Song 183: “Pinball Wizard” by the Who, part 1: Always Playing Clean

Andrew Hickey· Host0:00

[singing] A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, by Andrew Hickey. Song 183, Pinball Wizard by The Who. Part one, always playing clean. Before we begin, this episode contains some mention of child abuse, drug use, and physical violence. One of the things that people often get wrong is how memory works. Thanks partly to our own intuitions and partly to the work of Sigmund Freud, who of course attempted to get the study of the human mind onto something like a modern scientific basis, but whose work when compared to current psychology and neurology is roughly equivalent to pitting Aristotle's conception of physics against the latest results from the Large Hadron Collider. We think and act as if our memories are accurate records of what's happened to us, that when we remember things, it's as if we're looking over a video recording of the events that happened. We now know, though, that this isn't how memory works. You don't store a recording of what happened and leave it there untouched until you come to think of it again. Rather, very quickly after a memory is formed, it starts to degrade. You lose details. But if you think of it again, you fill in the missing details as if you're remembering them. Then next time you remember the event, you remember those filled in details as if they're part of the original memory. Every time you think of something,