Still, one could hold to what science had learned; and admit that reality at the quantum level behaved in ways that were simply outrageous at the level of human senses and ordinary experience. They had had three hundred years to get used to that, and eventually they had somehow to incorporate this knowledge into their worldviews, and forge on. Sax would have indeed said that he was comfortable with the familiar quantum paradoxes; things at the microscale were bizarre but explicable, quantifiable or at least describable, using complex numbers, Riemannian geometry, and all the rest of the armatures of the appropriate branches of mathematics. Finding such stuff in the very workings of the brain should have been no surprise at all. Indeed, compared to things like human history or psychology or culture, it was even somehow comforting. It was only quantum mechanics after all. Something that could be modeled by mathematics. And that was saying something.

So. At an extremely fine level of structure in the brain, much of one’s past was contained, encoded in a unique complex network of synapses, microtubules, dimers and vicinal water and amino-acid chains, all small enough and near enough together to have quantum effects on each other. Patterns of quantum fluctuation, diverging and collapsing; this was consciousness. And the patterns were clearly held or generated in specific parts of the brain; they were the result of a physical structure articulated on many levels. The hippocampus, for instance, was critically important, especially the dentate gyrus region and the perforant pathway nerves that led to it. And the hippocampus was extremely sensitive to action in the limbic system, directly underneath it in the brain; and the limbic system was in many ways the seat of the emotions, what the ancients would have called the heart. Thus the emotional charge of an event had much to do with how fully it was laid out in the memory. Things happened, and the consciousness witnessed or experienced them, and inevitably a great deal of this experienced changed the brain, and became part of it forever; particularly the events heightened by emotion. This description seemed right to Sax; what he had felt most he remembered best— or forgot most assiduously, as certain experiments suggested, with an unconscious constant effort that was not true forgetting at all, but repression.