The current consensus among memory researchers is that we need other capacities to be in place, skills that are not directly to do with the storage of information, before we can hope to carry our memories forward into later childhood and adulthood. One such factor is language. As soon as you can use words to […]
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I have been reminded lately — or perhaps all through the pandemic — about a false form of abundance in our social relations. When an opportunity arises to do a certain thing in a certain place with a certain person, it can easily feel like one optional example in an ongoing string of comparable offers. […]
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I want to persuade you that when you have a memory, you don’t retrieve something that already exists, fully formed—you create something new. Memory is about the present as much as it is about the past. A memory is made in the moment, and collapses back into its constituent elements as soon as it is […]
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Without our memories, we would be lost to ourselves, amnesiacs flailing around in a constant, unrelenting present. It is hard to imagine being able to hang on to your personal identity without a store of autobiographical memories. To attain the kind of consciousness we all enjoy, we probably rely on a capacity to make links […]
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It may not be easily accessible to non-Audible subscribes, but Stephen Fry’s 12-part series “Inside Your Mind” is thought-provoking, informative, and excellent. He does a great job as a science popularizer and communicator, sharing experimental research without jargon and in a consistently accessible and engaging way. So far, I have found the episode on memory […]
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Back in September, The Economist devoted a week’s letters page to responses to their article “How did American ‘wokeness’ jump from elite schools to everyday life?“. A couple make particularly interesting points: Your warning on the dangers of wokeism would leave many of the old thinkers on the left turning in their graves. The stunt […]
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Emma Jackson has an interesting article on the mega-libertarian “Freedom Convoy” protests and what they reveal about coalition building: Whether we want to admit it or not, there’s a lot that the anti-mandate movement is getting right from an organizing and movement-building perspective. For starters, in stark contrast to the Left, the past few days […]
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I can’t recall ever feeling as stuck with anything as I do with the dissertation. There are so many ‘to do’ items, so many of them depend on others being finished in order to be possible to complete themselves, and there isn’t any day-to-day or week-to-week pressure to keep me focused. To rekindle the terror […]
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Everyone is aware of the placebo effect, in which a mock or inert intervention like a sugar pill in a clinical trial will nonetheless produce what seem like real effects to the people who receive it. The nocebo effect is the opposite: where people exposed to something harmless can experience apparent ill effects because they […]
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It’s a tough, strange time right now because of COVID. Despite the predictable (and predicted) health consequences, governments are not willing to introduce restrictions which would help control this awful wave. They know that the politics of shutting down Christmas would be awful, both for enraged households that feel like they deserve for the pandemic […]
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