inside my brain

The title of this post is a line from the song, "Lush Life" that I'll be singing this weekend. It's one of those random phrases that we suddenly sing amid a whole bunch of wordless oos and ahs as back up to a soloist.

At this point, the week of the concert, I now have the whole concert memorized, with just a little hesitancy on two songs: "Day Dream," and "Satin Doll," where we sing back up, always the hardest to memorize. And I'll have no problem getting those down by the time of the dress rehearsal, Thursday.

But in taking on this memorization challenge, I've been fascinated by the idea of memory itself. How is it that I now have the words and music to an entire concert "inside my brain?" Where is it exactly? How is it that I can recall all those pitches and durations and words, not to mention movement, and reproduce it at will? I now have a whole lot of information inside my brain, literally part of me, that wasn't part of me four months ago. Was there empty memory space available? Did something else get moved out, that I now, by definition don't remember? Has my brain actually changed in some physical way? And does that physical change mean I'm not the same person I was?

Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice.