Candy Coated Memory

Recently in my Neurobiology class I’ve been teaching the students about the neural mechanisms underlying learning and memory. The ways we can learn names, faces, and dates and evoke things long forgotten from our childhood. The ways that we form neocortical assemblies behind the things we remember, where a whisper of a perfume or a few notes of a song can trigger recall of the entire memory. T here is something remarkable about the way we can attach ourselves to the past. Remember sequences of events. Stitch seemingly insignificant things together. And it doesn’t take much for an entire memory to come a tumbling back. When I was young I had a...