Thomas Edison's "Little People"

Can't remember your dreams from last night?  Neither can I.  Are we getting Alzheimer's, or is something else going on?  One of America's greatest inventors had an unconventional explanation for memory loss.

Thomas Alva Edison -- yeah, the light bulb guy -- possibly walked the ragged edge that separates genus from madness.  This is best shown in his insistence that little people lived inside of your brain.  They weren't in your brain for their jollies.  They were in there to work in recording your memories.  This is from his diaries:

"We do not remember.  A certain group of our little people do this for us.  They live in that part of the brain which has become known as 'the fold of Broca.'...There may be twelve or fifteen shifts that change about and are on duty at different times like men in a factory....Therefore it seems likely that remembering a thing is a matter of getting in touch with the shift that was on duty when the recording was done."

Don't believe me?  Look it up for yourself in The Dairy and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison (Greenwood Press; 1968.)  It is possible that Edison was just goofing around but he was not really known as a "just goofing around" guy.  Although in another part of his diary in 1885, Edison takes the credit for the power of his memory (well, his IMPLIED memory, anyway):

"Waited one hour for the appearance of a lawyer who is to cross-examine me on events that occurred 11 years ago.  Went on stand at 11:30.  He handed me a piece of paper with some figures on it, not another mark, asked in a childlike voice if these were my figures, what they were about and what day 11 years ago I made them.  This implied compliment to the splendor of my memory was at first so pleasing to my vanity that I tried every means to trap my memory into stating just what he wanted.  But then I thought what good is a compliment from a 10-cent lawyer and waived back my recollection..."

So if you forget your dreams in the morning, it's not your fault -- it's the fault of the dude on duty.  I wonder if Thomas Edison thought if the workers in his Broca's area looked like himself.  I also wonder if he dreamt about these little people and had arguments with them when he forgot things.  Did these little people ever unionize?  Personally, I don't blame Edison for his "little people" description.  Dreams can be so powerful that you can easily believe that somehow someone gets in your head (literally as well as metaphorically.)