A follow up to today’s earlier posting “turning point”; again, a lightly edited version of e-mail to family and caregivers.
Archive for the ‘Memory’ Category
turning point 2
July 30, 2026phantasia
April 21, 2026A brief notice.
A recent issue of the New Yorker recommends an earlier piece in the magazine, on an aspect of our mental lives, on mental imagery (experienced in the phenomenon of phantasia) — with which we can compare mental sounds (experienced in the phenomenon of auralia) — and how it works (or not) in different people:
Annals of Inquiry: “Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound: Research has linked the ability to visualize to a bewildering variety of human traits — how we experience trauma, hold grudges, and, above all, remember our lives” by Larissa MacFarquhar on 10/27/25 on-line; published in the print edition of the 11/3/25 issue, with the headline “Phantasia” — on aphantasia (lacking these mental perceptions) and hyperphantasia (having extraordinarily vivid mental perceptions), with considerable reporting on the lived experiences of aphantastics and hyperphantastics
More questions for anauralics
April 15, 2026Following up on my 4/13 posting “A host of voices”, on
an enormous amount of variability in the way mental imagery and mental sounds work, in different people and for different purposes
focusing on auralia, on hearing sounds in the mind, and on anauralia, its lack (in a small percentage of people), in various contexts:
in silent reading, in the voice of an internal adviser, in recollected speech or music, in auditory hallucinations, in speech or other sounds in dreams
I had my University of Arizona colleague Heidi Harley as an exemplary anauralic (while recognizing that each person has their own profile of mental-percept abilities); what she can tell us is important, beause it appeared then, and still does, that there’s not much research on mental sound (or mental imagery), in perceptually deficient subjects (anauralics, aphantastics) or even in perceiving (“normal”) subjects (auralics, phantastics), though it looks like there’s an enormous amount of variability.
Now: two further contexts to consider.
Three nights on the hormonal rollercoaster
March 4, 2026A journal of the nights of 3/1-2, 3/2-3, and (last night!) 3/3-4, during which I experienced the deepest lows and the greatest highs of hormone-driven states of being.
Meanwhile, somehow, the rest of life went on: washing up, getting my meals, ordering groceries and household supplies, mourning the deaths of old friends and admirable people, seeing doctors, getting exercise, scheduling appointments, writing blog postings, singing, fretting (pointlessly) about being completely uprooted and moved to an assisted living facility, getting income tax materials together, keeping in touch with friends (especially those in crisis or grieving, but just to renew connections going back as far as the 1940s), trying to recollect my work and activities in the 1960s (as intellectual history now potentially of significance), fending off assaults on me as an icon of DEI, answering e-mail, all while trying somehow to cope with the state of the world, which seems threatening to degrees once unimaginable, and in the face of grievous memory losses that will take months of labor to recover from (at the moment I am damaged goods, with a somewhat fried brain).
The three nights, expanding on notes I made at the time. (My memory for new things is very unsteady, so that I write stuff down. Then I have a huge pile of notes in which I have to find whatever it is that I need. So I have to try to remember where the relevant notes are. It’s all vexing, leading me to weep in frustration. But I persevere.) (more…)
Yummy grub from around the planet
November 12, 2025In full:
Thanks for all the good conversation and yummy grub from around the planet
My first report on a two-day visit from my old friend Ellen Kaisse, who flew in from Seattle to San Jose. Intended as help in my preparing to move to an assisted living facility — and we got some of that in — but for me it became mostly a wonderful time talking about our lives these days and trying to recover accurate memories of our pasts (so that there will be at least one more posting about the fragility and pliability of memory) — a vacation from my anxieties and sorrows, punctuated by three breaks for food (two lunches and one dinner), carefully chosen to be favorites of mine — I am now an experienced browser of restaurants for home delivery — that I was pretty sure Ellen had never had before and would also fit her dietary constraints (she doesn’t eat mammals).
This is the food report.
Memory, fragile and pliable
November 4, 2025It’s about two memories of mine.
One is from decades ago, about a phone call from Monique Serpette Transue, my man Jacques’s mother, confessing that her mother had pushed her into having the infant J baptized in the Roman Catholic Church, weeping that she had done something awful to J’s soul (fiercely anti-clerical, Monique was startlingly ignorant of the beliefs and practices of the church she didn’t adhere to). Or so I recalled the event in a 2022 posting.
The other is from reports in 2016 and 2025 of a 1970 visit to the linguistics program at what was then the University College of North Wales in Bangor, which had several members with the same, characteristically Welsh, name.
As I write here every few weeks, memory is fragile and undependable; from the beginning, in which our very perceptions are selective and skewed, influenced by expectation and experience, and then through years of fragmentation and loss and further skewings and extraneous intrusions from a host of sources; our memories are not only fragile, but also pliable. If we tell the same story every time — hardly anyone does — that’s because we’re producing a memorized performance (and it’s probably inaccurate). If we’re dead certain that we have the facts right, we’re almost surely getting them wrong. The literature is immense, and sobering.
So: two examples, with reflections on them.
American Chinese and Italian-American
August 19, 2025The trigger was the wonderful mixed seafood with tofu soup 海鲜豆腐汤 from the Amazing Wok in San Carlos, a couple weeks ago (and then several times since). which sent me back to lunches on my own in Reading PA roughly 75 years ago, after I was finished with the program of Saturday morning for boys at the Reading YMCA. I was then on my own in the city (browsing in stores, just walking the city, sometimes going to a movie, mostly ransacking the Reading Public Library), until late in the afternoon, when I went to my parents’ store on N. 5th St. — the Memo Shop, high-end costume jewelry — and the family did a little grocery shopping and my dad drove us the 4 miles home to West Lawn.
The lunches were sometimes sandwiches or other diner food at one of the lunch counters in town, but usually were Chinese (American) or Italian (American), at two little restaurants that I remember as being in basements on S. 6th St. (but these physical details are quite likely to have been altered in memory). There wasn’t room for a lot of menu adventure at either place. Typical lunches:
Chinese: egg drop soup or hot and sour soup; plus beef and broccoli, chow mein, or egg foo young
Italian: spaghetti and meatballs most often, sometimes veal parmesan or fettuccine Alfredo or a lunch special of the day
I had money from my parents to cover these cheap lunches, plus a 15% tip.
I don’t remember the decor at the Chinese place (probably minimal), but the Italian place had an impressive painting of what I recall as the Bay of Naples, with Mount Vesuvius in the background.
Tip of the tongue
July 24, 2025The briefest of shots. Following on my posting yesterday “A Monty Python formula pun”, Benita Bendon Campbell wrote to say that she has been reading The Autobiography of the Pythons by Chapman, Palin, Cleese, Gilliam, Idle, and Jones (originally published in 2003) and reports that in it, John Cleese goes on at length about Clump of Plinths, a successful Footlights Club show at Cambridge (pre-Python); he really loves that show.
Clump of Plinths is evocative of (I think) some Scots expression that’s distressingly on the tip of my tongue but is being blocked for me by Firth of Forth. Or maybe that memory of mine is an illusion. My mind is in a whirl.
Annals of diminutive /li/
July 26, 2024Just two days ago, it was (piecrust) crumblies. Now, Benita Bendon Campbell has sent me e-mail connecting crumblies to (garment) greeblies — which, as it turns out, I posted about on this blog way back in 2012. My personal experience with the two terms dates to the 1960s, and is bound up with my history with my late wife, Ann Daingerfield Zwicky (1937 – 1985); Bonnie (BBC) was Ann’s best friend (and has been a close friend of mine since 1960).