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#memory

5 posts5 participants1 post today

Today I was able to recall and correctly use the word "subtend," which was precisely the word I needed and one I probably last heard from the mouth of my geometry teacher Mr. Morris in 1977.

It took a good 3 minutes of just sitting there, feeling the shape of the meaning in my belly, picturing it, and moving my lips ineffectually hoping they'd sense just a small recognizable piece of the word poking out of the dark ocean floor.

And then there it was.

Please celebrate with me. 🥳
#memory

Do #fish have something like intangible #culturalHeritage?

#Herring used to feed in northern Norway and migrate south (>1000km) to spawn. A few years ago they abruptly stopped doing that.
The authors of a new study think older adults were overfished and didn't "teach" younger fish to migrate: nature.com/articles/s41586-025

NatureHerring spawned poleward following fishery-induced collective memory loss - NatureA critically low abundance of older herring due to age-selective fisheries resulted in an approximately 800-km poleward shift in main spawning.

#SlimeMold #memory #consciousness

"Memories without brains

Certain slime moulds can make decisions, solve mazes and remember things. What can we learn from the blob?

(. . .)

The differences between P polycephalum and humans may seem vast, but slime mould can reveal a remarkable amount about various aspects of how we remember. While many people might assume that our memories are primarily stored within our brains, some philosophers like myself argue that – along with some other aspects of cognition – memory can extend beyond the confines of the body to involve coupled interaction with structures in the environment. At least some of our cognitive processes, in short, loop out into our surroundings. Slime mould is an intriguing candidate to explore this idea because it doesn’t have a brain at all, yet in some cases can apparently ‘remember’ things without needing to store those associated memories within itself. In other cases, memories acquired via learning by one individual can even be acquired by a separate individual through physical contact. The behaviour of this strange form of life suggests that some of our ideas about how memories are acquired may need a rethink.

(. . .)

Once on the verge of being forgotten, P polycephalum is now recognised as a valuable model organism in behavioral biology. Some researchers have even explored it as an unconventional computer, showing how it could perform processing tasks and mimic electronic components.

But how can an apparently simple organism like a slime mould remember?

Wherever they migrate, Physarum plasmodia leave behind extracellular slime trails – a non-living mucopolysaccharide. In the wild, you’d most commonly find these trails in areas that a slime mould has already foraged and, hence, which are depleted of food. In principle, encountering the stuff could therefore tell the slime mould something about the availability of food in the area – but is extracellular slime used as a memory trace?

(. . .)

Reid and colleagues hypothesised that if Physarum uses extracellular slime as a memory trace of previously explored and likely food-depleted areas, then the plasmodia that encounter trails in the coated condition should take a significantly longer amount of time to reach the goal than in the blank condition. In the wild, an environmental record of an area already foraged and exhausted would be useful: it would tell a Physarum to look elsewhere. But with this particular experimental design, the researchers figured that fully coating the agar surface with extracellular slime would slow navigation because this uniformly coated surface would render the Physarum’s own slime trails largely undifferentiated and therefore useless. In contrast, plasmodia on blank surfaces could lay down and use their own distinct slime trails, creating a differentiated spatial map that allowed them to avoid revisiting previously explored areas.

And this is precisely what they found. Plasmodia in the coated condition took 10 times longer to reach the goal than the other plasmodia in the blank condition did. In this case, extracellular slime wasn’t exactly helping the organism, but it did show the researchers that it was using it as a memory trace."

aeon.co/essays/what-can-slime-

<p><em>Physarum Polycephalum</em>. Photo by Stephane de Sakutin/AFP/Getty Images</p>
AeonWhat can slime mould teach us about biological memory? | Aeon EssaysCertain slime moulds can make decisions, solve mazes and remember things. What can we learn from the blob?

my childhood home, as it appeared yesterday. A = the family room, originally a garage, remodeled by my dad. B = my brother's bedroom. C = the bedroom my sister and I shared. D = where the big old paper birch tree used to be, but isn't anymore, and that is sad and makes the yard forlorn.

Oh, and the rental car claimed it was 106F here, at about 2pm.

I read a novel in April two years ago. Now I'm reading the sequel, and I realise that I have almost no #memory of what happened in the first book. That's a little scary. But I do remember the contents of several other books that I read at that time. So maybe the problem is with the book, even though I enjoyed it according to my notes.

#PetLoss #memory #cat

1 year has gone by. I miss you.
There are more emotions inside of me than I’ll ever be able to express in a lifetime.

18 years with you, 1 without.

Grief is a complex process, some days are better than others.

Love you and miss you so dearly my sweet Patchy Mac. :ablobcatheart:

Looking forward to next week's #Memory Studies Association conference in Prague.

I'm on a Day 3 panel called "Layers of American Memory" w Alison Landberg (George Mason), Christina Simko (Williams), and Jeffrey Olick (U. Virginia).

The title of my talk (something I've written about here) is: "America 250: The U.S. Semiquincentennial and Instrumental Uses of Historical Memory in an Era of Political Polarization."

Anyone else going? @histodons

LIVE, Dammit Bluesky Blog

#YESquotes: Fires In the Dark/ Kay R. Jamison - "To write abt #war was to shape its #terror & futility into something that cd be grasped & its #memory to a point controlled...the debt to the dead was to remember & carry the message fwd. Nations as well as individuals #grieved" #Trauma bit.ly/4kjxuWd

LINK: bsky.app/profile/livedammit.bs

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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #livedammit #suicide

Bluesky Social · LIVEdammit (@livedammit.bsky.social)#YESquotes: Fires In the Dark/ Kay R. Jamison - "To write abt #war was to shape its #terror & futility into something that cd be grasped & its #memory to a point controlled...the debt to the dead was to remember & carry the message fwd. Nations as well as individuals #grieved" #Trauma bit.ly/4kjxuWd