Parallel search

Last night, I was in my room when I happened to remember the scene in "Stewie: The Untold Story" where Stewie from the future invited a girl over to his apartment, and now the girl wants to have sex with him, but he is scared and doesn't want to go into the room, and baby Stewie is ordering him to go in there and DO IT! Funny scene.

Anyway, I then tried to remember where had I watched this movie from, and I couldn't figure it out at first. "Netflix? Hulu? Redbox? Movie theater? Happened to start watching it in someone else's living room?" None of those options matched, so then I tried harder to remember, and then I found the answer: "It's on my hard drive! That's why I watched it several times, too!"

I was surprised I didn't figure that out since the beginning, though, because I don't have that many sources to watch movies from. So I pondered on what had gone wrong with my initial memory search, and I tried to remap what had just happened inside my knowledge retrieval system. Well, for once, I had not eaten much that day, and I felt my thought processes being considerably more sluggish than usual. As a plus, though, I think that same slowness allowed me to figure out what had happened more easily.

The feeling I had when I tried to remember was that of a parallel search. I asked myself the question: "Where did I watch the movie where Stewie travels into the future?", and then answers simply popped up into my consciousness, simple as that. "Netflix: No". "Hulu: No". "Redbox: No". "Movie theater: No". I don't recall a conscious effort to retrieve the distinct options - they just came to me. It was as if retrieval signals were sent towards the areas of my memory of when I had watched movies, and the one that matched the movie I was looking for would return the correct answer. A parallel, asynchronous search.

The option "Hard Drive" didn't show up, though. What happened to that option? Did I not send a retrieval signal in the direction of my hard drive movie-watching memories? Or were they just too distant/faded at that time? (It's been a while since I've watched movies from my hard drive). Maybe my partial-lack-of-food weakness caused my memory to not use up much energy for a task so trivial.

In any case, I thought about it for a fairly long time, and I felt urged to write what I had felt, so here it is. It's quite interesting to even think about brain processes, in any case.