3rd Denver

https://graphicsurf.com/item/people-listening-to-music-vector-free-flat-illustration/         When you listen to a song that you haven’t listened to in a long time do you get a sense of nostalgia? I notice that this happens to me quite often and it surprises me when I remember the lyrics to songs that I haven’t listened to in months or even years. However, studies have shown that lyrics are not the only things music can make you remember. An experiment done by Dan Cohen, a social worker, proved that listening to music can help people with dementia in nursing homes, and because the effects were so moving, there is a documentary on this called Alive Inside .  Dan Cohen would “ ask a resident's family to list the songs or instrumental pieces the person once enjoyed.” After this, Cohen would put together a playlist for them to listen to and while listening to them, people who were once unable to speak began to sing and dance. From continuous practice with “...

Amratha Rao - Week #15 Alzheimer's Disease My friend's grandfather recently passed away after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Without any cure, light medication was his only hope. Her grandfather spent his last few weeks surrounded by his grandchildren, despite not having recognized any of them. His dementia by the time of his death had gotten so severe that he couldn’t even recognize his children or his wife.  Alzheimer’s disease is one of the most common forms of dementia, accounting for up to “75% of all dementia cases in the world” ( Heerema ). While it may seem like Alzheimer’s Disease affects only the elderly, it is, in fact, a genetically inherited disease with an underestimated mortality rate. Being currently the “sixth leading cause of death” in the United States, Alzheimer’s is a common genetic disorder with almost 44 million cases worldwide. However, the biggest concern around the disease is its diagnosis ( Heerema ). It almost takes 2.8 years on avera...

https://www.healio.com/news/primary-care/20210810/concerning-67-of-calories-kids-and-teens-consume-come-from-ultraprocessed-foods During spring break, I had been fixing my sleep schedule, sleeping early, and waking up early. However, even though my mind feels clearer, my head no longer hurts, and my overall well-being improved, I still found myself having a terrible memory, so I decided to do some research to identify what other factors are there that could contribute to my forgetfulness. Upon doing some quick research, I found out that the Hot Cheetos and the cookies and cream ice cream I have been eating all this time had been playing a role in making my memory suffer. According to Healthline , the high-calorie and low-nutrition highly processed foods we have been eating are the foods that have significant negative impacts on our brains. Our brains have a molecule called a brain-derived neurotrophic factor, BDNF, located in the hippocampus and other areas of the brain. BDNF is crucia...

  Photo Credit: https://yourwordsmith.com/the-misinformation-effect/ When you and your friend are telling a story together, it may often change with countless retellings. It could get a little more dramatic, funnier, or scarier. It may even be hard to agree on some of the details, or you might even recall events with such great differences that you're not even sure if your friend was there. One explanation for this occurrence is called the misinformation effect: when our memory for past events is altered after exposure to misleading information.  Elizabeth Loftus, an American psychologist best known in relation to the misinformation effect, conducted an experiment in the 1970s on the malleability of memory.  She showed the tape of a car crash and asked participants to predict the speed of the cars. Some participants were asked about the cars’ speed after they “hit” each other, and other participants were asked the same question using the word “smashed.” The group ask...

Week 15: What I Learned From a Childhood Memory   – 4/27 - [5:06PM].           I remember many vivid instances in my young life where I have felt completely overwhelmed with doubt like I was swallowed alive by the overpowering fear that I will never be able to escape the obstacle standing in front of me. In those moments I feel so insignificant, so helpless, and so powerless. Yet, despite how impossible those challenges seemed, I managed to overcome them every time. I frequently look back upon those moments and cringe over how small those problems that made me spiral into a never-ending tunnel of darkness actually were in hindsight.    My most prominent memory of feeling absolutely doomed occurred when my mom signed me up for a band audition. For context, I was in the 7th grade back then, and I picked up flute about a year before. I cried when I first found out about the audition a week prior to the audition date. I felt angry and terrified. ...

Memory is unreliable. As time passes, our memory of certain events either fade or alter details so that it can't be fully trusted. Studies have shown that "eyewitness accounts of crime are susceptible to eyewitness accounts of crime are very susceptible to after-the-event suggestion and influence, and, thus, highly unreliable." Memory is also "malleable," and findings show that completely innocent people can be convinced and confess to crimes they did not do. A study published in 2015 in the journal Psychological Science  includes a social experiment where a group of students were told by researchers about a false event that never happened. In only three hours, 70% of them were convinced. For the experiment, the researchers reached out to the participating students' caretakers, and was able to retrieve some information about events that happened in their past. They then interviewed the students three times each for 40 minutes. In the first interview, the stu...

        Why Do We Remember What We Remember? Kirti Kande  Why are some images, events, and actions more impactful and memorable in our minds compared to others? You would think after all so much progress in technology and medicine we would have figured out the answer to this question looming inside our minds; sadly the answer is still unknown. “No scientist is perfectly sure how the brain physically sorts and stores all the information — and all the types of information — that gets encoded into memories”. Finding out the answer to this question may be very beneficial. The answer can improve our education system, fix memory lapses, and help people who have impaired memory. Imagine if we knew the answer to how to make memorable images, then classrooms would know which images would remain in the children's minds longer and we, as a society, can “help design a more memorable world”. When scientists at MIT tried to see which images would be more impactful with a ran...

  Week 14: Winter Abernathy - 26 April 2022 [10:54am] Nostalgia is a drug. It causes us to wear rose colored glasses that splay a sepia gradient over our memories, good and bad alike. As some of the people around me know, I am likely doing Ohlone College Connections next year(the paperwork parts have been filled out, plan is in motions) and in the most recent meeting about the program, I noticed someone from my past. My former best friend who stopped talking to me about a year ago is apparently, also doing the program. As this week’s topic may suggest, I have been bathing in the light of nostalgia recently.  I’ve been reminiscing, watching old videos and remembering hangouts. I find it funny how the ghosts of my past selves and people I loved(and still love) walk around this town. I understand that time as we know it is linear but sometimes I think it all melds together. When I go to old cafes that I used to frequent with my former best friend and our other friends, when I go ...

 "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." These words of George Santayana were one of the first ideas my AP Euro teacher taught to us last year. He explained this idea to be the primary reason why we study the history of our civilizations. We have to learn from the past mistakes of previous generations, otherwise, as said by Santayana, we will repeat them. On a superficial level, it does make sense. If our civilization in general understands the catastrophes of certain events in the past, we would theoretically ensure such mistakes would not occur again. Why would we logically wish to inflict more disasters upon ourselves?  However, is this really the case in our history? Anyone who has studied world history at all would know the names of World War I and II. When World War I had ended, it became the deadliest human conflict in history with more than 21 million causalities ("World War I"). The war demonstrated to humanity the depth of destruct...

Sky's the limit Memory is one place where God did not create all men equal (that and socio-economic classes, but that's a discussion for another time). Personally, I have a terrible memory. My remembering thing comes at mostly a conceptual level, so remembering how kinematics works in physics is an easier thing to remember than what I had for breakfast today. But that’s not the same for everyone, and some people blur the line between conceptual and real by using different techniques for remembering. Some people have pulled off insane feats of remembering things and reading about them alone makes me green with envy due to my inability to remember how old I am if asked suddenly. For some people, called savants, they are often born this way and have astounding powers such as an ability to remember things such as details from visually complex scenes. Some people aren’t even born this way. There are cases of people being injured and suddenly gaining these abilities and it is calle...

https://www.istockphoto.com/illustrations/memory-lane           While finding a topic for this week's blog, I started looking around my room and considered why certain objects hold special meanings to me. Why do we choose to hoard or hold onto certain objects that have no value or real purpose to them? In the article “ The Essence of Objects: How Material Finds Meaning ,” the author, Zach Batt explains how the memories an object holds can be more valuable than expensive ones.  At the beginning of Batts article, he asks the reader a question to consider. ‘ “If your house was burning, what would you take with you?”’ Besides taking our phones, we would probably take the things that hold the most value to us morally. Batts explains that these objects, even if they are things like a “wilted flower kept from a first date or prom night,” hold certain emotions to them. Often they are emotions that we only experience once in a lifetime which is why they ar...

  Week 14: Winter Abernathy - 6 April 2022 [4:05pm]    This is a line from Lemony Snicket’s Letters to Beatrice , my favorite love poem of all time. The letter goes through a list of scenarios, some outrageous, some heart-wrenching, and I’ve never read something so funny and heartfelt, something that makes me want to cry and laugh at such extremes all at once. There’s another line that plagues my mind,  “I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from slim to zero, and until your face is fogged by a distant memory, and your memory faced by a distant fog” The phenomenon of people’s memories being covered by a thick dust or fog with time while the emotions hold strong is a universal human experience and Lemony Snicket’s signature air of delirium makes an otherwise cruel emotion seem euphoric.  I love this letter with all my heart, it’s the core of my being, it describes how I view love. No matter distance or time, I still love them as mu...

  Picture Credit:  https://www.planetneurodivergent.com/four-tips-for-working-memory-problems-at-work-in-the-office-or-working-remotely/ Many of us are likely only familiar with two types of memory: long-term and short-term. However, there are many more divisions, types, and stages within the categories we are familiar with. While doing some research, I came across articles about working memory. This is a type of short-term memory that we use when we need to remember a phone number, an address, a shopping list, or a set of instructions. It's the ability to "hold and manipulate information in mind, over brief intervals." Since it is for things that are important to us at the moment, it is natural to tend to think that it is not really important. However, an article from The Conversation states that researchers believe working memory is central to the functioning of the mind.  Working memory can really only hold information for 10 to 20 minutes and only 5-9 pieces of inform...

      When I was in middle school, my sister had come sick with a rare medical condition called Kawasaki disease. The strange name stood out to me, but at the time I was more worried about my sister. However, after she recovered, the name stuck with me. A week later, when on a car ride to church, I looked outside my window and found the exact same name on the front of a building. Even to this day, every time I pass by that building, it sticks out to me. I would pass by billboards on the highway, and there it is: the name Kawasaki imprinted on them. However, prior to hearing of the disease, I have never noticed that building before, even though my family would pass by it every week; nor have I ever noticed the billboards, even though it is the exact highway we would drive on every week.     It was almost as if the name has become suddenly everywhere. It was almost as if the name had popped out right after my sister got sick, and since then has spread everywhere I...

Week 14: Fixes for Bad Memory   – 4/6 - [3:08PM].              Growing up, I quickly realized that my brain is not the sharpest tool in the shed. If you were to ask me what I had for dinner last night or two nights prior, there is a big chance that I do not remember. Sometimes I forget to complete a homework assignment due to my short-term memory, while other times I can not remember what I was going to say to somebody mid-conversation and things take an awkward turn. The feeling of forgetting something that I desperately want to remember is one of the worst feelings in the world. It feels like a piece of me and my experience is lost forever to the passing of time, and nothing I do will bring it back. All this time, I thought bad memory was something determined by birth and an evil fate I can not escape. However, I recently came across an article from Very Well Mind by Kendra Cherry called “ 11 Methods for Improving Your Memory ” that I am e...

In response to my blog post #13, I saw Pranav's comment that said he didn't like forgetting his password for the 3rd time that day. Whether that statement was literal or not (if it was good luck), I decided to look up some ways to create passwords that are both secure and easy for us to remember. Getting password ideas: Thinking of what to make your passwords can be a difficult topic at times. One suggestion is to create an acronym from a memorable sentence, an inside joke for example. You can also combine several random words together. You can get ideas from your favorite book or song, basing it on something that stands out to you. Finally, you can also have a base password that varies slightly for different platforms. Securing your password: In order to make your password a lot more secure, it is important to use a combination of upper/lower case letters, numbers, and symbols so that it is a lot harder to guess. For example, replacing certain letters with numbers (e.g. replac...

www.straightdope.com/21343485/is-there-such-a-thing-as-photographic-memory We have probably encountered the term “photographic memory” at some point in our lives—maybe from books, maybe from characters in movies, maybe from people who claim they have a photographic memory. This notion of photographic memory is “the ability to recall a past scene in detail with great accuracy — just like a photograph” ( Ye ). Wouldn’t it be great if we could just look at a sheet of math equations and be able to remember all of that exactly in our brains? However, that most likely isn’t possible as researchers suggest a true photographic memory does not actually exist ( Whelan ). The closest thing to photographic memory to exist is probably eidetic memory which is the ability to recall the exact details of an image for a brief moment (Whelan). Their memory can be tested using a technique called the Picture Elicitation Method where people with eidetic memory are given a visual to study, and after 30 s...

Week 14: A never-ending annoyance This week’s blog is one where I will be addressing something that has deeply annoyed me a lot since forever: nostalgia. Since coming here to Fremont, one thing I have noticed amongst my friends is a tendency to drift back to the past like Thornton and childhood. My annoyance with this is never-ending, and has led to a pathological dislike of the words “middle school” and “elementary”, along with it leading to some tensions with me and some friends. However, I got to thinking that maybe nostalgia might be bad (I am greatly biased against it, shockingly) and got curious about how it would affect a person’s mindset.  Thinking about it logically, it can’t be healthy to reminisce that often. The simple fact is that staying stuck in the past does prevent you from changing for the better in the future. If you are constantly thinking about that time that someone lit a trash can on fire in 7th grade, and talking about that most of the time, you prevent your...

The Importance of the Past Why do we need to remember the past? There are many reasons why we need personal, social, and economical reasons.  Firstly, it is important to understand and remember our past to analyze the mistakes we made. The reason we learn history in school is to understand the mistakes world leaders and countries have made so we will not repeat them in the future. “We can learn how past societies, systems, ideologies, governments, cultures, and technologies were built, how they operate, and how they change.” Our history helps us understand how we are a society today and helps prevent problems that occurred in the past from happening in the future.  Secondly, remembering the past is “fundamental to being human”. Our memories allow us to have “a sense of continuity”. As we live in a world with an ever-changing environment, it is important to remind ourselves that we on the inside are the same even when the outside changes each day. Our memories allow us to remem...

 Week #14 - Muscle Memory - Amratha Rao P3 I’m sure we all know how to ride a bike. But how well can you explain and break down the process to someone? Sure, it’s all about finding your balance, but are you actually conscious about maintaining your balance when you bike? Most likely not. Activities like biking come naturally and without thought to most of us, because it is an activity we have repeated so many times that our muscles have become accustomed to the movement. Over time, our muscles strengthen and the motion becomes natural to us, memorizing the action.  Obviously, our muscles can’t store memories, but these movements can be stored as procedural memories , or “memory for skills.” Our motor cortex is primarily responsible for most of our muscle movement, so when we learn new skills, cells from the motor cortex pass through our spinal cord and make connections with neurons to instruct certain muscles in our body to contract. The more we practice a certain movement, th...