Home at Last

I'm back! Last night I arrived at a temporary guest apartment in Taiwan where I will spend the next few days. I was on the road and flying the skies for about 29 hours.... blissfully short when you recall how earlier generations had to travel by sea! Though the flight was cramped and uncomfortable in economy class as usual, amazingly I actually managed to sleep a few hours.

Speaking of sleep, last night I slept soundly from about 10:30pm to 1:30 am... after that I was wide awake the rest of the night! Now, after a four hour nap this afternoon, I should be good to go until the wee hours tomorrow morning.... Jet lag is so fun. 

Best Investment Made for this Trip: A noise-reducing stereo headset. It really came in handy with a crying baby directly behind me during the first leg of my flight to San Fran! Hardly noticed him.

Worst Investment (in a good way): All the time spend pre-packing and meticulously weighing my 4 check-in overweight bags and two carry-ons. I had it all figured out to fork out an extra $400 to check my luggage (as it turned out at the counter it should have been $450 as the scale at the regional airport was apparently slightly different than the one at Dulles International), but the customer assistance at the check-in counter was apathetic and indifferent. 

Almost everything is done electronically these days. After the check-in computer console told me to speak to an attendant for customer service, the first attendant merely told me to use the computer and walked away for a break. The second lady seemingly pulled a dollar amount randomly out of the air. When I told her what I thought it should have been she merely responded "Do you want me to charge you more?" So now I'm grateful for an extra $130 I can spend somewhere else! 

Worst (Potential) Loss: The bag which holds my new hardly-used Acer laptop and Canon Digital Camera which hasn't appeared yet.  Hopefully it will make it down in the next few days. Praise God this is the only out of the four that I didn't need to pull something out of for the weeks ahead... I won't be needing any winter clothes when the temperature is in the upper nineties, or any books for pleasure reading while I study Taiwanese intensively for 4 weeks and look for a new apartment! Two Canadian co-workers told me last night that 4 of their 9 bags didn't make it with them on the same plane.

Remembering Words for where They Were Printed on the Page

Have you ever remembered something you read by recalling and then fanning back in your book to where it was located on the printed page (left page, right page, how far down)? My father and I both do this.

Knowledge of the space around us is central to our behavior, and so we learn to focus our attention in order to remember things and learn our way around. The Greeks had a technique described by Cicero in 55 B.C. of remembering words by picturing the rooms of a house, associating words with each room, and then mentally walking through the rooms in the right order.

Spatial memory is the scientific term concerned with finding one's way around in space. In our hippocampus is something called a spatial map: a cognitive map which internally represents the external environment.

Our brains do not have a sensory organ dedicated to space. So they must combine inputs from several different sensory inputs to generate a complete internal representation. it does this in many areas and many ways, different for men and women.  Brain imaging shows the brains of men and women light up in different areas as they think about space! (In Search Of Memory, pp. 307-316)

Putting Humpty-Dumpty Back Together Again

In relation to my last post, when different aspects of sensual perceptions are reconstructed, where exactly in the brain are they integrated? What strategy does the brain use to read itself out?  For example, if all the visual areas report to a single master cortical area, who or what does that single area report to?  Who is 'looking' at the visual image provided by that master area?" Kandel explains that there is no single cortical area to which all other cortical areas report exclusively, either in the visual or in any other system.   .. This question, which is central to the unitary nature of conscious experience, remains one of the many unresolved mysteries of the new science of mind. 304

The Brains of Birds and Taxi Drivers

In his treatment of spacial memory, Kandel moves into a fascinating discusson of how space is represented in the hippocampus of the brain. "The spatial memory of environments has a prominent internal representation in the hippocampus. This is evident even anatomically. Birds in which spatial memory is particularly important-- those that store food at a large number of sites, for example-- have a larger hippocampus than other birds.... London taxi drivers are another case in point... Functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed that after two years of [rigorous orientation] to the streets of the city, London taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus than other persons the same age." 306

Your Genes and Your Memory

 

Since my last post on Eric Kandel's In Search of Memory regarding the cellular neurobiology of the brain, I've continued to follow Kandel's discussion as he moves into molecular biology and the role which genes play in memory formation. Kandel draws three fascinating conclusions: 1) Activating long-term memory requires the switching on of genes. 2) To switch on these genes, one kind of protein must be activated and another kind, which suppresses memory-enhancing genes, must be turned off: "The fact that  a gene must be switched on to form long-term memory shows clearly that genes are not simply determinants of behavior but are also responsive to envirnonment stimulation, such as learning." There is a biological constraint on what experiences get stored in memory. (3) The growth and maintenance of new synaptic terminals makes memory persist. "Therefore, to rephrase Kandel, if you remember later anything of this post, it will be because your brain is slightly different after you have finished reading it." 276