Besides headaches, Murphy experienced all sorts of other symptoms over the next few days, including drowsiness, slower reactions, and cravings for sweets.
He felt as though The Lion King was playing in his head every day. Now it wasn't just the dialogue—he felt that if someone gave him a pen, he could draw the entire film from beginning to end.
"In short, these are all consequences of increased neural connections," Omid Abbott explained.
"Just recalling a film I watched in the past created that many neural connections?" Murphy was skeptical. "Then shouldn't your heads have burst long ago, with all the papers you read every day?"
Murphy hadn't mentioned The Lion King, only given a rough explanation of what he had experienced.
Omid thought for a moment, then said, "I can explain this from two angles."
"First, the amount of information you obtained through Total Recall may be much greater than that contained in a few papers."
"How so?"
"Our brains are extremely clever. The amount of information we encounter every day is unimaginably large. Take visual information, for example. Our eyes have extremely high resolution—equivalent to hundreds of millions of pixels—and our ability to perceive motion approaches thirty frames per second. In terms of bytes, visual information alone feeds more than fifteen gigabytes of data into our brains every second."
"Over the course of a day, that adds up to more than six hundred petabytes of data."
"Our brains don't actually process all that information. Instead, their attention mechanisms select only certain parts that require particular attention for processing, leaving the vast majority untouched. We form memories by associating useful information with information we already know, and the amount ultimately retained in memory is far smaller still."
"Because of this method of storing memories, most of what we retain