingbird - the same objects that served as examples in the physical field.

Seers and clairvoyants will see the various aspects separately. Thus mediumistic reports may differ as to whether or not there is color, location, movement, size, utility, to who did they belong, and previous experiences - each psychic can see only one or more of the fragments of information.

This reveals the complexity of the phenomenon of clairvoyance and especially of the degree of difficulty in accepting the reliability of his accounts.

Homework - Allan Kardec teaches that mediumship is a phenomenon that takes place through the brain of the medium.

(The interpretations I present here are only my suggestions for study - they are not in the doctrinal body of the Spiritist Doctrine).
 

Nubor Orlando Facure is a neurosurgeon physician and director of the Brain Institute of Campinas-SP. Former professor of Neurosurgery at Unicamp (University of Campinas), he is a writer and Spiritist speaker.