I watched from my southern patio steps in Tucson. Perfectly framed in the southeastern early night sky between my Tombstone Rose and my Carob Tree.
Editing Memory
One of the weirdest things about memory is that every time a person remembers something, that memory is found, reconstituted for recall, and then recalled. A memory may seem like a pristine recollection but is not the original memory, it is a re-collection, a putting back together, of data. Changes to a memory happen. A […]
Dancing and Neuroplasticity
Memories are consolidated through activity that occurs in the hippocampus in the brain. Short term memories are processed into long term memories. Now there is evidence that physical activity such as dancing and endurance training both increase the volume of the hippocampus. That is right, movement impacts cognition… and memory. A recent systemic review of […]
Cultural Memory
Today my discussion moves from the physical to the cultural realms of memory. Like most discussions of memory involving multiple accounts of an event, there is no one agreed upon definition of memory beyond the individual. But clearly, information gained in the past is brought forward and shared via culture. In 1871 E. B. Tylor […]
Body Memory
The concept of body memory is a confusing one. The neural system and brain is usually considered to be distinct from the body. The blood brain barrier protects the brain from noisy and dangerous particles and extraneous information that regularly influences the components of our bodies at the cellular level. The essence of who we […]
Age and Memory
Common knowledge tells us that as we age that we likely will become forgetful. Some fortunate few people remain sharp as a tack as they near their hundredth birthday. These people are lucid and recall life events, places, and people. Types of Cognition and Memory But even so, they are using a type of cognitive […]