3rd Denver

            http://www.danielnashillustration.com/the-giver-sci-fi-now-magazine The topic of memories immediately reminds me of the dystopian society of The Giver. As I’m sure most of us have read this novel in middle school, I thought it would be appropriate to reintroduce this novel since it is extremely relevant to our topic. The Giver , a fictional novel, focuses on the importance of memories and how a perfect society would be more harmful than beneficial. In this society, everyone except for a select few has no feelings or memories apart from the ones that are “given” to them. These memories are generated and provided for every individual any other memories they have are erased. However, once the “chosen one,” Jonas, receives these memories to become the next “Giver,” or holder of all memories, he feels that everyone in society was not truly happy without being able to feel both positive and negative feelings. For this reason, Jonas sets out on a...

  Photo Credit: https://www.healthline.com/health/why-cant-i-remember-my-childhood Being unable to recall our earliest memories, like our first steps or specific moments that occurred in the initial years of our childhood, is a nearly universal trait shared by people. Sigmund Freud described this phenomenon in the late 19th century as "infantile amnesia." It is interesting that we have surprisingly few memories of our early childhoods, as young children have such a high learning capacity. Through having children perform imitation-based tasks, researchers revealed mnemonic competence in children before they could even talk. According to an article published in 2021, a brain imaging study by Yale scientists showed that infants as young as three months old were already using the hippocampus to recognize and learn patterns.  Nick Turke-Browne, a professor of psychology at Yale, suggested that babies gain experience in the world, their brains search for general patterns that h...

  Week 13:  Past vs. Future - 3/23 [7:49 PM] Memories and nostalgia play huge roles in our daily lives. It’s what gets us through the day and onto the next, allowing us to build off of what we’ve learned and enables us to retain what we are about to learn.  Has it ever occurred to any of you that in less than 4 months, the only recollection of our English class, classmates, and times as juniors will only be through our memories? Everything we learned and the feeling of sheer panic before every timed write will all be squeezed down to just a sheer thought or feeling. In less than two years our time at American and our time with the rest of our fellow juniors will also be summarized into a vague experience, overshadowed by the next. We most likely will never see all 700 of us, or the Class of 2023, once we graduate. Our memories are what allow us to hold on to the past and cherish it, even when it's physically impossible to do so. Our memory is what carries our past and his...

Human memory is an odd thing. We assume it is a collective conscience and often say things like “wow omg we the people of (x country) sure do remember the actions of (y country) done to us a long time ago and we need revenge for it!”, but how real is this collective memory, how reliable is it and most importantly how is it used? The most common thing we hear about collective memory is probably the Mandela effect. This is when something that a lot of people remember is actually wrong. Maybe it was misinformation, maybe it was misinterpretation, but this one cuts deep. For example, the effect derives its name from people thinking that Nelson Mandela died in the 1980s in prison despite him having lived till 2013. A more common one would be people remembering Darth Vader having said “Luke I am your father” despite our dear Sith Lord never having said that. Small misconceptions like this have no effect on life but then the question arises, how much could the Mandela affect the memory of a h...

        Week 13: Winter Abernathy - 23 March 2022 [5:23pm] “We’re sleeping on our problems like we’ll solve them in our dreams     We wake up early morning and they’re still under the sheets” The lyrical genius of this line astounds me everytime I listen to this song. The inflection in this line creates a parallel between the two images painted and the feeling of sleeping on conflict praying for it to go away is painfully relatable but made beautiful by this writing. Defenceless by Louis Tomlinson is a song not only with beautiful tone and production quality but with hauntingly gorgeous lyrics and figurative language. Another line from this song that rips my heart out while simultaneously being a song lyric that I believe describes my heart perfectly is: ”I hope that I’m not asking too much just want to be loved by you     And I’m too tired to be tough just want to be loved by you” I am notorious in my friend groups for being self-sacrif...

  Week 13: Looking Back   – 3/23 - [5:06PM].           My grandma once told me that when we look back on things that we worked hard to accomplish, we will remember the glorious moments of success over the pain we went through. What she said as we struggled up a challenging hike in Yosemite National Park really stuck with me and I realized this wisdom applies to so many experiences in my life. This moment became an important memory to me.       I was somebody who never studied for a test until the second year of junior high in 8th grade. For me, middle school was a big jump from elementary school and my low grades from 7th grade revealed to me that my old method of learning and test preparations (which was none at all) was not working. I was determined to do better in my second year. During the summer before 8th grade, I completed endless review books and even self-studied some 8th-grade material to be extra prepared. All my eff...

"'What is memory without forgetting?' asks Oliver Hardt, a cognitive psychologist studying the neurobiology of memory at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. 'It’s impossible,' he says. 'To have proper memory function, you have to have forgetting.'" Memory is a very intriguing thing, but forgetting is an aspect of memory that is often overlooked. Forgetting is often assumed to be "a passive process in which memories, unused, decay over time." However, researchers have recently put forth the idea that "the brain is built to forget." In 2012, neuroscientist Ron Davis uncovered evidence of forgetting in fruit flies and found that dopamine is essential to forgetting. Several years later, Hardt discovered similarities in rats. Many other researchers had parallel discoveries, and they were able to come to the conclusion that "[f]orgetting . . . 'is not a failure of memory, but a function of it.'" The hippocampus is an ...

      You are casually talking to a friend of yours, and all of a sudden you feel like you have had the exact same conversation before in the past. You walk into a room, and all of a sudden you feel like you were in the exact same room before. However, at the same time, you are almost certain you have never been in either of such scenarios in the past. This insanely relatable phenomenon has been dubbed the term "déjà vu," or the French translation of "already seen, and has since left modern scientists still uncertain about its mysterious causes.     One possible reason scientists have given for this "glitch in the brain" is the occurrence of an "electric malfunction" in the temporal lobe, the area of the brain that stores memories and detects familiarity (Thompson). When the temporal lobe's neurons that are dedicated to "recognition and familiarity" are mistakenly fired during random events, our brain thus interprets the present as a fam...

                                                                                          Memory vs. Rememory When hearing the new blog quarter was based on memory and language, I pondered what is there to write about memory and then an idea came to me. In the book, Beloved, Sethe, a freed slave, discusses the concept of rememory. This new idea of rememory intrigued me and this blog unit came at the perfect time for me to explore this concept. Memory means storing a certain event in your life and at the given moment remembering or recalling it. On the other hand, rememory is “repressed moments bubbling up from the deep” parts of your mind. So, memories are events that are in the conscious part of your mind while "rememori...

I remember when I went to a summer camp a long time ago, my camp counselor gave us a long list of tribe names for us to try to remember. Only a few people were able to remember. After most of us failed miserably, the camp counselor taught us a trick on how to remember it easily: the Method of Loci. The Method of Loci , or what more people commonly refer to as the memory palace, is the technique where a person stores information to later recall in a spatial environment they visualize. However, this technique is only limited to simple information, like password digits or items on a grocery list; concepts like “math equations or the meanings of foreign language vocabulary words” are less applicable to this technique (Wallington). While the method is limited, it still can be useful in some areas, so how exactly do we build a memory palace? To begin with, visualize an environment that you are very familiar with such as your home, a local park, or even school. With a place in mind, think abo...

https://www.birchpsychology.com/birchs-blog/2021/10/22/overthinking-the-culprit-behind-low-self-esteem                  Overthinking is something many people do on a daily basis, but what are the negative effects of it physically and mentally? Because overthinking focuses on negative thoughts and the worst possible scenarios such as “ rehashing the past, dwelling on bad experiences or worrying about the future,” it may cause depression or have more detrimental effects. In an article from Kera News , while focusing on the topic of mental health, a psychologist from Parkland Memorial Hospital, says “when we ruminate on certain thoughts, it can snowball into bigger, more extreme negative thinking.”                      As the negative thoughts get more common and more severe, it can begin to affect one’s everyday life and physical well being. Causing sleep deprivation, eating...

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/02/how-scent-emotion-and-memory-are-intertwined-and-exploited/ Our sense of smell not only can be used to detect different scents, but it can also serve as a memory trigger. According to Life Sciences Professor Raymond Leo Erikson and Harvard’s Venkatesh Murthy, it is because of the brain’s anatomy that smell and memory are so closely linked ( Walsh ). The olfactory bulb, located in the front of the brain, controls smells. Olfactory signals get to the limbic system very quickly, meaning odors are directly linked to the “amygdala and the hippocampus, the regions related to emotion and memory” (Walsh). Because of the evocative power smells possess, people and businesses have tried to use this to their advantage. The film industry during the 1950s invented the Smell-O-Vision, where movie theaters were infused with certain scents so viewers could be more engaged with the scenes. Presently, people can experience this in 4DX movie systems.  Add...

  Week 12: Badminton…? - Amratha Rao A new activity has been added to my schedule this week, and I can very much say that it has been sucking the life out of me. Being on the Badminton team has probably been one of my biggest goals in high school, so I was thrilled when I managed to make the varsity team all three years. However, this year, I’m finding it particularly hard given that I also have to balance my heavy academic workload.  I’ve been playing badminton since around 6th grade and nothing gives me a natural high like the one I get playing on the court. I’m sure the feeling is familiar to any of us who participate in an extracurricular activity. But being a particularly energetic person, badminton was the key to tempering my hyperactive tendencies and allowed me to exercise both mentally and physically.  Going back to the topic of school, I’ve had three major English submissions in APENG alone this week, and I shouldn’t count out Mr. Takacs' ridiculously complicate...

Sleep. As high school students we all have heard the sentence: Sleep is very important for you; yet, many of us ignore this and continue to pull all-nighters, staying up until 3 in the morning, going to sleep, and waking up at 7am. What does sleep actually provide us, other than giving our bodies a break? Many believe when we hit the pillow and shut out eyes so does our brain, but that is the exact opposite. We may be asleep but our brains are wide awake checking “to ensure that the exquisite balance of hormones, enzymes, and proteins isn’t too far off-kilter. And all the while, cleaners follow in close pursuit to sweep out the toxic detritus that the brain doesn’t need and which can cause all kinds of problems if it builds up” ( Park ). When we are asleep, our brain is repairing our muscles, digesting our food, helping “clean out” our brains, cleansing our skin, building up our bones, etc.  What if you do not get the recommended amount of sleep?  Restricting and limiting your...

  Week 12: The Power of Mindsets   – 3/2 - [6:02PM].        If there is one thing that I have learned from APES this year, it is that everything has a good side and a bad side. For example, we are always taught that recycling is good as it brings numerous advantages such as reducing pollution and saving material. However, even the beneficial practice of recycling has its flaws: it is expensive and the process results in pollutants of harmful chemicals. This idea that everything has its advantages and disadvantages comes up frequently in our study of solutions to environmental problems and applies to everything in life.  This brings us to the power of mindset. Since everything in our lives has its pros and cons, the way we choose to view them can dramatically affect how these things impact us. Studies have shown that an optimistic mindset can make tasks easier and more enjoyable to do and help people achieve success in life, while a pessimistic attitu...

Dopamine: a term we are probably all relatively familiar with. It is a type of neurotransmitter and plays a huge role in producing a sense of pleasure. It is typically released by rewarding experiences, activating a reward system in our brains, often leading to addiction. However, dopamine is surprisingly also the primary neurochemical behind the reward of power. Power is intoxicating, especially when it is unchecked. Most people already in a position of power will do anything to preserve that position, keeping them in an addictive cycle of wanting more. When deprived of power, the brain "produces cravings at the cellular level that generate strong behavioural opposition to giving it up." Simply put, power is an addiction, and the dopamine in our brains can drive us to always seek more, never truly satisfied with what we have. It is no doubt that our brains are "neurochemically pre-programmed to seek pleasure," and we all are driven by the pleasure dopamine provides...

  Photo Credit: https://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/everyday-myths/time.htm Time is a powerful force in our lives, described in an article from the Association for Psychological Science as "the great equalizer." No matter how much money we make, what we do, or how famous we are, we are all limited by the same number of hours in a day.  However, the article cites a study by two scientists from UC Berkeley, which demonstrates that feeling a sense of power leads people to "perceive themselves as being able to control time" and feel that they have more time at their disposal. Scientists Alice Moon and Serena Chen conducted a study with 557 participants and established that power leads to an increase in perceived time ability.  Although powerful people would generally have more control over their time, with an ability to cancel meetings or assign tasks to assistants, Moon and Chen found that people with higher power still perceived greater control over time...

    Since the establishment of the Internet in the late 1900s, its formation has been attributed as one of the most transformational inventions to humanity. Its ability to transmit information in a matter of seconds, to provide publicly accessible data for billions, to create such a lasting impact that generations born after cannot imagine a life without it, were all just bits of its legacy. Its legacy, however, has established a severe dependence upon itself.     Imagine this scenario: one day, as students across the nation open their computers, instead of connecting to their everyday websites, they instead all face a 404 error. Expecting this to be simply a temporary internet outage, these students patiently wait for it to resolve. However, when some go on their phones to pass the time, they witness similar errors as their favorite Instagram pages remain blank and unloaded. Across the nation, these events occur to all fellow students, and soon enough companies begi...

  Week 12: Winter Abernathy - 2 March 2022 [9:15am] I’ve been in somewhat of a somber mood the past few weeks and these thoughts are a by-product. With that preface, I’ve been thinking about how, from my experience at least, children are conditioned from a young age to only receive love in two ways, familial and romantic. Beyond that, platonic love is almost demonized; opposite sex friendships(because society’s heteronormative) are constantly jeered because at least one of you have to be in love with the other, physical touch is deemed sexual and strictly romantic. For people like me whose love languages are quality time and physical touch, it is hard to ever feel loved and it’s even harder to acknowledge that need. It is terrifying to ask for a hug or to spend time with someone because of the ingrained sentiment that those things are inherently romantic. It is terrifying to feel like the only chance you have at being loved is a romantic relationship.  This system of social co...