#so bs and vs aren't really possible in their language

[therealandian]

so on one hand, i want to bring back binora and elaive into the space gays story, just for funsies. on the other hand, with the changes i've made to sturik anatomy, their names are not linguistically possible in their native tongues...

soooo guess i'm gonna have to rename them lol. zuru can at least stay the same

[with-my-murder-flute]

Yep! Quite likely. John says "I know where remembrance lives in the brain, and he won’t have any of it," but that's honestly kind of BS. There isn't one specific place memory lives in the brain. And I know Taz Muir knows that. (Also, because Gideon wasn't there for the final meltdown at the compound, John might have been a little bit more lazy with him than with any of the others.)

Harrow's memory wipe is said to be primarily in the temporal lobe, and it's honestly the most sensible way to do that. (She also specifically modded her language process with the ORTIS override.) The temporal lobe is mostly serves as the central clearinghouse by which memories are stored and retrieved. It's like the sorting room in a post office. Actual memory storage is in tiny bits and pieces all the hell over, so that memories of the same event are divided up and associated with the different senses and processes that were going on. Then it's mostly the temporal lobe that's tasked with keeping track of those index files, so to speak.

F'rex, if I smell something, the temporal lobe would play a big part in helping me tug on related memories, like the last time I smelled it, where I was, what I was doing, who I was with, and how I felt about them. But if the temporal lobe doesn't do its job, I might not be able to tug that network of memories, so I'd just know the scent is familiar, but not why or how.

So Harrow didn't and couldn't erase all her memories of Gideon; she just tried to delete the central index file marked "Gideon". But you can see how sloppy that is--she remembers the Ninth's reduced capacity for having babies, and remembers that there's one other person with a uterus in her generation, but then when she follows that lead to retrieve memories about that person, she hears that the "gideon" directory has been deleted, that she died as an infant.

The problem, as I understand it, with trying to track down the memory itself in a million little pigeonholes, is that one, it's really hard to know which particular neurons help me recall the smell of my grandmother's cooking vs the smell of a storebought pizza, and two, if you just try to go scorched earth and destroy everything then great, good job, I now have no understanding of what tons of smells even are, and you damaged a bunch of the free disk space onto which new scent memories might be written.

So I mean, Jod could sit there being an fMRI like Mercy does with Harrow, exposing people to various stimuli and seeing just what parts of the brain light up to track memory back to its source, but I'm not convinced he did. That would be the much tougher and more dangerous method; it's quite likely he just used Harrow's.

And if he did use Harrow's method, the memories themselves aren't necessarily lost; it's the ability to find them that is. Therefore it's totally possible that Pyrrha and other lyctors might have found or developed neural workarounds to help them connect the dots.

“What if I don’t like me?” [Nona] said. But Pyrrha didn’t seem to understand. “Well, you’ll probably start visiting clubs and trying to hit on the dancers, and going from relationship to relationship not really being able to commit.”

-Pyrrha Dve, unattainable MILF of the myriad