Learn a bit about #memory retrieval and how the #brain hides our cherished treasures - http://clapway.com/2015/08/19/your-brain-hides-memories-but-you-can-restore-them-342/

While we all have memories, some of those memories, especially ones that are particularly traumatic, are hidden from us by our own brains. In a way, this protective mechanism of being unable to recall stressful memories prevents us from experiencing the emotional pain associated with the memory. But what if we need to face them? How can we get these memories back?

A new study published in Nature Neuroscience has explained the process of state-dependent learning and how it affects our memories — or lack thereof — thanks to our brain’s protective instincts.

Memories Formed In Particular States Can Only Be Accessed In A Similar State

Our brains may hide our emotionally painful memories, but the repression of these memories can manifest themselves as mood disorders, including anxiety, depression, and PTSD.

What happens when we have a traumatic experience is that our brains are still recording, but they are within a specific type of recording category known as state-dependent learning. The study researchers have found that those memories that are formed within a specific state of mind (be it fear-induced or drug-induced) are best retrieved when the brain has returned to that similar state.

Key author of the study Jelena Radulovic of Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine explains that this important finding may lead to better treatments for patients suffering psychiatric disorders who need to face their traumatic memories in order to recover.

So how are memories formed? If you can’t remember, read this!

Meet The Neurotransmitters that aid your Memories

There are two main amino acids in your brain that are the neurotransmitters that control your nerves. Meet glutamate and GABA receptors!

Glutamate stimulates your nerves, while GABA calms them. They act as opposing forces to help balance your brain function: one excites your nerves when the time is right, the other inhibits them when you need to chill. But in certain overstimulating situations, our glutamate spikes, which wouldn’t be a terrible problem except it’s also the main chemical needed to store memories for easy retrieval.

Now, GABA is interesting because there are two kinds of GABA receptors. The first is the balancing receptor to glutamate, while the other has a different role. These extra-synaptic GABA, as they are known, primarily focus on adjusting mental states and brain waves in response to internal body chemicals.

Do you remember when we said sleep is the key?

Extra-synaptic GABA are at play when we are tired or are waking up or are under the influence of drugs or alcohol. But they are also hard at work when a fear-inducing state is occurring and we are using out glutamate to respond to the event. During this fear state, our extra-synaptic GABA store our memories deep within our subconscious.

The researchers in the study likened this to tuning the radio from AM to FM frequency, where we regularly access FM, but the station we need is on AM. We can’t get to the channel we need if we stay on the FM frequency, so we must switch to AM.

Likewise, if our GABA receptors store the traumatic memory, in order to get it back, we must activate them again.

But can we restore memories with light? This article says “perhaps”…

The Study That Used Inebriated States To Restore Memories

The study researchers came across their findings after taking lab mice and getting them inebriated. No, not with alcohol, but with a drug called gaboxadol, which stimulates the extra-synaptic GABA receptors in their brains.

While inebriated, the researchers moved the mice to a box, gave a short electric shock, and repeated the assignment the next day but without injecting the mice. Strangely, the mice showed no fear of the box. However, when they gave another shot of gaboxadol to the rodents and placed them in the cage, they stood anxiously awaiting another shock. They had remembered.

Under the same drug-induced brain state, the mices’ memories of the traumatic event came flooding back because the extra-synaptic GABA receptors were activated. They had tuned into the AM frequency and the channel was playing loud and clear.

What does this mean for humans? Well, it may mean that a different system for regulating, storing, and accessing memories has been found that can prove useful in therapies for mood disorders. Our memories are all there, we just have to learn on which channel they are playing to hear them.

Title Picture Credit to 55Laney69
Additional Image Credits to Sara and |vv@ldzen|

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From the beginning of Moleskine, they’ve been recording our memories like no other…

 

Your Brain Hides Memories, But You Can Restore Them

Another exciting kind of #space by #Moleskine. - http://clapway.com/2015/07/05/expo2015-in-milan-moleskine-is-the-future-of-human-space-123/

Artists, designers, futurists and even the eminent First Lady Michelle Obama assembled en masse to Milan this summer to experience EXPO2015, an exposition introducing the sublime dreams of how we will use space in the future, comprised of over 100 pavilions with a cultural acuity spanning the world. It debuts a future whose space reflects the progress of an increasingly globalized human identity, sans national and ethnic divides.

With a list of attendees whose reputation nearly renders Obama’s quotidian, those of us too busy to make it may have missed something spectacular. But fear not, for Milan-based Moleskine invited a dollop of architects, designers, illustrators and drawing enthusiasts to sketch the Expo pavilions in addition to Milan’s beautiful landmarks, for an architectural point of reference.

Designed with Adobe, the Moleskine Smart Notebook sketches were uploaded in real-time for the rest of us to fest in tense with this artistic vision, giving us a future lens of our own. Let’s have a look!

CRITIQUE OF PRAGMATISM

The Italian Pavilion is sketched by Misiadesi. Its entrance curves into space straight out of Kubrick’s vision of the future. Resembling a spacecraft visiting for the day, is at once an echo on the 1960’s drive to expand human perception, to grasp the world firmly, by the joints, snugly interfacing the best of humanity with nature’s uncanny wonders. But inside, we see a reflection of how this drive to interface with the world alters our own structure in the jagged walkways, layered pylons and redundant superstructures that come together perhaps to critique the aesthetic worth of pragmatism.

ÉLAN VITAL

Emilie Romano’s Moleskine drawings of the Nepal Pavilion screams vitality from the far reaches of time. Inverted square pyramids supporting more pyramids rising into the sky in shrinking succession to a singularity exclaimed by King Kong’s war cry. This part asian, part sub-continental expressionist rendering seems to limn a cryptobiologic–a logic of life from a time before history, before time was time and life was perhaps more vital, and un-quantifiable.

HUMAN COMMUNION

In Christiana Donzelli’s Moleskine depiction, Uraguay’s Pavilion gives us our first taste of human life. Long arching pergolas shade an amalgam of homonids collecting around what could be a town well. Massive pylons stretch into the sky at relaxed acute angles, bringing focus to the megalith which reads the name of the nation on wood in the midst of human bustle and excitement.

DESERT EXPEDITION

The Angola Pavilion feels perhaps erected in a desert, as if Burning Man were a cultivated architecture of its own. A long passageway, possibly 20 by 30 meters, and a city block deep, is shaded by alternating loose wire frame canopy, allowing the thin human forms below to walk over the group’s newest find: a wave rising out of the ground, giving explorers a better view of this spacious oasis. Christian Gerasolo just gave this writer a dream to look forward to.

GLOBALIZATION

The Belgium Pavilion, sketched to beautiful detail by Misia Design’s adept use of Moleskine, reflects something of a more self-conscious cosmopolitanism, bringing together disparate uses of space into one block; a restaurant is crammed behind a Belgian Fries fast food store. Canopies and giant umbrellas shade humans discussing themselves over coffee and snacks. The aqueduct of the future rises out of the far left in nine pipes which turn down back to the planet in discontinuous shifts, creating an arch. Behind glows a blue superstructure, rising up to support a massive canopy, a sail really, a sail pointed up at the sky, carrying this space up into the future. Behind, in the distance, is a silver skyscraper, reminiscent of the twin towers, watching things develop from afar, both behind and ahead of us all.

MEGALITHIC COMMERCE

Caffe Cluster, a massive space enclosed by wooden planks rising more than 30 feet to the ceiling. A single yellow stripe, one meter tall carries pertinent information across the space for people to study and note below, perhaps for coffee, perhaps for what one could hypothesize is happening here: the transiting material of human business; goods exchanged for projects transporting human interests and speculation into the creation of new spaces, into the future.

HUMAN SOCIETY

Andrea Battistoni renders the dualism inherent in architecture clear. On the left we see the hustle and bustle of transiting persons of varying professions, age and class. Some converse, others wait, while one baby carriage rests unattended in front of a man, perhaps homeless, rests equally unattended against the edge of the central structure, which appears constructed of thin, overlapping planks. Conscious of this sea-worthy effect, around the corner are three levels of red doors, all open to human activity. A single human face nearest our vantage is mid-double-take, turning back perhaps to view the space as its represented on the right of the image; sans humans, sans color; the central structure rests mysterious.

ARCHITECTURE AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Daniela Tediosi’s Caffe Cluster seems to limn something of human consciousness in view of new space. A short yet tall hallway is decorated with paintings. One features an exhausted boy resting against a wall with one leg out, clamping his eyes shut. At bottom, we see a man turning his attention to us in a multiplicity of overlapping outlines endemic of the paradox in generating space, that it flows forward, turning away and back at itself, its innate difference from itself folding outward into time.

GAZE OF CIVILIZATION

Arianna Franchi’s rendition of architecture shows us that Moleskine can also be endearingly modern. The same space displayed by Battistoni’s sketch is displayed again in black and white. The central wooden structure’s doors are not all ajar here, but the ones that are contain some stockpiled material. Pairs of legless human figures stand around in noir style, speculating below giant rectangular screens which hang from above. In the center of the ceiling hangs a globe, perhaps to show that this too is under the gaze of the Earth; a panopticon to human life.

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Moleskine is a classic for sure. Check their travel notebook out on Clapway Trends:

Expo2015 in Milan: Moleskine is The Future of Human Space