Latest news with #InSearchofLostTime
The Herald Scotland
30-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
This could be the last place you ever visit...
The chubby patient honestly replied: 'But that's never.' Talking bull As our regular readers know, the Diary is fascinated by the English language. Occasionally we've even attempted to communicate using it, though we don't recommend that amateur linguists should stumble into such a thorny forest, where wolfish nouns and ravenous adjectives are lurking. Diary correspondent Campbell Thompson informs us of the definition of the word 'avoidable'. 'It's what a matador attempts to do,' reports Campbell. Clocking off We sympathise with this comment on social media from Glasgow actor, musician and one-time River City fan-favourite Tom Urie: '1985: I can't wait to see what the world looks like in 40 years! 2025: I miss 1985.' Phoney message We continue with our tales of time travel. (See above.) This time we're spinning and whirling backwards through the decades, instead of forward. In yesterday's Diary we mentioned a poor teenager who was left feeling bereft when his phone ran out of charge while he was no where near a plug socket. We are now told that whenever this happens to the teenage daughter of reader Debbie Harvey, she says to the grieving youngster in the sing-song tones of an aeroplane pilot: 'Welcome to the year 1999. Please enjoy your stay.' Debbie's daughter does not find this amusing. Not in the least. Donkey days Time Travel: Chapter 3. The Diary is celebrating the pungent smells of childhood that instantly take us back to the glorious days of our readers' youth. (Very much in the same way that nibbling on a madeleine cake transported the narrator of Marcel Proust's magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time, back to his formative years.) Bert Houliston says: 'The scents from my childhood in Saltcoats would have to include Granpaw's Jaicket, a heady mixture of stale pipe tobacco, spilt beer, and spittle laced with mint imperials. 'Also Wet Dug; Seaside Donkey; and the Midden at Twilight.' Handy advice Dire warning of the day from reader Frank Gunn, who gets in touch to say: 'I don't care how wonderful the hand soap smells, you should never walk out of a bathroom smelling your fingers.' Glass glancing Staring out his living room window the other morning, reader Samuel Booth concluded: 'Looks like we're in for a bad spell of wheather.'
New York Post
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Byron Buxton finally living up to his fantasy baseball potential should no longer be ignored
Imagine getting to the theme park you'd been dreaming of going to since you were a child, only to find out that it's closed for maintenance from an animatronic moose. You'd be devastated. You may even punch that moose. Now imagine this park was in a place called Buxton, Minn. (not a real place), and you've been trying to go every year since 2015. Every time you go, it's closed for maintenance. Eventually, your desire to visit dissipates, since it always ends in disappointment. Roto Rage believes one more sojourn to Buxton's Theme Park could be worth it. All the rides are functioning, and it's the 10th anniversary of its opening. Advertisement No one has ever disputed Byron Buxton's talent. His biggest downfall always has been an injury history that makes 'In Search of Lost Time' by Marcel Proust look like a short story.
National Geographic
17-06-2025
- Health
- National Geographic
How smelling roses could help you make stronger memories
If hearing an old song or getting a whiff of freshly sharpened pencils instantly carries you back to high school, you're familiar with the link between your senses and memory. When a sensory experience spontaneously evokes an autobiographical memory, it's often called the Proust Effect, named for French author Marcel Proust who described how the experience of eating a madeleine instantly transported him back to childhood in his novel In Search of Lost Time. 'The senses are critical for memory because they're at the intersection between our environment, our experiences, and our memory system,' says Susanne Jaeggi, a professor of psychology, applied psychology, and music and co-director of the Brain Game Center for Mental Fitness and Well-Being at Northeastern University in Boston. But you don't have to wait for that random waft of pencil shavings to conjure your school days. By actively focusing on your senses during important moments, you may actually be able to improve your long-term memory. And even if you're not trying to remember a specific moment or experience, strengthening your senses will boost your memory overall. Here's how your primary senses influence memory—and what experts say you can do to hone them. The links between memory and the senses in your brain First, some background: On a basic physiological level, the parts of the brain that process smell, sight, sound, taste, touch, and memories are neurologically linked. When you're exposed to a particular sight, sound, or smell, your senses generate electrochemical activity—with brain cells firing, typically in the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for memory and learning, explains Andrew Budson, a professor of neurology at the Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and coauthor of the book Why We Forget and How to Remember Better. These signals are transmitted to the hippocampus, which then 'takes separate sights, sounds, smells, thoughts, and feelings and binds them together into something coherent,' he explains. Meanwhile, the brain's amygdala adds emotion to the experience, and another part of the hippocampus tags this information so it can be retrieved for years to come. 'One of the ways a memory can be tagged as important is if it had a strong sensation such as a strong smell or beautiful image associated with it,' says Budson. 'That tells the brain to hold onto the information for a long time.' When information is experienced across multiple senses—for example, if you see and smell an apple pie as it comes out of your grandmother's oven—it has a higher chance of being remembered, Jaeggi says, because 'you have different pathways for accessing it later.' Indeed, research has found that multisensory learning improves memory by creating what's known as a 'memory engram'—a physical trace or imprint of a memory in the brain—across different sensory areas in the brain. 'There's a myth that some people learn best with visual stimuli and others with auditory stimuli,' says Budson, who's also chief of cognitive behavioral neurology at the VA Boston Healthcare System. 'The truth is, we all learn best when we have a multisensory experience because we're literally storing that memory in multiple areas of the brain that are associated with those senses.' Different areas of the brain play a role in sensory processing and memory formation. There are two hemispheres in the brain, each of which contains four main lobes: • The frontal lobes help control thinking and short-term memory, as well as voluntary movements and emotion regulation; • the parietal lobes process and integrate sensory information, including taste, texture, and temperature; • the temporal lobes are involved in auditory processing and spatial and visual perception; • and the occipital lobes process and interpret visual information from your eyes. Sight has might As human beings, 'we are very visually oriented,' says Jonathan Schooler, a cognitive psychologist and professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of California Santa Barbara. 'You can recognize a smell but it's hard to recall a smell. It's easy to conjure an image in your mind. While people often think vision happens in the eyes, what you see is actually processed in the occipital lobes, the parietal lobes, and the temporal lobes of the brain. 'Vision is the largest sense in terms of brain real estate,' Budson explains. Not surprisingly, research has found that visual long-term memory 'has a massive storage capacity' for details. Visual memory also can help you remember people and places—and it's flexible. In a study in a 2023 issue of Current Biology, researchers demonstrated that visual memories are the result of neural codes that evolve over time so that people can use that information to guide their behavior in the future. For example, if you make a list of groceries to buy but forget to bring it to the store, the process of having written it down and reviewed it will help you remember what you need. TIP: Zoom in on the details. If you train your eyes and mind to pay better attention to visual stimuli, studies have shown it can improve accuracy and efficiency in recalling visual information. If you're gazing at a scene in nature or a painting in a gallery, home in on the colors and textures to help you remember it better. (Learn what makes a photo memorable.) Hearing provides a soundtrack Although it's unclear why, scientists have found that auditory memory—the ability to remember information that's presented orally—tends to be less robust than visual memory. But there are exceptions: A study in a 2021 issue of the journal Psychological Research found that musicians have specific advantages when it comes to remembering sequences of sound patterns. These include the variations in pitch associated with speech (based on intonations or inflections) as well as changes in frequency of other sounds. This makes sense because remembering sound variations is important to musicians. A similar principle applies to important moments in real life for non-musicians: You might remember what song was playing when you met the love of your life or the lyrics to a song you played nonstop in high school because they mattered to you. 'A lot of what we remember has to do with the [subjective] importance of the information we're processing—the fact that it is important or interesting to us,' Jaeggi says. TIP: Break down the sound into separate parts. Auditory training—training your mind to listen actively to sounds and make distinctions between them—has been shown to improve working memory, attention, and communication among adults with mild hearing loss. So if you hear a great song that you want to remember to add to Spotify later, try to pick out certain instruments or rhythms in the piece. Smell conjures emotions If the smell of fresh-cut grass or campfires reminds you of your childhood, you're in good company. In 2021, a study conducted in Japan found that exposure to particular scents—such as tatami (Japanese straw mat), osmanthus flower, baby powder, citrus, and incense—elicited vivid, autobiographical memories, causing participants to feel as though they were 'being brought back in time.' 'No other sensory system is linked to the neural hub of emotion, learning, and memory, the way smell is,' says Rachel Herz, a neuroscientist and adjunct assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and human behavior at the Brown University Medical School. The primary olfactory cortex resides where the amygdala and the hippocampus meet—"that's where the conscious perception of smell occurs,' Herz says, and it's the area that modulates learning and memory. A study in the journal Memory found that olfactory cues are more effective than visual cues at helping people recall memories from childhood. 'If you smell an odor, it's a great way to unlock a memory,' says Lila Davachi, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Columbia University in New York City. TIP: Stop and smell the roses, the freesias—and the rest of your surroundings. A 2023 review of the medical literature found that olfactory training (a.k.a., smell retraining) is associated with improved cognition and memory. 'Good olfactory function is important for healthy brain aging,' says Herz, author of Why You Eat What You Eat: The Science Behind Our Relationship With Food. This is why Herz recommends engaging in smell training: Spend a few minutes every day smelling different things in your home such as spices, personal care products, perfumes, candles, or foods: 'Focus on what you're smelling and think about what it reminds you of,' she suggests. Taste the moment Believe it or not, there's something called gustatory working memory—the ability to remember a particular taste even after you're exposed to other tastes. With gustatory memory, taste information detected by your taste buds travels to the gustatory cortex, located within the cerebral cortex in the brain. There, it's processed and interpreted; then, the taste signals are transmitted to other brain regions, including the amygdala which plays a vital role in emotional responses and memory formation. Taste memory allows you to anticipate the taste of particular foods simply by looking at them, which helps you choose the foods you like and avoid those you don't. Keep in mind that your sense of taste doesn't work alone: 'When we talk about flavor, it comes from what's in our mouth but also [from] the volatile chemicals from what we're eating or drinking migrating up to the nose,' says Pamela Dalton, an olfactory scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. While it's widely claimed that between 75 and 95 percent of what we perceive to be taste actually comes from the sense of smell, a precise percentage has been hard to prove; even so, many researchers agree 'that olfaction plays a 'dominant' role in the tasting of food.' TIP: Eat a wide variety of foods—and describe them to lock in the experience. A study in a 2022 issue of Nature found that healthy adults who engaged in taste recall training became better at recognizing and recalling sweet, salty, sour, and bitter tastes they'd previously been exposed to. To improve your gustatory memory, treat yourself to a range of these different taste sensations. Focus on the flavors and the way the foods feel in your mouth—then describe them in words. While drinking wine, Budson recommends focusing on the various flavors and sensations on your tongue. Get a feel for things Most people don't think of memories related to the sense of touch—often called tactile memory—but research shows that people are remarkably adept at storing and recalling memories of how objects feel. 'Touch sensations are processed in the parietal lobes, close to the frontal lobes and next to the movement processing area,' Budson says. This allows you to integrate the experiences of touch and movement in ways that help orient you and navigate your surroundings—which is why you can hold a cup of coffee without looking at it or spilling it. TIP: Channel your inner preschooler and make time for sensory play. Research has found that engaging in tactile memory training can improve sustained attention and working memory. You can do this at home by running your fingers through bowls of water, rice, and dried beans and noting the differences in how they feel. You could also try making shapes with clay while focusing on the way it feels in your hands. If you pay attention to sensations that feel good or uncomfortable, it can help you make wise choices in the future. For example, if you take note of the discomfort you feel in a roughly textured shirt, it'll help you remember not to buy clothes in the same fabric in the future. Your tactile memory can also help you decide if a tote bag you've loaded up is going to hurt your hand or shoulder, based on previous experience. Ultimately, strengthening your senses and your memory is all about paying attention to the world around you, Schooler says. He recommends engaging in breath-focused meditation, using your breath to anchor your attention, then shifting your focus to whatever sights, smells, or sounds are arising. Herz agrees: 'The more attention you pay to anything—and attention is multisensory—the more it will reinforce whatever information you're encoding in your brain.' This article is part of Your Memory, Rewired, a National Geographic exploration into the fuzzy, fascinating frontiers of memory science—including advice on how to make your own memory more powerful. Learn more.
Wall Street Journal
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
Fiction: Antonio Muñoz Molina's ‘Your Steps on the Stairs'
What is the saddest sentence in literature? My candidate comes from the second volume of Marcel Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time': 'We construct our lives for one person, and when at length it is ready to receive her that person does not come; presently she is dead to us, and we live on, prisoners within the walls which were intended only for her.' In Antonio Muñoz Molina's 'Your Steps on the Stairs' the narrator—he is unnamed until the book's final pages—is in Lisbon, preparing his new apartment for the arrival of his wife, Cecilia. The couple lived together in New York City until the narrator lost his corporate job for reasons he leaves murky. Suffice it to say that he is happy to enter early retirement in a beautiful new city with his dog and the woman he loves. So he hires a handyman to make countless improvements that will ensure Cecilia's comfort. Meanwhile he settles in to practice the 'craft' of waiting. He cleans; he reads (ominously, his book of choice is the polar explorer Richard Byrd's survival memoir, 'Alone'). To sharpen his anticipation, he sometimes lays out two settings at the dinner table. 'There's a moment when waiting reaches a kind of chemical purity,' he says. 'It's when I sit by the window and do nothing but wait.' In a cool, controlled translation from the Spanish by Curtis Bauer, 'Your Steps on the Stairs' builds to a crescendo of suspense by enveloping the reader in the narrator's memories, obsessions and, it becomes increasingly clear, delusions. Though the absent Cecilia is enigmatic, we learn that she works as a neuroscientist, which allows Mr. Muñoz Molina to reflect on optical illusions and 'cognitive mirages.' As the narrator's unreliability becomes more pronounced, his grip on reality loosens and the story slides toward the outermost limits of self-deception. This novel possesses the eerie melancholy of a work of crime noir, where the nemesis is some truth too intolerable to face with open eyes.
Yahoo
07-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
A New Kind of ‘Illness Realism'
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. Illness and literature have frequently been bedfellows. Tuberculosis, for example, shortened the life and influenced the work of authors as varied as Robert Louis Stevenson, Franz Kafka, and the Brontë sisters. We can't know what In Search of Lost Time would have looked like if a variety of ailments had not left Marcel Proust in his bed during his youth. To infer that sickness begets literature would be misleading—perhaps even dangerous. But once in a while, it forces a writer to undergo a radical artistic transformation—one so serious that they might reconsider what books can do. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic's Books section: What Christopher Hitchens understood about the Parthenon The modern voice of war writing A novelist who looks into the dark This week, Hillary Kelly wrote for The Atlantic about a visit with Hanif Kureishi, the award-winning British author who, in 2022, at age 68, began to feel faint and lost consciousness. When he awoke in a hospital, he learned that he had broken his neck, and was paraplegic. Kureishi was already well established before his debilitating injury. In fact, he confessed to Kelly, he believes success had made him too comfortable. 'I was happy having a good life,' he said. 'I thought, Fuck it. Why should I spend all day working? … I didn't have much of a desire to write anymore.' But after his fall, beginning in his first days in the hospital, Kureishi started to write furiously. A flurry of social-media posts earned him sympathy and admiration for his truth-telling. Over two years of immobility and constant care, that intensity has not abated. A new book, Shattered, collects essays from his first year. In defining what's new about the book's 'illness realism,' Kelly draws on Virginia Woolf, another writer who faced serious health challenges. In On Being Ill, Woolf wrote that 'things are said, truths blurted out' on the sickbed 'which the cautious respectability of health conceals.' Kureishi, Kelly writes, conveys these truths unvarnished: 'He has no distance from himself or his condition, and refuses to add any.' Kureishi told Kelly that he hasn't been able to read since his fall; he hasn't even read his own book. Last week in The Atlantic, Kristen Martin wrote about another unusual memoir that presents a very different example of how a health emergency can rewire an author's work. Sarah Chihaya's Bibliophobia is, Martin writes, 'an account of how her reliance on books played a major role in a crisis, leading her, for a time, to fear them.' In 2019, after a lifetime of devoted reading, Chihaya was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward, after which she found herself unable to read (or to write the book that would secure her tenure as a Princeton professor). What eventually helped her emerge—and to write this memoir—was a diagnosis of major depressive disorder, which provided 'a new plot for her life, based in reality rather than fiction.' Writing—of a new, almost unbearably honest kind—seemed to have helped both of these authors communicate intensely isolating experiences to readers. For the ill person, Woolf wrote, 'the whole landscape of life lies remote and fair, like the shore seen from a ship far out at sea.' Yet that seascape, too, belongs to life; most readers find themselves there at some point. And an author may teach them how to navigate the tides. Hanif Kureishi's Relentlessly Revealing Memoir By Hillary Kelly How a tragic accident helped the author find his rebellious voice again Read the full article. , by Sarah Viren At first, To Name the Bigger Lie seems like a straightforward coming-of-age story. As a high-school student in 1990s Tampa, Florida, Viren falls under the sway of her charismatic teacher Dr. Whiles, who is intent on pushing his students to question the nature of the truth. His pedagogy involves exposing his class, often uncritically, to conspiracy theories that include Holocaust denialism. Years later, in 2016, Viren sets out to write a book that treats that period in her life as an allegory for the rise of fascism in the United States. But, partway through the writing, her wife—an academic, like Viren—is falsely accused of sexual harassment, and the ensuing Title IX investigation becomes part of Viren's narrative. The surprising convergences that Viren finds between the case and Dr. Whiles's teaching—both of which turn out to be fraught, harmful ways of trying to access the truth—culminate in a chilling interrogation of the fact-finding methods that our institutions rely on. — Tajja Isen From our list: Read these books—just trust us 📚 You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip, by Kelsey McKinney 📚 Loca, by Alejandro Heredia 📚 Blood Ties, by Jo Nesbø The Dictatorship of the Engineer By Franklin Foer Despite this history of failure, Americans haven't shaken the hope that some benevolent, hyperrational leader, immune to the temptations of political power, will step in to redesign the nation, to solve the problems that politicians can't. That hope is unbreakable, because American culture invests engineers with the aura of wizardry. This is true for Elon Musk. For years, the media glorified him as a magician who harnessed the power of the sun, who revived the American space program, who rescued the electric car. Given that hagiographic press, some of it deserved, he could easily believe in his own ability to fix the American government—and think that a large chunk of the nation would believe that, too. Read the full article. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Explore all of our newsletters. Article originally published at The Atlantic
