Memory all alone in the electrical brain light...

This week we continued our discussion of Whitrow's "What is Time".  Part one proved to be even more interesting as we took it apart as a class. I was surprise by how many people were irked by the statement about animals living in a continual present; apparently most pets show more of an understanding than Whitrow suggested?  Then we tested our speed-sketching and imaginations with "Win, Loose, or Draw Game"(?).  Some of the ideas were genuinely neat, and some were genuinely confusing ( I really id not understand what a "sheeple" was or how on earth to draw such a thing until Ashok explained his idea).

Thursday we started with a warm-up in our sketchbooks, in which we drew "how we got here".  I split my page diagonally, and drew a detail oriented map from my dorm building to Montgomery Hall, and on the other half,the path I take through Montgomery Hall to actually get to the class room.  Then we started watching the movie "Memento" directed by Christopher Nolan.  The main character (Leonard) has not short term memory and is living his life through his tattoos and Polaroid pictures (I was curious when this movie was made/intended to take place because I haven't seen Polaroid film almost anywhere for a while now...I used to use it all the time until I got my own digital camera in 9th grade.)  Next catch to the movie?  The plot is not linear.  Bouncing back and forth between color and black and white scenes, the story weaves in and out, overlapping events until the audience feels almost as lost as Leonard does (waking up in strange "new" places all the time).  I cannot wait to see how it all ties together in the end(or rather, the beginning?)

Our most recent reading was the second installment of "What is Time".  The "Time and Ourselves" section left me felling very different from the first part.  The beginning of the final paragraph made me pause, "Our emotional life also influences our experience of time."  This idea combined with the closing thought of "social evolution" really pulled a lot of points Whitrow makes together for me.  The repetition of consciousness/conscious auditory experience/subconscious auditory etc. stuck out as I read; especially at the beginning when Whitrow says, "...time is one of the forms of our intuition.  That is to say, it does not characterize external objects but only the subjective mind that is conscious of them."  So time is only partially existent--it is real (only) in the parts of our mind that we use to perceive it?  Whitrow again compares/contrasts people to other animals--this time equating feelings of "fatigue" and our mind power to learn how to characterize "the data of our experience".  Going on to talk about electrical connections in our brains and studies about whether of not these electrical messages can be inherited or absorbed (worms...ew), this section focuses on what memory and our mental perception of time has to do with how we perceive it personally more so than the first section.  If I had to choose one sentence that really made the article for me however, it would not be one addressing the conscious or subconscious interpretation of time, but one on page 25, talking about what memory means to us and how it has been associated with us:"Memory has long been regarded as the concomitant of our sense of personal identity."

I found the discussion we had in class about our "first memories", and the idea about whether or not they were actual memories or just situations that have been drilled into our minds with videos, pictures, and stories, just fascinating!  There are some memories that I have, that I know have not been affected by an external source, because they are just little parts of my existence, that for some reason I have a vivid recollection of living.  Others are clear, but that may (or may not be because I have a physical representation of this memory (I had some pictures on my external memory (Funny, my computer's external memory storage more specifically) so I thought I would use them to help illustrate my point). 

                                 

For example, I do not recall that hug at all, but it obviously happened.  On the other hand, I vividly remember playing piano and singing with Katie (the little blond girl).  These pictures were could have been taken a couple hours apart at most, yet I have no recollection of one of them, and a crystal clear of the other (improve piano is a very intense art, especially for toddlers).  I can still hear parts of the piano, and there is no sound with this picture...so that I credit as an authentic memory, not one that I may "created" with bits and pieces of a hoe video for example.

 

Another thing I found very interesting upon further reflection, was the thought of the realization of our own names.  I think I equated my name to possession almost before I realized that it meant "me".  I named all of my baby dolls after myself, and the color of their outfits.  I remember pushing Blue Mariana and Yellow Mariana around in strollers through the foyer of my home, "shopping", and then taking them back to the family room, and "cooking" for them with my blue, white, yellow, and pink accented kitchen set--plastic food, utensil, dishes, and all!  They were my dolls, Mariana's dolls and I named them accordingly I suppose.

 

Which still led me to wonder if memories can be "created" with pictures and videos, or they can last for decades with out any visual or audio ques, then could they be recovered without the use of the ques?  The article referenced different kinds of memory, and what that has to do with the wiring of the brain, etc.  This article seemed to suggest similar concepts:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11739-lost-memories-could-be-restored-by-rewiring-brain.html

The person being interviewed in this article (Li-Huei Tsai) suggests that if what they were looking into (a few years back now) was possible, that memories that we might consider "lost" are still "saved" somewhere, much like Whitrow, suggesting that we just need to learn how to draw them out.  If this is the case, I still wonder what kind of progress has been made in this field-degenerative diseases are still a problem, so obviously this solution has yet to be perfected...

 

Which leads me to my specific questions:

-Are we ever able to really determine/prove if a memory we pull from our "blocks of wax" is genuine, or if we have learned it through repetition of pictures/stories/etc.  (Or is it just a matter of trusting ourselves, that we have original data running through our head, that has yet to be altered by a current reminder (ie. photos)?

-How much do our emotions tie into how we remember something, how long we remember it, how we look back on something as certain intervals of time pass...we humans are an emotional species, does that change how we are "wired" drastically, say from other primates?  Or do we just use the same wiring a little differently?  Does emotion have nothing to do with the process at all?  Do we just think our feelings have something to do with it?