YOU’VE perhaps suspected there’s more to Daniel O’Donnell than meets the eye. And you would be right. Yet, before we explore O’Donnell’s cosmic symbiosis with one of the most astonishing scientific discoveries of all time, we should spark up the old neurones with a context-setting, classic thought experiment: does a falling tree make a sound if there’s nothing around to hear it?

Well, of course it does. Although all things from ants to elephants hear vastly differing frequencies, the objective reality of sound existed long before sensory organs evolved to detect it. Trees will continue to fall with a crack and thud long after our brief, torrid stewardship of this planet is over.

Yet, what if the person who observed that falling tree lacked the ability to form memories? Certainly, they’d have no frame of reference to comprehend a tree. And without memory, stuck inside an eternal millisecond, that person would also have zero awareness of their own conciousness. Time would simply cease to exist, melting away like a Dali clock. A perceivable reality would simply not exist. Life would be indistinguishable from death. No trees would ever fall.

It’s a truth staggering in its obviousness. That each creature on this planet – in the universe, perhaps – is only able to exist, function and evolve due to their brain’s ability to store information. And thanks to a revelatory new discovery, many scientists now believe cerebral stickiness didn’t actually co-evolve with the brain, as once presumed.

It now looks likely that all consciousness is simply the result of an ancient viral infection – one we, thankfully, can’t shake off. And although this mysterious affliction remains incurable, it is no longer undetectable.

Great story, Arc

GENETICISTS recently studying ‘Arc’– a gene active within our neurons and understood to be responsible for forming and retaining memory – weren’t quite prepared for what they discovered. It seems special proteins created by Arc do something astonishing – they shape themselves into the unmistakable Hellraiser “Pinhead” shape of a virus.

The genetic evidence strongly suggests this mysterious organism first infected a common ancestor of ours around 400 million years ago and, apparently, completely altered its primitive brain.

By transmitting genetic code through its RNA, the virus actually gave this pre-dinosaur organism and its descendants the same gift I got on Christmas morning 1992 on VHS – Total Recall. Over millions of years, this new ability gave rise to consciousness itself. And, eventually, you and I.

It’s certainly a disturbing and novel spin on the origin of our acute self-awareness, perhaps confirming once and for all that we are not so special as a species. It’s quite likely we are simply durable skin bags, built by nature to safely incubate and transport viruses. If we are indeed just drone mules gifted a small degree of universal awareness by the viral occupants of our brains, at least we mutually benefit by such co-dependence by being aware of our three score and ten blink-in-the-eye-of-infinity wee existences.

It’s certainly unarguable that the evolutionary advantage of being able to form memories eventually led some curious apes to launch steel phalluses towards the moon – and also creating the medium you’re reading these words on. It also allowed these apes to work out they were on a spherical rock that was spinning around a nuclear furnace in the middle of infinity.

That said, it’s possible that human scientific endeavour itself is simply the ancient virus attempting to understand itself by evolving brains of the organisms it has infected. It did come first, after all.

An enlightened voice

IF memory is indeed a virus, what does this mean for we egotistical humans who have historically believed ourselves a cut above the rest of the species on this planet? Certainly, many enlightened members of our tribe have tried to tell us over the years that the miracle of memory is key to solving the mysteries of consciousness and the human condition.

The first known study of memory was Aristotle’s treatise “On The Soul”, the title of which might also be the first known instance of irony. The philosopher’s then-heretical musings suggested we humans are simply blank slates, not animated by any magical eternal soul, there was no afterlife and we are simply the sum of our experiences. Aristotle wasn’t invited to many parties.

Although countless philosophers and intellectuals have come and gone since his death 2000 years ago, few humans have advanced Aristotle’s studious musings on the enigma of memory and true nature of reality more than Irish singer Daniel O’Donnell.

Although his work is often dismissed by accepted mainstream perception as offensively featherweight easy-listening, serious academic study of O’Donnell’s remarkable oeuvre exposes a rich wealth of philosophical truisms and florid accounts of how memory has the power to set us free yet, ultimately, cages us.

On record, the Irishman’s towering intellect and acute sensitivity to the human condition hides in plain sight. Perhaps only upon his passing will be realise we were blessed to exist in the same spacetime as this scientist of the human heart – one who dedicated his life to exploring the enigma of memory.

“Remember You’re Mine”, “Remember Me”, “Last Thing On My Mind”, “Don’t Forget to Remember” and the ingenious “I Forgot To Remember To Forget” are clearly all evergreen roadmaps for the soul, yet, such an obvious obsession with memory suggests that the Arc gene may be stronger in luminaries such as O’Donnell and Aristotle than the rest of us – the virus perhaps using such enlightened vessels to elevate the entire human collective consciousness and evolve us all into transdimensional orbs made of pure light. 

Perhaps instead of a tree falling, the classic thought experiment should ask: does a Daniel O’Donnell album make a sound if no-one is around to hear it play? And, this time, the answer would certainly be no.

For surely, only human ears could ever empathise with the great truths exposed by O’Donnell, whose entire 56-album body of work exists as one long bittersweet ode to mortality and the imprint of memories upon our finite existence. The singer often falls back upon the truism that we’re only truly gone when those who remember us die themselves, but there’s surely room within O’Donnell’s defiant optimism to also consider one other possibilty – that the immortal virus that granted us conciousness may also be capable of remembering its long lineage of mortal hosts. And thus, we live on forever.

And finally ...

APPLICATION of the scientific method may not always be immediately apparent within O’Donnell’s lyrics, yet repeated listening reveals an abiding obsession with the processes of the natural world. His hymn to the epic scope of geological time, “My Donegal Shore” perfectly illustrates this infatuation, an evocative work inspired by the wealth of ancient biodiversity on the western Irish coastline, where the Atlantic has thrown up many exotic fossils, flora and fauna.

That O’Donnell has found a meeting point between intellectual prowess and strong religious faith is to his credit. Not many believers in divine creation are sympathetic to suggestions that their inner worlds are simply illusions projected by a 400 million year old virus burrowed deep inside their brains.

Yet, mere secular laymen can perhaps never truly understand what quells the contradictions warring within such a unique, quicksilver mind as O’Donnell’s.

All answers are perhaps found within the work itself, abundant with analogy for O’Donnell’s highwire balancing act on the tightrope between faith and science.

Certainly, “The Time That God Sends” lends itself better to a chorus than “A Prehistoric Virus Infected Us With A Limited Frequency Of Consciousness Within A Finite Slice Of Spacetime”.

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