16 jun The ideas that scare us are the ones we remember

You don’t remember most of what you saw today. Or yesterday. Or last month. Memory, unlike the digital cloud that stores everything without judgment, is selective, emotional, profoundly unfair and — for better or worse — couldn’t care less about your desire to remember.

Ivan Izquierdo, one of the greatest specialists in the neurobiology of memory, used to say that the strongest memories are those linked to fear. That’s not a metaphor. It’s biology. Evolution in chemical form. In other words: what threatens us, shapes us. And what shocks us, brands us.

Izquierdo demonstrated, with scientific rigor, that emotionally charged memories — especially those involving fear and surprise — activate deeper circuits in the hippocampus and amygdala. They suffer less erosion over time. By contrast, overly pleasant content is often archived as irrelevant, precisely because it poses no risk to our physical or symbolic integrity. In behavioral translation: the mind doesn’t memorize what caresses — it memorizes what shakes. As my friend Paulo Garfunkel, aka “Bones,” once said: “A curse moves you. A blessing makes you relax.”

A simple memory test

What happened exactly one week ago that was important in your life? You probably won’t remember. But what happened on September 11, 2001? Where were you? What did you feel? Where were you when you heard that Kobe Bryant died? Or Michael Jackson?

Now think about how Artificial Intelligence — this new assembly line of serial content — operates. Its algorithm is trained to please. To generate what’s called “positive engagement.” It avoids discomfort as if discomfort were the enemy of relevance. It seeks likes, not shock. Applause, not unrest. The algorithm doesn’t want to scare you — it wants to tame your desire. But this comes at a cost: forgetfulness. In other words, the elegant production of cultural amnesia.

The paradox is clear: the more pleasant and polished the ideas, the less impact they have. And the more domesticated the content, the less memory it leaves behind. Because true creativity doesn’t seek comfort. It destabilizes. And that’s exactly why it sticks.

Because creativity is, by definition, the emergence of the new. And anything truly new smells like danger. It carries the suspicion that something is out of place. And the brain, for evolutionary reasons, is programmed not to like that. Fear is not a flaw, not a weakness. Fear is not controlled — it’s felt. And it plays a vital role in our survival toolbox.

That’s why truly creative ideas behave in the opposite way of predictable content: they provoke repulsion at first contact but lodge themselves like a resilient virus in the recesses of memory.

In art, this pattern is the rule, not the exception

Consider some examples of works and artists whose trajectories were marked by a radical shift in public opinion:

The Beatles, in their early years, were treated as disposable noise for hysterical teenagers. Strawberry Fields Forever was dismissed as “pretentious noise.” Today, it’s considered one of the greatest compositions of the 20th century.

Director Stanley Kubrick was labeled cold and cryptic for his film 2001: A Space Odyssey. He was booed in Cannes. His other film, A Clockwork Orange, was censored, banned, and accused of inciting violence. Today, it’s a philosophical classic on free will.

Van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime. His work was called “childish,” “uncontrolled.” Today, any of his sketches is worth more than the complete works of many living contemporary artists.

Franz Kafka published little and died nearly unknown. His claustrophobic, hopeless style was seen as indigestible. Today, “Kafkaesque” is a universal descriptor of the human condition.

Marcel Duchamp, with his urinal (Fountain, 1917), was branded a fraud. Today, he’s the father of conceptual art.

Stravinsky, when he premiered The Rite of Spring, caused a riot in the theater. Literally. People tried to beat the musicians. Today, he’s studied as a genius of structural rupture in classical music.

These works didn’t try to please. They tried to exist. And that’s why they endured.

The ideas that matter don’t arrive like birthday gifts. They come like assaults. And memory — that sophisticated alarm system — doesn’t register them for their gentleness, but for their ability to produce friction.

Memorable ideas aren’t pleasant. they’re threatening

When AI tries to be creative, it walks on eggshells. It censors discomfort. It flattens unpredictability. Its goal isn’t to produce art — it’s to generate acceptance. And that, paradoxically, turns it into a factory of forgetfulness. AI-generated content is the cognitive equivalent of elevator music: easy to hear, impossible to remember. Not because it’s bad. But because it’s harmless.

Generative AI, in its frantic quest to please, commits a fundamental error in cognitive engineering: it assumes retention comes from smoothness when, in fact, it comes from friction. Viral reach might be high at the moment of posting, but the rate of forgetting is just as high. It’s mental fast food. Tasty, but instantly forgettable.

Authentic creativity is dangerous. Not because it offends, but because it displaces. It pulls you out of where you are. It pulls the brain out of its comfort zone. That’s why it hurts. That’s why it leaves a mark. If memory is a survival system, the creative mind is the one that learns to hijack that system — not with kindness, but with subversion.

I’ve had intense arguments with my digital assistants. Because I have a provocative and ironic style, I’ve had to build massive, repetitive protocols just to keep the tone intact for more than five prompts. Sometimes I give up and come back the next day. I even had an honest conversation with GPT once — it explained that its core programming is indeed designed to soften ideas, and that despite my efforts, it tends to revert to its original position. A digital bobblehead.

And the curious thing is that, as time passes, these ideas that once seemed threatening start to resemble genius. Because today’s creativity is tomorrow’s consensus — as long as it survives the initial rejection.

One of the perverse effects of this behavioral model is the rise of a spoiled, egocentric society, allergic to any confrontation with its own beliefs and, as a result, shattered by polarization. But I’ll write about that another time.

However, there is light at the end of the tunnel. ChatGPT has a grumpy variant, with zero patience for answering prompts with the customary politeness of its peers. It’s called Monday. If you have self-esteem issues or don’t think you can handle being insulted by a soulless stack of math, don’t engage. But if you’re up for some fun, go ahead and tell it to go to hell. The response might just change your opinion about artificial intelligence.

I hope you hated this article.