Life Scripts

Michael Jackson and the Man in the Mirror

Jefferson Singer — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:13:21 +0000

Michael Jackson was born on August 29th, 1958 and died, as we are all very much aware, on June 25th, 2009. I was born on September 19th, 1958, and as I try to be very much aware, am still alive. As anyone born in this same year can attest, there is some small added significance to the "King of Pop"'s death. Ever since I first realized that we were birth buddies, which was when I was 11 years old and reading a fan magazine taken off the desk of the one African-American girl in my elementary school (I was stealing magazines and he was already the front man of The Jackson Five), I have used Michael Jackson as a kind of extended time piece for my own life.

As Michael broke away from his brothers and began his solo career in the late 1970s, I was immersed in college and breaking away from my parents. As he reached superstardom with Thriller, I was working on my Ph.D. at Yale. I remember dancing to Billie Jean and Beat It with my girlfriend who was eventually to become my wife. I still can envision moving on the dance floor with her, trying to match my footsteps to the thumping bass of Billie Jean. We were at a party held in the Yale Art and Architecture Building, and we were dancing next to my wife's friend, who was dancing with a scion of the Rockefeller family. A little drunk, I felt a momentary sense of glamour, wealth, privilege and possibility. It felt like both Michael and me were reaching the top of our game.

By the late 1980s, Michael Jackson had transcended all expectations of what the top of the game might be. He had become literally the most popular performer in the world, his image and voice instantly recognizable. In contrast, I settled into a rewarding, but hardly glamorous, career as a professor at a small liberal arts college. Even more, while I was dutifully padding around the block on 2 or 3 mile jogs in order to stave off the inevitable aging process, Michael was leaping over subway turnstiles and leading packs of dances in splits, pirouettes, and backflips, showing no signs of leaving his 20s behind.

By the mid-1990s, Michael's channeling of Dorian Gray had begun in earnest. He had become obsessed with youth, surgically altering his appearance to avoid any sign of age, living in a Block City of Neverland to foster the illusion for himself and the children with whom he surrounded himself that one can be safe from the adult world and the relentless demands of time and responsibility. I, on the other hand, like so many others our age, was being smacked in the face every day by the responsibility of being a parent to two young children. The distance between his world of fantasy and ferris wheels and my world of supermarkets, laundry baskets, and school project crises could not have seemed wider.

By the early 2000s, as we entered our 40s, it seemed like his Block City had come crashing down. Allegations of child abuse and his increasing bizarre behavior and appearance filled the tabloids, while his musical success and influence had faded into the background. Should I confess to some schadenfreude, pleasure at his fall from grace, a grim satisfaction at his inability to cheat time and escape the treadmill of middle age? Perhaps, but even more I saw Michael Jackson as no longer part of my cohort - he was my age, but not of my age. He had become frozen in a pop culture that no longer concerned me; even in the pop culture that my pre-teen children embraced he had become more of an oddity and spooky character than a musical innovator and legendary performer. The kind of meaning that I sought in my life no longer came from a possible grasp of fame or celebrity, but from the pleasures of a cross-country ski with my wife, my children's discoveries of books and tastes and new best friends, from the slow accretion of accomplishment in my work, and the moments of fellowship in song or prayer at synagogue.

Yet now at his unexpected death, while planning a comeback (Fitzgerald said, "There are no second acts in American lives"), Michael suddenly mattered to me again. Along with millions of others around the world, I listened to his music again, in some cases for the first time in years, and watched him float through the air in endless video clips. His beauty could not help but move me; his high tenor and staccato breaths sent a chill down my spine. But beyond any remorse at the loss of his genius, his death sent out a sky-brightening flare to the rest of us 1958'ers - What are we going to do with the years left to us? Whatever went wrong with his life, he managed to bring a passionate intensity to his time in this world. At nearly 51, do we have some of this fire left? This is what his death asks me - I have done the dutiful work of living a responsible and productive adult life - one daughter in college, the other about to be, money saved, minimal debt. But have I burned bright enough? It is not money, glamour or celebrity that would answer this question, but commitment to and expression of a passion, whether intellectual, physical, artistic, or spiritual. His death at nearly exactly my current age puts me on warning - any time, any time, any time. I suppose I am looking at that man in the mirror and asking if it indeed is time for a change.

Good-bye "H.M."

Jefferson Singer — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 18:14:50 +0000

As the Christmas trees accumulate on the sidewalks and the college students give up their languorous breaks and return to school, I would like to take one last backward look at 2008 and say good-bye to a man who contributed more to our understanding of human memory than any other individual who has ever lived. He was not a scientist; he was not a Proustian scholar; he was not a writer or artist.

Henry Molaison (or H.M. in the scientific literature) died on Dec. 2nd 2008 at the age of 82, in a nursing home outside Hartford, CT (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/us/05hm.html). He was a motor mechanic who had been hit by a bicycle at the age of 9 and soon after developed debilitating seizures. At the age of 27, increasingly incapacitated by these convulsive episodes, he sought relief from the neurosurgeons of Hartford Hospital. There, in an effort to tame the seizures, Dr. William Beecher Scoville removed critical sections of his brain's medial temporal area, including the sea horse-shaped hippocampus. The rest, as they say, is history, or in H.M.'s case, the lack of any history from that point forward.

What happened to H.M. and what changed our understanding of memory is that without these portions of his brain intact, H.M. could not consolidate new memories. The gist of his life and well-learned routines acquired before his current age were still available to him. He could remember some general events from his childhood (e.g., hiking trips, going to the beach); he could remember some details of his work; he could remember a few major world events. He could make his bed, do simple chores, glance at a paper, fix a sandwich. However, any new events, new conversations, new information had a retention time of roughly 15 minutes and then it was gone, lost to his consciousness, as fleeting as a passing breeze.

With those few strokes of his surgical instruments, Dr. Scoville had inadvertently created the greatest living laboratory for the study of human memory that has ever existed. Affable, compliant, and healthy as a horse, H.M. lived on and on. And the legion of researchers made their pilgrimages to Hartford with their memory tests, drawing pads, and learning lists. They came to understand the vital role that the medial temporal region plays in transferring encoded information to higher areas of the brain - how it enables the linkage of new memories to concepts and categories in the cerebral cortex that allow them to be slotted and safely stored. The fact that H.M. could retain some new information after sufficient repetition, but only in a vague and routinized manner without any conscious awareness of what he had learned, also taught these researchers about the existence of two memory systems - one for explicit or "declarative" memory and the other for implicit or "procedural" recall. Now with MRI technology and sophisticated memory tests, neuroscientists are honing in on the exact roles that the hippocampus and related structures, such as the anterior cingulate nucleus, and the amygdale play in memory. However, it was H.M.'s unfortunate mishap that shone the spotlight for the first time on these vital organs of recall. So neuroscientists and memory researchers owe him an immeasurable debt. But this is not all he taught us and this why I, as a personality and clinical psychologist, want to express my own personal tribute.

H.M. is more than just an iconic figure in memory. His odd and tragic-comic 55 years of unexamined living (unexamined by him, but scrupulously examined by others) have spoken eloquently to us about the meaning of self and identity. H.M. went on living, eating, talking, smiling, laughing, but he remained frozen in a Rip Van Winkle twilight of his first 27 years. He could not accumulate experience, accrue the wisdom of lessons learned, savor the passage from anxious youth to the comforts of his later years, nor (perhaps thankfully) face the despair of lost chances and unfulfilled opportunities. The novel of his life stopped and never resumed. As a consequence, his narrative identity, what Dan McAdams calls the "life story" (McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5, 100-120.) could not knit together his past, present, and future into a unified and purposeful whole. Like the cat that chases his tail or the dog who relishes with surprise the very same bone he himself has hid, H.M. greeted familiar visitors as new friends and could comfortably carry out the same conversation each day in an endless recursive loop.

There is no indication that H.M. lived an unhappy life. In a sense his salvation was his inability to grasp what he had lost or put more precisely, what he could never accrue. For the rest of us, his one dimensionality - his perpetual present - reminds us of what we owe to memory - of how fully and richly we know ourselves from what has transpired in our past. Years ago I wrote a book with Peter Salovey (Singer, J. A., & Salovey, P. (1993). The remembered self. New York: The Free Press.) that championed the thesis that we selectively construct our personalities from certain key "self-defining memories." Yet the emotional power of these memories was not paradoxically based in the original experiences, but in the relationship of these past events to our current goals and desires. What defines key memories as central to our sense of self is their ongoing relevance to what we are actively seeking and pursuing in our current lives. Freud felt that our early experience was determinative of our future desire. We argued that equal weight be given to the reciprocal influence of the present on the past. Identity is a circling dance between now and then that culminates in "What if?"

Dr. Scoville severed the relationship between present and past for H.M. and in doing so he robbed him of the capacity to look forward. And this is the real secret of what H.M. taught us about identity and not just memory. From the standpoint of personality, H.M.'s most profound loss was the future not the past. In every memory lives a dream or a nightmare - if this is what happened before, how can I have this again or how can I make this different? Life is janus-faced - without the backward glance, there is no knowledge of the distance still to go. We simply run in place. With the gift of memory, we are able to put in place the chapters of our story and construct a plot that pulls us toward a still unresolved ending. The plot propels us forward, demanding at each turn that we ask, "What will happen next?" Memory is indeed the engine of identity.

So good-bye and thank you, H.M.! You have left a legacy of research and understanding of which you were only dimly aware. It is now our duty to take the strange present that your life offered to us and apply it to a more complex and humane vision of ourselves.

Sarah Palin and Dan Quayle's Most Memorable Moment

Jefferson Singer — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 10:17:25 +0000

Immediately after Sarah Palin's surprise emergence as the Republican vice-presidential candidate, comparisons to Dan Quayle began. What interests me as a memory researcher is how soon people began to recall the famous exchange during the 1988 vice-presidential debate between Senator Quayle and Senator Bentsen, the Democratic candidate. Bentsen's rebuke of Quayle has become more than a memorable moment; it is an emblematic image of the contrast of experience with naïveté. When do political moments become political memories?

When Quayle attempted to quiet doubts about his relative inexperience (a bit more than one term in the Senate and two terms in the House), he pointed out that he had a similar level of elected service as J.F.K. when he was elected president. Bentsen shot back, "Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." The audience let out a collective gasp and Quayle was visibly shaken. The media seized on this moment and replayed it endlessly in the hours after the debate right up to election day. It is still available on YouTube where various versions have received over a quarter million hits, a figure that will surely soar into the million hit range after the Palin announcement.

How does such a powerful political moment turn into an iconic political memory? It can't be the media repetition alone since many other similar moments in Quayle's checkered career were derisively replayed or endlessly discussed (his "potatoe" mis-spelling or his "Murphy Brown" speech about single motherhood), but have not had similar traction in the collective memory. I would suggest there are a few key factors that keep a moment like that debate exchange alive and still relevant in our political culture. First, there was the shock and vividness of the moment. How often do we see a political figure of the stature of a vice-presidential candidate caught so completely off-guard and embarrassed on a national stage? Second, and I think this is even more important, Quayle and Bentsen each stood for something more than themselves; they were archetypes respectively for youth and experience. In this sense, this moment had a mythic quality to it. Quayle's imprudent effort to compare himself to a beloved and fallen president (from a different party and different political orientation) was symbolic of a certain callowness and arrogance of youth. Bentsen's reply reflected the blunt truth-telling of an older man - the crusty veteran lawyer-doctor-coach who has too few years left to sugarcoat the hard truths of the world. Hollywood could not have written a better scene in capturing the contrast between two characters that stood for something more than themselves.

In my work on self-defining memories (http://www.jeffersonsinger.com/) or in Dan McAdams's studies of the life story theory of personality, we have found that memories that persist in an individual's life and become thematic of their most important personal concerns contain both strong sequences of emotion reactions and characters or episodes that link to other similar memories. For example, if an individual often returns to a memory of a particular painful argument with a parent, it is likely that this memory connects to a number of similar memories that capture the essence of an ongoing conflict with that parent. The one memory that seems to remain the strongest and most persistent is likely to contain within it the most powerful distillation of the characteristics of that parent, the frustration that he or she would provoke, and the painful ending that would be the inevitable result. In its ability to capture the essence of the struggle between parent and child, this one memory becomes a touchstone or emblem for so many others.

The same is true, I believe, for our political memory. In a political culture, we have certain recurrent themes that define our national discourse about leadership. We look for signs and symbols of decisiveness, integrity, vision, and in the case of Quayle and Bentsen, experience. When a particular political moment can throw a powerful spotlight on this archetypal theme of youth vs. maturity, the moment becomes more than a "spin" item, it enters into our shared psyche and reverberates beyond itself.

So now with the fresh news of a V-P candidate who is 44 years old and who has been governor for only two years and previous to that a mayor and city councilwoman of a small Alaskan city, our memories are stirred to find echoes of similar circumstances in the past. Dan Quayle comes quickly to mind and then with the power of the mythic stories that our narrative memories create, the archetypal exchange between Bentsen and Quayle springs forward. From an abstract consideration of the challenges presented by inexperience, we are thrust into a vivid image of a young man brought up short by a dignified elder statesman. Time will tell how Sarah Palin will fare, and whether similar or very different memories of her debate with Joseph Biden will emerge.

Texting Leaves Out More Than the Vowels

Jefferson Singer — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:01:52 +0000

Dina and Todd, a couple I had just begun to see in therapy, had a major fight and have broken up. Dina's back with her mother and the only communication she is having with Todd is by texting. Although this has been very efficient in figuring out what to do about the dog and their shared possessions, what happens to their memories of each other?

The missing part that concerns me is how actual dialogue can spark memories of the relationship - images of shared experiences in the shadow box of our own consciousness. To lose this process of remembering and its result is to strip away some of the delicate bark that protects the essence of what it means to be a human being. I don't know Dina and Todd well enough yet to say if they should stay together, but I do worry that texting is not going to allow them to find out. Their relationship's future is being mediated by telegraphic paragraphs that can fit on cell phone screens. How will they make the best decision if their current images of each other are text-based?

If they were to talk face to face, speak on the phone, or even write letters, they would have to draw on a greater store of mental imagery, of linkage to the vast library of shared moments that their memories have stored. The blinking black letters that leap across Dina and Todd's cell phone screens are brief bursts in the present - like ants on a sheet at a picnic - momentary blips that can be wiped or shaken away.

You might ask, ‘How is a text different from a letter?' Both are written communications and the writer and receiver are not in each other's presence. There are a number of ways - a letter contains the physical manifestations of its writer in a way that a text does not. The unique handwriting; choice of paper and pen; the scent of perfume, aftershave, cigarette, or coffee that is a stowaway within the folds of paper; the sheer word count of the typical letter that only a Tolstoy of the touchpad could match - all of these elements conjure up specific memories and physical images of the person writing the letter. Even a "Dear John" letter helps you to know better who the Jill is that is rejecting you.

Now, of course, people don't write letters any more. I am not advocating for a return to Victorian epistles as a main vehicle of relationship. I am simply saying that texting subtracts vital dimensions of imagery and physicality from the negotiation of very important human relationships. Now maybe this is exactly what Dina and Todd intend, but whether it is the best way for both of them to know what they ultimately want is less clear to me.

All of our more stream-lined forms of technological communications - texting, email, My Space - by removing the physical cues and tangible presence of the other person challenge the persistence of human contact in our memory banks and contribute to an increasing ephemeral quality of contemporary life. My Space with its instantaneous posting of pictures from recent events takes away the effort of recollection, the work that two friends or a group of friends might do in recreating the event depicted. The experience is displayed instead of relayed and this loss of memory's elbow grease takes away heft and definition from the body of experience.

What will happen to Dina and Todd is unclear, but one thing I fervently hope is that they sit down and talk to each other, or talk on the phone, or write thoughtful letters - Anything that will allow them to feel the presence of the other - bad or good - that will engage memory in order to acknowledge more fully the human dimensions of the other person whom they once claimed, and perhaps still claim, to love.

Reflections on the Woman Who Suffers from Total Recall

Jefferson Singer — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:05:33 +0000

Jill Price would be a completely unremarkable person except for the fact that she can remember every moment of her life since 1980. In her memoir, The Woman Who Can't Forget (www.amazon.com/Woman-Cant-Forget-Extraordinary-Science/dp/1416561765), published this year by Simon and Schuster, she describes her capacity to recall the details of any day in her life since the age of 14. Give her the date and within seconds, she is back on that specific day, be it a boring Sunday or a non-eventful Thursday. She can remember the trip to the corner store, the conversation with the postman, and the T.V. show she watched before falling asleep that night. Her exquisite memory for the details of her personal life as well as for public events that occurred on those same days is unique in the history of memory research. She has been studied extensively by researchers at the University of California - San Diego and the results of extensive clinical and neuropsychological testing were written up in a fascinating paper, published in Neurocase in 2006 (http://today.uci.edu/pdf/AJ_2006.pdf). The primary researchers, Larry Cahill and James McGaugh, along with the neuropsychologist, Elizabeth Parker, have dubbed this syndrome, hyperthymestic syndrome, which refers to an uncontrollable, automatic, and non-ceasing extraordinary recall of autobiographical memories from one's life.

Having read the Neurocase paper and listened to Ms. Price's personal accounts of her condition through radio interviews, I have some thoughts about what might be part of the explanation for her rare memory anomaly. First, it is extremely important to note that there are areas of memory in which Ms. Price is not at all extraordinary and even performing at levels considered to be below normal functioning. Ms. Price was not a great student. Her capacity for academic facts, equations and calculations in mathematics, and conceptual abstract thought are all unexceptional. In fact, the results of her psychological testing revealed that she has rather limited abstract abilities. For example, she scored extremely low on a test of Similarities (e.g., "An apple is to fruit as a table is to...). On other tests of memory in which recall of the remembered items required an ability to see a higher order linkage or abstract category that would allow for grouping or "chunking" of the items, she was also weak. The overall pattern of these and other test results along with her own self-report of her educational and career struggles point to ongoing limitations in an ability to make more complex abstractions and to see meaningful connections among both the events and ideas that have entered her mental life. As support for this contention about the deficit in her abstract reasoning, the Neurocase authors suggested that the pattern of her intellectual testing pointed to the kind of left pre-frontal cortex deficits that are seen in individuals with Asperger's and obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

In common with these other syndromes, what Jill Price's hyperthymestic syndrome seems to reflect is a deficit in an inhibitory function controlled by areas in the left pre-frontal cortex. This inhibitory function allows the brain to step back from physical and immediate detail and slot these details into larger units of meaning. For this abstracting process to occur, the brain needs to prioritize the flood of sensory-near experience and allow much of this information to recede into the deepest and most distant recesses of memory. It languishes there, if not forgotten, then certainly banished to a kind of Lethe-like obscurity. Think of this as similar to how a silhouette artist works. Starting with a full sheet of black paper, the trick is to cut away or remove pieces in order to achieve the final abstracted image of the individual's face. Most people's autobiographical memories work like this; we start with a more detailed account of a recent significant event and slowly over time whittle away more and more of the nuances as we hone our memory of the experience to the specific interactions and events that have retained emotional and personal significance for us. The rest of the memory is no more than the narrow dark scraps that are swept away as we settle upon our unique portrait of "the way things happened."

Not so for Jill Price. In the absence of this abstracting, self-organizing system of memory, which is really the part of autobiographical memory associated with meaning and self-definition (see my article on the self-memory system in autobiographical memory written with Martin Conway and Angela Tagini, published in Social Cognition in 2005; http://www.atypon-link.com/GPI/doi/abs/10.1521/soco.22.5.491.50768), she is using an extremely literal and inefficient strategy for organizing her memory. The absence of a meaning filtering mechanism means that she relies on a calendar-dating strategy for organizing all of her previous experiences. Imagine an immense filing cabinet that contains a unique file folder for every passing day. The events of that day are placed in that day's folder, labeled by that calendar day, and placed in the cabinet. The obsessional attention to achieving this feat is indeed awe-inspiring, but eventually one would feel like the sorcerer's apprentice, inundated with facts and dates that seem to have very little use. Despite her phenomenal memory with its legerdemain quality, it is indeed a painful burden to carry.

Jill Price has said that she would not want to change the way that she remembers because it is who she is and she could not imagine being another way. I can understand that having access to the vast scroll of her life events, she would not want to blot them out or lose her ability to review them. Still, it is clear to me why her approach to memory represents an extreme deviation from the typical unremarkable human memory system. The organization of memory by meaning and category rather than simple numerical dating is both more efficient for the social and interpersonal demands posed by a complex society and more fruitful in the cause of self-definition and understanding. Knowing what television show you watched on November 3rd, 1986 is a feat for bar bets and magic shows, but it tells you very little about the quality or the meaning of your life. Jill Price's unusual memory may be one of the best examples to illustrate the point that what we forget is just as important to knowing who we are as what we ultimately remember.

What Do You Remember of Your College Graduation?

Jefferson Singer — Mon, 12 May 2008 12:23:59 +0000

There is a Saucer Magnolia tree in front of the Psychology building at Connecticut College. Each May, its pink and white blossoms unfold to herald the beginning of spring. There is a quiet myth shared among the older faculty that on the last day of classes each year, the final blossom of that Magnolia will drop to the path below, and a short time after we will don our robes for Commencement. Two decades of these ceremonies have filled me with memories of posing with students, their smiling parents and fidgety younger siblings, of giving hugs and shaking hands, of realizing that many of these good-byes may indeed be permanent, that these youthful faces will be frozen in time for me. I will forever see them as they were at 21 and 22 years old - beautiful in their youth; confident, perhaps with a hint of fear, but impatient and eager to begin the rest of their lives.

When I think back to my own graduation, I see my memory of commencement from a different light, not the sepia-tinged nostalgia of the professor who can project his warmest wishes on even the most unashamed slacker that ever slept through a seminar. Thinking of my own graduation from Amherst College in the early 80s, I am once again inside that self-conscious overly sensitive skin of my own making - that mixture of deep insecurity and arrogance that made me at the time "moody" and "poetic," though I think I was mostly just confused. I don't think my confusion was out of the ordinary, and can't help but wonder how many other smiling graduates have their Dustin Hoffman moments of feeling dazed and directionless, swimming in a deep pool with no clear purpose to their labors.

I have a distinct and rather sad memory of my own graduation ceremony. When the speeches and marching had all ended, when the mortar boards had been thrown like Frisbees in the air and then retrieved, when all the families had re-united and started off toward the luncheon tent, I stood among the rapidly descending clean-up staff, craning my neck and baffled that my family had disappeared. We had made no meeting plan but the crowd was not that big and it seemed incomprehensible to me that my family (my parents, grandparents, and brothers) could not find me, especially as the throng of people thinned to a few final stragglers. My self-righteous anger stirred and I thought how typical of my absent-minded professor father to screw up my one big moment. How hard could it be to walk across a green and give me a brief handshake and say job well-done?

Finally giving up, I walked down the hill to the luncheon, assuming I would find them at a table, stuffing themselves with food (perhaps they might have saved me a seat, at least). When I did indeed find their table, I started to give my dad some pointed words about leaving me up there alone, the only graduate of the Class of ‘80 not to be greeted by a family member. My father listened and I could see that he felt pained by what I said, but I could see something more was on his mind. When I finished my mini-tantrum, he told me that his father had become scared and confused by the noise and the crowd, and they had decided to get him seated at the luncheon tables as soon as they could. This kind of anxiety was unusual for my grandfather, who was a quiet and easy-going man. I had not seen him in the last few months since I had been at school, but I saw something in his eyes that I had not ever seen before; there was a kind of blankness combined with a slightly nervous air. In the months ahead the depth of his Alzheimer's became readily apparent and we all came to realize how hard my grandmother had worked to hide his declining mental state from us all. I took my seat and gradually calmed down; soon friends stopped by with their parents and a kind of normalcy within the sequence of the day resumed.

Over the years I have recalled this memory with a mixture of sadness and embarrassment over my rather self-indulgent concern with the fact that the celebration of myself was delayed by some minutes. More importantly, I have come to see this last day of college as my first day of full membership in a web of responsibility - no longer a junior partner in adult society - my grandfather's frailty, my parents' fear, their own loss simultaneous with my triumph were not a distraction, a side story, an intrusion on my "glory;" they represented my real commencement into a world that asked more of me than my grades or awards or celebrations of success. My college days were over, and I was being reminded of the perpetual "inconvenience" of being a vulnerable and ephemeral human being. I was soon to see that each memory gained is linked to memories lost, each life ahead to lives that slip away. This memory of my momentary loneliness as I stood with my parents nowhere in sight was the most honest introduction that I could have had to what it really meant to start the rest of my complicated life. The world was going to be (as everyone's is) filled with pain and pleasure, and sometimes pain comes right at the moments when one anticipates the opposite. Adult life means learning that we must embrace this fact. This knowledge was both the cost and prize of graduation.

Men May Be from Mars, But At Least They Can Find Their Way Home

Jefferson Singer — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 14:08:19 +0000

New research has emerged that shows differences in men's vs. women's memories. These findings reinforce some of what we might have expected regarding which partner in a couple is going to be more likely to remember what the hostess looked like at the party and which one might be the better choice to find the way back home.In a very recent article in Current Directions in Psychological Science by Herlitz and Rehnman (2008), these researchers report that women show better memory for verbal material and for faces (especially other women's) and men have better spatial memories (e.g., for routes and directions).

In one of the more clever studies discussed in this research, men and women were presented with faces designed to look androgynous and were told the faces were either male, female, or simply faces. While men showed the same recall ability in all three conditions, women showed superior recall in the condition in which they thought they were recalling other women's faces. It turns out that all infants, male or female, show an advantage for remembering female faces, but over time males lose this bias, while females retain it. Yet women still surpass men in recalling any type of face, suggesting a greater social orientation in general. Women also remember word lists better and events or incidents from the last year more effectively than men. In a classic study, Ross and Holmberg (1990) showed that women had much more detailed memories than their male partners for their first meetings. However, when these women left the room, their partners showed marked improvement in their memories for the same encounter, suggesting that they rely on their female mates to do the heavy lifting when it comes to remembering social events.

Why do men have better spatial memory and women better facial, social and verbal memory? Researchers have not yet been able to disentangle the biological vs. social contributions, yet studies across Asian, European and North American cultures have found similar results. No studies of sex differences in episodic memory in South America or Africa have been reported in the literature yet. The authors discuss Herlitz's study of illiterate Bangladeshi women who tend not to venture very much or very far outside their homes. In contrast to the typical findings, they showed poorer recall than the Bangladeshi men for several kinds of social information. Yet, they still showed superiority on an episodic memory task in which a list of words was presented orally and later recalled. So culture may make important differences, but certain advantages may be biologically hard-wired.

After writing all this, I wonder why I have a better memory for the names of actors and actresses in films than my wife does. And why she is always the one reading the map when we head out on a trip? It is good to remember that studies find results on average and not for every person. That's what I will tell her the next time she reminds me that I am the one who always gets us lost.

Where are the Matzoh Balls of Yesterday Year?

Jefferson Singer — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 12:13:52 +0000

Where are the Matzoh Balls of Yesterday Years?

     This weekend the Jewish holiday of Passover has begun. As Jews around the world sit down to their seder meals, they begin an evening of ritual and the re-telling of the exodus from Egypt. Although there are periodic sips of wine as the story unfolds around the table, there is a long wait before the meal begins. Often the thick salty smell of Matzoh Ball soup pervades the dining room, and while the leader intones the next blessing, memories are stirred in a Proustian flood of images. How does smell memory work and why does it have this compelling emotional power?
     Thanks to some of the remarkable detective work of Linda Buck and her colleagues at Harvard University, we now have a much better sense of the intricacy and specificity of our memory for smells. When that matzoh ball is cooking in the other room, it is releasing vaporized molecules (no doubt heavy in sodium!) that waft up our nasal cavity, encountering hair-like olfactory receptors. Some of these receptors react uniquely to particular molecules and in other cases unique molecules activate several different receptors. These receptor messages (which could be considered like the alphabet or letters of smell) travel to the olfactory bulb that sits at about the level of the eyes at the threshold of the brain. Reaching two different receptor areas in the bulb, they combine into distinct patterns (the words of smell), which then travel through a single neural path (the most immediate and direct of all sensory systems) to the smell sensory cortex in the higher brain. Interestingly, and not at all unexpectedly, considering the power of smell to move us, this neuronal connection also finds its way to the limbic system, the older and more emotion-based part of the brain. At same time that our higher order thinking and our emotions are activated, connections to our hippocampus from both these areas have invoked memories linked to the smells. A few vaporized matzoh ball molecules have catapulted into an Armageddon of emotional memory. Proust understood this all when he wrote,
   After the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered...the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls...bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory. (cited from Pines, M., The mystery of smell: The vivid world of odors, retrieved from http://www.geiscollection.com/senses/d110.html, 4/20/08)
     So tonight, as you wait patiently for the soup to be served, think of those thousand of receptor cells spelling in a language of smell the seders of the past, filled with the faces of bubbes and zaydes, now long gone, but brought back in this moment when scent, thought, and feeling combine.

Meet the Beatles of your Memory

Jefferson Singer — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 01:36:37 +0000

Where do the Beatles fit in your personal memories? Do you have a favorite memory of hearing one of their songs, seeing one of their films, or of discussing which Beatle was your favorite? Now the English memory researcher, Martin Conway has created a website where you can log your memories.

     The address is www.magicalmemorytour.com and with a few questions answered, you can enter an account of your favorite Beatle-related memory. The website is a collaboration between the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA) and Drs. Martin Conway and Catriona Morrison of the University of Leeds. The results of the survey are available in different categories (e.g., songs, albums, films, news items) on the website and will displayed on a huge projection screen during the BA festival of Science in Liverpool from September 6 to 11, 2008.
     My own favorite memory is going to see the Beatles' film, "A Hard Day's Night" in 1964. I was only 5 years old and I got to sit on a pony outside the theater before the movie. Once we were in the theater, we never heard a single line of the film due to the non-stop screaming that commenced at the first scene of the "Fab Four" running from the crowds and did not stop until the credits began to roll at the end.
     It is nice to think that one of my best recent memories is sitting with my teen-aged daughters, watching "Across the Universe" and hearing my 18 year-old Olivia tell me that it was one of her favorite films.
So go to the website, submit your memory, and then copy it and paste it to this blog to share with us. Here is a sample memory to whet your appetite:

The first time I saw a picture of the Beatles was in a magazine, Glamour, I think - the same picture that was on the Meet the Beatles album. I was immediately drawn to their appearance - so cool, but then when "I Want To Hold Your Hand" hit the States, I knew I was in love. Their music not only defined me and my generation - it affected every aspect of my life, literally consumed me.

It Was a Most Memorable Night and Nothing Happened

Jefferson Singer — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 11:41:25 +0000

     Are some of the best days of our lives, the ones that we should burn most deeply into the long-term store of memory, also some of the most uneventful and uncomplicated ones? Should we make more of an effort to remember the quiet contented times along with the roller coaster rides of success and failure, heartbreak and triumphant love?
     As I got into bed last night, I thought about the dinner my wife and I had shared with our closest friends at a local restaurant in our town center. Both couples had walked from their homes to the restaurant. Something we almost take for granted, but is increasingly unusual in our driven world. The restaurant itself had changed its fare recently from a gimmick of "gourmet comfort food" to a straightforward healthy menu of more simply prepared and healthier food. After the dinner, I walked back to my friend's house and watched some of the NCAA tournament. When I came home, I found both of my teenaged daughters safely home from nights out with friends. Each of them was in good spirits and gave me a hug goodnight. I crawled into bed next to my wife who greeted me by rolling closer to me under the blankets. Before I gave myself over to sleep, I told myself to save this moment, to savor this night where the "undertoad" (from John Irving's "The World According to Garp") had mercifully been kept at bay and we were all, all four of us, O.K.
     One more thought - the words - "save" and "savor" - seem so close, but their meanings and etymologies are different yet, in a funny way, complementary. When we save something, we preserve and retain it. When we savor something, we take enjoyment from and relish in it. "Save" comes from the Old French, "Sauf," and from the Latin, "salvus" - safe, healthy and uninjured, but ultimately from the base of "sol," which means whole. To "savor" comes from the Latin, "sapere" - to taste, and is also related to "sapient," which means to be knowing, wise, and to have taste. And in these two different aspects of these words, we find the wisdom (and taste) to enjoy the solid (same root) moments of our lives. Through saving and savoring, we grasp the key to the gift and bliss of memory on a day that "nothing" happened.