I, Memory

What if your eyes stored visual memory amid the layers of retinal ganglion cells, like your own miniaturized video camera?  It's said that everything we've experienced is filed in the brain, just not retrievable for most of us; could there be another storehouse residing in the neurons of the eye?  Every flash of vision snapshotted, the light aligning in patterns that could be replayed once the key unlocks the optic door of eye memory, making another subconscious realm of nerve endings, along with that of our intestinal and reflexive hand memories.

Why not just rely on the brain's repository of visual knowledge, necessary as it is to forming memory to begin with?  Imagine if the brain has shortcircuited, gone offline, is floating between worlds and that there was a way to access visual stimulation familiar and recognized, like going to the bank to refresh funds.  Could it ignite cerebral memory into response?  Right now there isn't any discovered mechanism in the body of the eye that goes beyond it being a tool for processing vision, but since other areas of our bodies are capable of non-brain memory, why not the sophisticated eye?

Neurons operating on electrical impulses line the retina, shooting off visual information to appropriate entities, but do they store any of it?  How long does it take for a photo flash to dissolve from a stunned retina? What of images of everyday?  Is information stored as if on film, layered on photoreceptors, not necessarily identified but there?  Say from the time you were little, an infant in the crib to now, everything that you have ever seen still existing in exquisite, microscopic pockets?

Perception plays tricks, some things aren't believed to have been seen or we just don't notice them.  How handy it would be to have an organic camera on board, we would be better witnesses for civilization than any traffic stop monitor.  But of course as with anybody's anything, there are always glitches and missing pieces that could still omit recording significant information.  No two people would see the same event exactly, just as fingerprints differ.

I have been reading overmuch lately; by nightfall, my eyes long to shut against the black squiggles on white paper.  They gratefully close in the dark, while the brain continues shuffling the deck of memory until the the cerebral cupboard door battens the hatches even while the cards still lay on the table.  Sleep is peaceful, perhaps the only time when.  Winter nights, early evenings, good, still night.