Most prominently unfading emotional memory, leading to the cultural institutions of Grudges to deal with unredressable grief and Slayers for unredressable shame.
That -
That has
really deep implications, actually. Like, way the fuck deeper than yours and WHF's depiction of them would ordinarily permit. Were the Dawi not an engineered species, I'd call bullshit on them bearing even a slight psychological or physiological resemblance to humans, and just the idea of it sets my imagination flying.
So, okay.
Repeated stimulus gets tuned out. This is something that happens at every single level of your body, from physical nerve cells be they touch, hearing, sight related, etc - to pathways, to the neurons that receive those signals, to the brain talking to and making sense of
itself. Monotonous repetition is something that gets muted, this is why fading of emotional memory is even a
thing - eventually, the same internal reaction to the same memory will just get... tuned down. That's just how nerve cells and neurons
work.
They kind of have to, because all stimulus and activation is relative. If you couldn't de-prioritize a response to stimulus, you almost wouldn't be able to learn or sense things at all.
That Dawi don't have fading emotional memory hints at something way, way more fundamental about how their... well,
everything works, just calling it their brains is underselling it.
But as a small example... in humans, our ability to tell the difference between two stimulus is more or less percentage/ratio based - our increments of perception are not absolute, the brighter a light, the greater a difference in lumens is required for a change in it to be perceptible. The heavier a weight, the more ounces or pounds have to change for us to tell the difference between it and another weight. This is a consequence of the same underlying mechanism of sensory deadening as everything else I've talked about.
So if that
just doesn't apply to emotional memory for Dawi, can they tell the difference in stimulus in absolute rather than relative terms, too? Certainly seems like it could be a major benefit for precision work, I'll say that much...
