Lecture: Dianetic Auditing And The Mind (1966)

I know, it’s fashionable for the newspapers to say I never went to college, and there are several colleges at this particular time that are wishing that I hadn’t gone there. But I can also assure you that you give them another decade or so, those colleges I haven’t even done more than go to a prom at will have some plates on them. You know? Man is silly, you see?

Anyway, in college we were taking atomic molecular phenomena, which is a very interesting subject. And they should have left it there as a toy subject and shouldn’t have gone any further with it, because out of that subject came the atomic bomb. Now, it’s originally called atomic molecular phenomena. Well, they narrowed the subject down and made it very compressed and highly specialized and called it nuclear physics. And today, why, people get degrees in nuclear physics and go out with aplomb to blow human beings all to pieces because politicians don’t know how to handle governments.

Now, the whole subject of the human mind was so unknown, so bedazzled and mucked about, people hardly even knew there was a mind. You find Mary Baker Eddy saying, “All is mind, infinite mind.” Well, we’re into a problem in semantics, meaning the meaning of words. She was using mind in some other connotation and so on. She thought the universe was a big think. Fortunately it’s not. We’re here. A lot of think but there’s also us. No criticism of her. She was trying like everybody else.

So, this thing called the engram came from a theory I developed while I was in George Washington University. And it was an interesting theory because man had no explanation for the storage of thought. But if you consider–now hold your hat because this is typical scientific think, see; some theory to embrace the phenomena. Now, if memory is contained in a molecule, there are ten to the twenty-first power binary digits of molecules in the brain, in the neuron system. Yes, ten to the twenty-first power binary digits.

Now, what a binary digit is, I’ve forgotten. You know as well as I do. I knew once, but I don’t know anymore. Binaries to me–you see, I’ve been in navigation since and they’re the two suns that go around each other and make a dumbbell sort of star. You see, I didn’t know what it is.

Well anyhow, I know it’s a long figure. And if there were a hundred holes in each molecule–see, this figure is something you just go on writing for a day or two, you see, or weeks–and if there were a hundred holes in each one of these molecules, and there was one memory in each hole, why, man, by calculation then of the number of things observed and remembered, and by actual inspection of man’s memory, man had enough memory storage to last him three months. And although this may not be true for psychologists, psychiatrists or many professors, there are those who can remember further back than three months.

So I wrote this up as a proof that this wasn’t how man remembered. In I think 19 – oh, I don’t know when it was, 1936, some five, six years later, something like that, this was issued in Austria (from Vienna, where else?) as the way man remembered. So, man is so scarce on data that he will even buy ways people have proved man doesn’t remember in order to explain the mind and memory.¹

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