To me — maybe not to anyone else, but to me — there are two distinct kinds of memories, only one of which I really think of as a memory. When someone asks me if I remember something I generally reply in the negative unless I remember it in that one particular way. These two ways are: Plain Old Memories and Remembered Facts.

Plain Old Memories are things you can re-experience in your mind, maybe even evoke the scents and sensations of the moment. The tentative hold before you approach for your first kiss, the first time a girl you like smiles back at you, that night you started at a basement party and wound up dancing naked in the fountain. These memories are much less reliable than Remembered Facts, they’re so rooted in emotion and passion that over time they become little more than the emotions of the moment with a few sprinkled images and a healthy imagination to fill in the rest, but they’re so much more human than that second form of memory.

Remembered Facts are things you know happened to you, but they feel distant, like facts from a table you had to memorize at some point. As an example, at my fourth birthday party I had pizza. Something didn’t sit well and I got sick from it. I didn’t eat pizza again until I was in grade 6. I’m sure there was a point when that event felt real to me, but at this point I simply know that it happened. I know that it happened in exactly the same way that I know that World War 2 happened. I can attach emotion to it, but the emotion will never come from it. There’s an immutable distance to it. Do you remember it? No. You know it happened, but you don’t really remember it.

I always tell people I have a terrible memory and this is what I mean. So much of my youth is obscured by veil of abstraction, a dehumanizing wall that lets me know things happened but never re-experience the urgency of them. I know that many things have happened to me. But I don’t remember them in the way I think most people remember their personal histories.

I recently saw a commercial about using a supercomputer to analyse traffic flow and direct the traffic lights to reduce gridlock, but I know for a fact that traffic lights want gridlock. Every day when I drive home, I get stopped by nearly every light on the route. The light turns green and shortly after the one just down the road turns red; just in time to bring everyone that just made it through the last light to a halt. This is not an accident. It’s designed to slow people down. Slower drivers means fewer accidents. Which is a good thing, overall.

Of course, it has an unintended side-effect, one which likely increases the danger of accidents. Humans are resilient by nature, we tend not to give up easily. So when we come out of the gate looking to get something done, see the path closing ahead of us, however temporarily, we think “if only I got there a little bit faster.” And so we hit the gas a little harder, we push the pedal down a little farther, and we’re tens of a second away from rationalizing making it through the light. So we push a little harder, and finally we make it through. Human progress.

But as your speed increases, your likelihood of pushing through on a risky yellow also increases and your likelihood of getting in an accident (and a higher speed one at that) increases in kind. These gridlock inducing measures are designed with speed reduction in mind, but it inevitably leads to speed increases, and brakes getting hit a little harder each day, getting worn that much faster, leading to even more accidents. It’s a lose-lose scenario. I wish the people that programmed these lights understood that. Maybe the supercomputer will help with that.