[THIRD PERSON]

"Alright, Jim. It's getting well past the time I'm supposed to stay, so I better get going." Amelia gave the man a sweet smile as she gathered her belongings, making sure as to not leave anything.

"Okay, Amelia. Thank you, for coming in today." The man, Jim, spoke in a gruff voice. He did his best to give the girl a nod, his neck brace limiting the movement of his neck.

   "I always come, Jim. I'd never forgive myself if I didn't." Amelia pointed with a comedic chuckle, before turning around and placing her hand on the door knob. Opening the large wooden door, she slipped out quietly, with the attempt to close it softly.

"We need a room for this patient! Stat! We're losing him!"

Amelia's head snapped to the multiple shouting doctors rushing through the tiled, lit hallway as they speed-wheeled a gurney. They rushed past her with diligence, and Amelia couldn't help but try to get a peek at the victim on the gurney.

In the mere seconds of the rush, and from what she caught, she couldn't really tell much. There were loads of burn marks and blood displayed everywhere. Although, she did notice his brown hair, messily strewn over a his head, glued by sweat.

With a sigh, Amelia gave the boy a mental prayer before continuing her walk to the receptionist's desk, where her friend Juley sat.

"Hey," Juley noticed the girl, glancing to her with a smile. "How's Jim today?"

  "He's doing well." She nodded, resting her forearms on the cold, disinfected counter. Amelia bit the inside of her cheek and tapped her pointer-finger nail on the ugly green marble, curiosity eating away at her.

"Have you- gotten anything on the new guy?" She cautiously asked, her eyes flickering to the hallway the doctors had just rushed him down. Amelia heard Juley sigh and their eyes met as she crossed her arms over her chest, looking to her computer screen.

  "Not much, unfortunately. Just- a first name and status report." She spoke, reading off of the screen. Amelia nodded, the information not quite quenching her thirst for more.

"So, what happened?" She wondered aloud.

"His name's Dylan. Car accident, it says." Juley shrugged. "Truck slammed into the back of his car, sending him to the center of an intersection, where-"

"Oh, god."

Amelia stood up straighter, her eyebrows furrowed at her friend. "What? What happened?"

  "He was t-boned by an 18-wheeler." Juley eased, biting her lip as she shook her head. "Poor kid."

Amelia softly nodded her head in agreement, slightly put off about the accident. The boy probably wasn't even thinking about the possibility of crashing at all; until someone shoved him in front of the giant truck.

"Aren't you usually headed to class by now?" Juley raised an eyebrow at Amelia, who froze at the realization. It wasn't more than two seconds later that Amelia was sprinting off through the automatic front doors of Meadow Mills Hospital.

☇

Amelia's breathing finally eased as she jogged through the doors of her classroom. She hurried to her seat, sitting down just in time for her professor to begin today's lecture.

"Since the earliest neurology work of Karl Lashley and Wilder Penfield in the '50s and '60s, it is clear that memories are not necessarily stored in just one part of our brain, but rather, are haphazardly distributed throughout the cortex. After consolidation, long-term memories are kept throughout the brain as groups of- neurons that are programmed to fire together in the same pattern that was created in the original experience, and each element of the memory is stored in the area that initiated it, such as groups of like emotions."

"Therefore, contrary to popular belief, memories are not stored in our brains like books on library shelves, but must be actively reconstructed. Welcome back students to your second term course in Psychology."

Amelia pulled open the cover of a new grey notebook, clicking her led pencil as she prepared to write notes. If Amelia Langdon was good at anything, it wasn't memorization. She needed to write anything she wanted to remember, such as notes for class, or the four things she needs at the local general store.

"The indications are that, in the absence of disorders due to trauma or brain disease, the human brain has the capacity to store almost unlimited amounts of knowledge indefinitely. Forgetting, therefore, is more like to be the result from incorrectly or incompletely encoded memories, and or problems with the recall or retrieval process. It is a common experience that we may try to remember something one moment and fail, but then remember that same item later. The information is therefore clearly in storage, but there may have been some kind of mismatch between retrieval ques and the original encoding of the information. "Lost" memories recalled with the aid of Psychotherapy or hypnosis are other examples supporting this idea, although it is difficult to be sure that such memories are real and not implanted by the treatment." The professor bellowed, slowly pacing behind the large desk at the front of the auditorium-like room. Amelia quickly scribbled down his words, thankful the man wasn't speaking at a much quicker speed than what her hand was writing.

"Having said that, though, it seems unlikely that, as Richard Schiffrin and others have claimed, ALL memories are stored somewhere in the brain, and that it is only in the retrieval process that irrelevant details are "fast-forwarded" over. It seems more likely that the memories which are stored are in some way edited and sorted, and that some of the more peripheral details are never stored."

As Amelia scribbled down the last few words, she looked up just in time to see another girl in the class raise her hand calmly.

   "Yes?" The professor pointed her out, nodding for her to speak.

"So, underlining the fact that all memories are stored, but can then again also be miss-coded, could memories be slightly altered? Perhaps to the point where someone could remember something that is somewhat or completely wrong?"

  The professor looked hard in thought for a moment, before clasping his hands behind his back.

"I assume something along those lines could happen. Memories could end up being "fused" together, altering them both completely to create one new false memory. After all, the brain is not perfect." He answered, making the girl give a small nod in understanding.

  Another boy raised his hand immediately after the professor finished speaking, making the professors turn. "Yes?"

"If the brain is imperfect, how can we trust of use any memory that we recall?" The boy pointed out. Other classmates looked in surprise, awaiting an answer as they looked to the professor. The man chuckled, simply smirking at the boy.

    "For the same reason you asked that question, son." He nodded.

"Because it's the only way we can learn."

[a/n]

hey, its me, back at it again with the edited chapters

love you