Something human
Walking in the city yesterday evening, I passed LuAnne’s Wild Ginger and inevitably thought of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. LuAnne’s, an unremarkable plant-based Asian restaurant, means relatively little to me except that it’s where Mary and I were eating dinner one night in 2020 when I got notification of Ginsburg’s death. Now when I pass LuAnne’s, both Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn locations, RBG comes to mind.
We all have these funny associations. If I’m ever reminded of astigmatism, I think of a specific friend-of-a-childhood-friend and her telling of why she needed glasses over breakfast at a sleepover party over 20 years ago. The word meat makes me think of a former colleague’s kid who once said the word in a very cute way while describing what he ate for lunch. I could go on.
These connections form through a process described simply by the neurobiology saying, When neurons fire together, they wire together. And with repeated firing and wiring, the neurons become clusters called neural nets. As a therapist-in-training, I’m most focused on the neural nets, or associations and memories, that cause people distress. But as a regular person in the world, I am delighted by the thought that we all contain countless idiosyncratic mental connections which serve as proof of our uniquely human subjectivity.