General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: My wife will get her meds [View all]tblue37
(65,342 posts)that is what Will's wife needed and couldn't get, so I conflated "drugs" and "insurance companies" to produce nonsense. Thanks for the correction.
This past weekend I kept doing something similar when trying to warn a friend that exposed fiberglass insulation in his basement could be dangerous to his cat. I KNOW that the insulation is fiberglass, but because in my mind the dangers of insulation are closely connected to the reasons why asbestos was outlawed in insulation, I kept referring to the insulation as asbestos rather than fiberglass--repeatedly, despite being corrected each time by my friend!
I have a similar issue when referring to or even thinking about my daughter and my youngest sister. Obviously memories about them are stored close together in my braine or tightly intertwined in some way, because I continually refer to them by the other's name AND by the wrong label (sister vs. daughter). Even more bizarre: I sometimes ask about or attempt to reference with one of them something that is known only to the other one! I momentarily forget that my 32-year-old daughter doesn't share the childhood memories I share with my 59-year-old sister.
I have long been interested in neuroscience, and this sort of cross-connection of memories and conflation of references to words or concepts that are not linked to each other, but that are independently linked to a third, separate though related, concept, strikes me as a clue to how memories are encoded in the brain. I wonder how much research is focused on such conflations.