#memory

#memory

It's a question David Ewalt, Scientific American's editor in chief, was tasked with tackling long ago, where he was forced to look at memory, human connection and technology in a way that asked deeper questions about how we preserve information in the digital age and what it means to come into contact with our past selves. Hi, David. David Ewalt: Hi, it's nice to join you.

Back to selectionEvery Contact Leaves a Trace, its title alluding to a basic principle of forensic science, is the latest cinematic exploration from experimental filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs. Pairing this concept with seven (of the 600) business cards she's collected over the years, Sachs embarks on an investigation into "how an encounter with someone seeps into your way of thinking" (as she explains in a VO that runs throughout the film).

I remember opening our bounty of wedding gifts vividly. Ten years ago, right after our wedding, my husband and I road-tripped to New Orleans for our honeymoon, and we passed the time on the road by opening a gift every hour or so. With every bit of tissue paper, we felt like the most well-loved people in the world. Friends and family gave us so many of the things we needed to set up our home and start our family. I thought for sure that every single kind gesture would be bright in my mind forever, but it turns out that many of the specifics of those gifts have faded and been replaced by the feeling of the warm glow of support I felt opening them, as my mind has filled up with 10 more years of life.

Winston really pays tribute to the word 'morph', as his process involves printing images onto clay which he then shapes and photographs frame by frame to create a "sense of shifting, tactile movement", turning into bizarre animations that sometimes look like the evolution of brand new life forms. Focusing on memory, found imagery and the "tension between analog imperfection and digital control", his subjects bloom and curdle into lumpy clay creatures, some resembling people, others resembling plants in tendril-like movements.

People ask me sometimes, "What do you think about out there?"-usually with a curious look, as if pedaling for hours must feel like watching paint dry. But it's not like that at all. The longer the ride, the more my mind opens up. The road doesn't bore me-it speaks to me. It quiets the noise of everyday life and lets the thoughts that matter most rise to the surface.

Los Angeles-based photographer Kaitlin Maxwell was raised in South Florida and experienced the passing of her father at a young age. Photography has been a way for Maxwell to navigate the world, find meaning and a sense of identity. Using natural light and a medium format film camera, Maxwell's practice is an intimate study of the human condition, rooted in a desire to understand what it means to be seen.

A tattoo is an indelible mark, a permanent etching of a memory or a belief onto the body. We apply this concept to stuffed animals, which are often deeply intertwined with our personal histories. Through interviews with the owners, we uncover the unique stories and memories associated with each toy-where it came from, what it has witnessed. A tattoo artist then translates these narratives into a custom embroidery design.

Zeng was born in China and began studying Visual Communication at Shanghai Normal University in 2015. After working as a freelance artist and designer, Zeng moved to Germany to study at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. His artistic interest lies in the boundaries between documentary and fiction, and the self-referential nature of memory. "the internal crusade" is a reflection of Zeng's upbringing and education.

Anthropic is now making the memory feature in Claude available to all Pro and Max users. The feature remembers projects and preferences, so you don't have to explain the same context every time. Anthropic is also introducing an incognito mode. The rollout means that Claude can retain context between sessions. The memory function was initially only available to Team and Enterprise users since its announcement in early September. Now, all paid users have access.

Anthropic says the goal is "complete transparency." Users will be able to clearly see what Claude remembers rather than "vague summaries," it said. Specific memories can also be toggled on and off or edited with natural conversation. For example, you could tell Claude to focus on specific memories or "forget an old job entirely." Users can also create "distinct memory spaces" that will keep various memories apart.

Tell me about what you had for dinner last night. There are different ways you could fill in the details of that story. You could give perceptual descriptions of how your food looked and tasted. Or you could focus more on conceptual experiences, such as what that food made you think and feel. In a new brain scan study, neuroscientists found that telling the same story different ways activates different memory mechanisms in the listener's brain, shaping how someone remembers what you told them.

The brain generates rhythms naturally. One way to confirm this is to record the brain's electrical activity. This electrical activity results from the passage of ions (particles with positive or negative charge, such as sodium and chloride, the components of salt) across brain cell membranes. EEG (electroencephalography), a painless and harmless technique using wires (electrodes) placed on the scalp to record this activity, has been around for nearly a century. EEG reveals that much of a healthy brain's electrical activity is rhythmic, not random.

My entire education, everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised: I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience.

At the sixth edition of the Aichi Triennale, which opened in Japan in September, wars and their effects loom large. The exhibition's title, A Time Between Ashes and Roses (until 30 November), comes from a line in a poem by the Syrian poet Adonis about the cycle of destruction and rebirth, observed through nature. It resonates throughout this year's event, where war, displacement, memory and the natural world are interwoven across venues in Aichi Prefecture, located to the west of Tokyo.

In "Consuming Place: Women, Wine and Imagination," Janine Aujard examined how women in England and Australia experience wine drinking not just as a gustatory pleasure, but as a medium for engaging with place, memory, identity, and imagination. She frames wine consumption as a cultural practice that allows women to "consume" spatial and temporal dimensions. In effect, they are drinking more than wine: They imbibe ideas of place, belonging, and time.

almost seen is an invitation

Memory - like cinema, in Andrei Tarkovsky's conception of the form - can be seen as a kind of "sculpting in time". In such an understanding of the term, the process of remembering is less like taking books from a neatly ordered library shelf and more like an act of creation in and of itself, a complex pulling of threads to produce an image that is true only insofar as it expresses something deep about its maker's subconscious.

memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.

You have a radio head tattoo on the back of your neck. We both lived on s.e. 28th ave. We spent only one night together but I saw you months later in the frozen food section at Fred Meyer and you were pregnant. Was it mine? This was over 10 years ago. I'm in my late 40s now and never had any children. Just curious. I don't even remember your name anymore as it's been so long.

The social aspect of music may be beneficial for your brain, too. Corbett also told Newsweek that the singers in the study had better complex task completion as they aged. But the study noted that the benefits that come with singing may also have to do with the social connections that are formed when singing with a choir or in a group setting. "Music doesn't usually happen in isolation," Fesharaki-Zadeh said. Think about it: Music is often played in a group, practiced with a teacher or performed for other people. That social interaction is one of those protective factors for brain health, he added.

The Grid, which challenges users to Remember A Guy that fits into various different categories every day, delivered an efficient if sometimes maddening way to scratch a mental itch that has been with me for more or less my whole life. At the very least, I'll generally do one in the morning to wake my brain up, and while I'm not sure that thinking about what teams Mike Fetters played for before breakfast is right for everyone, it absolutely works for me.

These researchers explored the influence of forgiveness on the memories of victims and perpetrators of a wrong. In particular, they explored whether forgiveness affects people's ability to remember the details of past events, whether they can remember the emotions they experienced in that past event, and also whether that memory still elicits an emotion. Across several studies, participants were given a prompt to remember a past event.

Our past gains meaning through the stories we choose to tell ourselves. Memories are not fixed; they can be reshaped and reconsolidated. Changing stories frees us to pursue purpose and joy in the present.

I saw John, still alive, moving on the ground, but I realized I couldn't take that photo of someone who was dying—it didn't feel right, he recalls.

When we think of 'digital product design', it's tempting to frame it in terms of usability, engagement, or revenue. But those are surface-level outputs. Underneath, design decisions are time-shaping mechanisms.

Eden dresses in a blue gingham pinafore reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, suggesting a journey or pilgrimage theme explored in Kotting's works.

I remember my voice entering the blend, the anonymous shallows clean and barely rippling, or sharing a duet with Krista, a bent harmony, our first altos meeting and crossing like a pair of notched sticks.