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The most unforgettable person you have ever met (Essay)

June 26, 2019 by studymumbai Leave a Comment

Talk about the most unforgettable person you have met. What qualities did you like in that person, which you will always remember.

This is a commonly asked topic for essays in schools, including ICSE Class X.

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Essay 1 (257 Words)

For me, my grandfather will always be the most wonderful and unforgettable person that I have ever met. Grandpa was a caring, loving, and beautiful person, he had the biggest heart that a person can ever have.

I remember grandpa was always willing to help everybody who needed him, he always said, “There is a solution to every problem,” and “The only thing we can not do anything about is death.” When a problem arises, we have to see all of our options to find the best solution for that problem, and never run from it.

Grandpa had his favorite quotes too. One of her favorites was “Do everything from your heart and don’t expect anything in return.”

Our grandparents had a little dairy where Grandpa used to sell all kinds of dairy products – milk, cheese, curd, and other things. I remember the time when a woman walked into the store with her little son, and all she was doing was looking and looking around. The woman looked like she didn’t know what she wanted; but grandpa knew better, and he asked the woman if there was something she could help her with. The woman replied, “What can I buy with this little bit of money?” Grandpa answered, not much, but take what ever your family needs, and just pay me later whenever you have the money.

Grandpa with her kindness taught me a lot through out the years. Another of grandpa sayings was, ” We always have to keep a smile in our face, for it will keep us young.

If there is someone besides my family who I admire and will not forget is my Math teacher Prabhu who taught me in Xth. I owe a lot to my teachers and to name one as my favorite is like selecting pearl from an ocean full of pearls but I like Prabhu sir the most. Apart from teaching concepts of mathematics in lively manner, he cracked so many jokes and made us laugh. He also tried to make us all independent in our day to day life by asking us to own each and every activity/task at home. He is now retired and lives in Chennai.

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My Father is my love and inspiration

My Father is my first love whom I can trust upon blindly, My Father is my inspiration who helps me never to lose courage and confidence, He is the one who supports me and stands by my side in every aspect of my life, He is the one who never lets me down and always cheers me up, makes me feel happy and fine, He is the one who never ever lets me feel alone He is my Superhero and makes me move on .

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Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything - Joshua Foer 2012

The most forgetful man in the world.

H aving met some of the best memories in the world, I decided that my next step would be to try to seek out the worst. What better way to try to begin to understand the nature and meaning of human memory than to investigate its absence? I went back to Google in search of Ben Pridmore’s counterpart in the record books of forgetfulness, and dug up an article in The Journal of Neuroscience about an eighty-four-year-old retired lab technician called EP, whose memory extended back only as far as his most recent thought. He had one of the most severe cases of amnesia ever documented.

A few weeks after returning from Tallahassee, I phoned a neuroscientist and memory researcher named Larry Squire at the University of California, San Diego, and the San Diego VA Medical Center. Squire had been studying EP for over a decade, and agreed to bring me along on one of his visits to the bright bungalow in suburban San Diego where EP lives with his wife. We traveled there with Jen Frascino, the research coordinator in Squire’s lab who visits EP regularly to administer cognitive tests. Even though Frascino has been to EP’s home some two hundred times, he greets her as a total stranger every time.

EP is six-foot-two, with perfectly parted white hair and unusually long ears. He’s personable, friendly, gracious. He laughs a lot. He seems at first like your average genial grandfather. Frascino, a tall, athletic blonde, sits down with me and Squire opposite EP at his dining room table and asks a series of questions that are meant to gauge his basic knowledge and common sense. She quizzes him about what continent Brazil is on, the number of weeks in a year, the boiling temperature of water. She wants to demonstrate what a battery of cognitive tests has already proved: EP has a working knowledge of the world. His IQ is 103, and his short-term memory is entirely unimpaired. He patiently answers the questions—all correctly—with roughly the same sense of bemusement I imagine I would have if a total stranger walked into my house and earnestly asked me if I knew the boiling point of water.

“What is the thing to do if you find an envelope in the street that is sealed, addressed, and has a stamp on it?” Frascino asks.

“Well, you’d put it in the mailbox. What else?” He chuckles and shoots me a knowing, sidelong glance, as if to say, “Do these people think I’m an idiot?” But sensing that the situation calls for politeness, he turns back to Frascino and adds, “But that’s a really interesting question you’ve got there. Really interesting.” He has no idea he’s heard it many times before.

“Why do we cook food?”

“Because it’s raw?” The word raw carries his voice clear across the tonal register, his bemusement giving way to incredulity.

I ask EP if he knows the name of the last president.

“I’m afraid it’s slipped my mind. How strange.”

“Does the name Bill Clinton sound familiar?”

“Of course I know Clinton! He’s an old friend of mine, a scientist, a good guy. I worked with him, you know.”

He sees my eyes widen in disbelief and stops himself.

“Unless, that is, there’s another Clinton around that you’re thinking of—”

“Well, you know, the last president was named Bill Clinton also.”

“He was? I’ll be—!” He slaps his thigh and chuckles, but doesn’t seem all that embarrassed.

“Who’s the last president you remember?”

He takes a moment to search his brain. “Let’s see. There was Franklin Roosevelt ...”

“Ever heard of John F. Kennedy?”

“Kennedy? Hmm, I’m afraid I don’t know him.”

Frascino interjects with another question. “Why do we study history?”

“Well, we study history to know what happened in the past.”

“But why do we want to know what happened in the past?”

“Because it’s just interesting, frankly.”

In November 1992 , EP came down with what seemed like a mild case of the flu. For five days he lay in bed, feverish and lethargic, unsure of what was wrong, while inside his head a vicious virus known as herpes simplex was chewing its way through his brain, coring it like an apple. By the time the virus had run its course, two walnut-size chunks of brain matter in EP’s medial temporal lobes had disappeared, and with them most of his memory.

The virus struck with freakish precision. The medial temporal lobes—there’s one on each side of the brain—include the hippocampus and several adjacent regions that together perform the magical feat of turning our perceptions into long-term memories. Memories aren’t actually stored in the hippocampus—they reside elsewhere, in the brain’s corrugated outer layers, the neocortex—but the hippocampal area makes them stick. EP’s hippocampus was destroyed, and without it he is like a camcorder without a working tape head. He sees, but he doesn’t record.

EP has two types of amnesia—anterograde, which means he can’t form new memories, and retrograde, which means he can’t recall old memories either, at least not since about 1950. His childhood, his service in the merchant marine, World War II—all that is perfectly vivid. But as far as he knows, gas costs a quarter a gallon, and man never took that small step onto the moon.

Even though EP has been an amnesic for a decade and a half, and his condition has neither worsened nor improved, there’s still much that Squire and his team hope to learn from him. A case like his, in which nature performs a cruel but perfect experiment, is, to put it crassly, a major boon to science. In a field in which so many basic questions are still unanswered, there is a limitless number of tests that can be performed on a mind like EP’s. Indeed, there are only a handful of other individuals in the world in whom both hippocampi and the key adjacent structures have been so precisely notched out of an otherwise intact brain. Another severely amnesic case is Clive Wearing, a former music producer for the BBC who was struck by herpes encephalitis in 1985. Like EP’s, his mind has become a sieve. Each time he greets his wife, it’s as though he hasn’t seen her in twenty years. He leaves her agonizing phone messages begging to be picked up from the nursing home where he lives. He also keeps an exhaustive diary that has become a tangible record of his daily anguish. But even the diary he finds hard to trust since—like every other object in his life—it is completely unfamiliar. Every time he opens it, it must feel like confronting a past life. It is filled with entries like this one:

9:34 AM: Now I am superlatively, actually awake.

Those scratched-out entries suggest an awareness of his condition that EP, perhaps blissfully, lacks. From across the table, Squire asks EP how his memory is doing these days.

“It’s fair. Hard to say it’s real good or bad.”

EP wears a metal medical alert bracelet around his left wrist. Even though it’s obvious what it’s for, I ask him anyway. He turns his wrist over and casually reads it.

“Hmm. It says memory loss.”

EP doesn’t even remember that he has a memory problem. That is something he discovers anew every moment. And since he forgets that he always forgets, every lost thought seems like just a casual slip—an annoyance and nothing more—the same way it would to you or me.

“There’s nothing wrong with him in his mind. That’s a blessing,” his wife, Beverly, tells me later, while EP sits on the couch, out of earshot. “I suppose he must know something is wrong, but it doesn’t come out in conversation or in his way of life. But underneath he must know. He just must.”

When I hear those words, I’m stung by the realization of how much more than just memories have been lost. Even EP’s own wife can no longer access his most basic emotions and thoughts. Which is not to say that he doesn’t have emotions or thoughts. Moment to moment, he certainly does. When informed of the births of his grandchildren, EP’s eyes welled up each time—and then he promptly forgot that they existed. But without the ability to compare today’s feelings to yesterday’s, he cannot tell any cohesive narrative about himself, or about those around him, which makes him incapable of providing even the most basic psychological sustenance to his family and friends. After all, EP can only remain truly interested in anyone or anything for as long as he can maintain his attention. Any rogue thought that distracts him effectively resets conversation. A meaningful relationship between two people cannot sustain itself only in the present tense.

Ever since his sickness, space for EP has existed only as far as he can see it. His social universe is only as large as the people in the room. He lives under a narrow spotlight, surrounded by darkness. On a typical morning, EP wakes up, has breakfast, and returns to bed to listen to the radio. But back in bed, it’s not always clear whether he’s just had breakfast or just woken up. Often he’ll have breakfast again, and return to bed to listen to some more radio. Some mornings he’ll have breakfast for a third time. He watches TV, which can be very exciting from second to second, though shows with a clear beginning, middle, and end can pose a problem. He prefers the History Channel, or anything about World War II. He takes walks around the neighborhood, usually several times before lunch, and sometimes for as long as three quarters of an hour. He sits in the yard. He reads the newspaper, which must feel like stepping out of a time machine. Iraq? Internet? By the time EP gets to the end of a headline, he’s usually forgotten how it began. Most of the time, after reading the weather, he just doodles on the paper, drawing mustaches on the photographs or tracing his spoon. When he sees home prices in the real estate section, he invariably announces his shock.

Without a memory, EP has fallen completely out of time. He has no stream of consciousness, just droplets that immediately evaporate. If you were to take the watch off his wrist—or, more cruelly, change the time—he’d be completely lost. Trapped in this limbo of an eternal present, between a past he can’t remember and a future he can’t contemplate, he lives a sedentary life, completely free from worry. “He’s happy all the time. Very happy. I guess it’s because he doesn’t have any stress in his life,” says his daughter Carol, who lives nearby. In his chronic forgetfulness, EP has achieved a kind of pathological enlightenment, a perverted vision of the Buddhist ideal of living entirely in the present.

“How old are you now?” Squire asks him.

“Let’s see, fifty-nine or sixty. You got me,” he says, raising his eyebrow contemplatively, as if he were making a calculation and not a guess. “My memory is not that perfect. It’s pretty good, but sometimes people ask me questions that I just don’t get. I’m sure you have that sometimes.”

“Sure I do,” says Squire kindly, even though EP’s almost a quarter of a century off.

Without time , there would be no need for a memory. But without a memory, would there be such a thing as time? I don’t mean time in the sense that, say, physicists speak of it: the fourth dimension, the independent variable, the quantity that compresses when you approach the speed of light. I mean psychological time, the tempo at which we experience life’s passage. Time as a mental construct. Watching EP struggle to recount his own age, I recalled one of the stories Ed Cooke had told me about his research at the University of Paris when we met at the U.S. Memory Championship.

“I’m working on expanding subjective time so that it feels like I live longer,” Ed had mumbled to me on the sidewalk outside the Con Ed headquarters, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. “The idea is to avoid that feeling you have when you get to the end of the year and feel like, where the hell did that go?”

“And how are you going to do that?” I asked.

“By remembering more. By providing my life with more chronological landmarks. By making myself more aware of time’s passage.”

I told him that his plan reminded me of Dunbar, the pilot in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 who reasons that since time flies when you’re having fun, the surest way to slow life’s passage is to make it as boring as possible.

Ed shrugged. “Quite the opposite. The more we pack our lives with memories, the slower time seems to fly.”

Our subjective experience of time is highly variable. We all know that days can pass like weeks and months can feel like years, and that the opposite can be just as true: A month or year can zoom by in what feels like no time at all.

Our lives are structured by our memories of events. Event X happened just before the big Paris vacation. I was doing Y in the first summer after I learned to drive. Z happened the weekend after I landed my first job. We remember events by positioning them in time relative to other events. Just as we accumulate memories of facts by integrating them into a network, we accumulate life experiences by integrating them into a web of other chronological memories. The denser the web, the denser the experience of time.

It’s a point well illustrated by Michel Siffre, a French chronobiologist (he studies the relationship between time and living organisms) who conducted one of the most extraordinary acts of self-experimentation in the history of science. In 1962, Siffre spent two months living in total isolation in a subterranean cave, without access to clock, calendar, or sun. Sleeping and eating only when his body told him to, he sought to discover how the natural rhythms of human life would be affected by living “beyond time.”

Very quickly Siffre’s memory deteriorated. In the dreary darkness, his days melded into one another and became one continuous, indistinguishable blob. Since there was nobody to talk to, and not much to do, there was nothing novel to impress itself upon his memory. There were no chronological landmarks by which he could measure the passage of time. At some point he stopped being able to remember what happened even the day before. His experience in isolation had turned him into EP. As time began to blur, he became effectively amnesic. Soon, his sleep patterns disintegrated. Some days he’d stay awake for thirty-six straight hours, other days for eight—without being able to tell the difference. When his support team on the surface finally called down to him on September 14, the day his experiment was scheduled to wrap up, it was only August 20 in his journal. He thought only a month had gone by. His experience of time’s passage had compressed by a factor of two.

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.

William James first wrote about the curious warping and foreshortening of psychological time in his Principles of Psychology in 1890: “In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous and long-drawn-out,” he wrote. “But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.” Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older. “If to remember is to be human, then remembering more means being more human,” said Ed.

There is perhaps a bit of Peter Pan to Ed’s quest to make his life maximally memorable, but of all the things one could be obsessive about collecting, memories of one’s own life don’t seem like the most unreasonable. There’s something even strangely rational about it. There’s an old philosophical conundrum that often gets bandied about in introductory philosophy courses: In the nineteenth century, doctors began to wonder whether the general anesthetic they had been administering to patients might not actually put the patients to sleep so much as freeze their muscles and erase their memories of the surgery. If that were the case, could the doctors be said to have done anything wrong? Like the proverbial tree that falls without anyone hearing it, can an experience that isn’t remembered be meaningfully said to have happened at all? Socrates thought the unexamined life was not worth living. How much more so the unremembered life?

Much of what science knows about memory was learned from a damaged brain remarkably similar to EP’s. It belonged to another amnesic named Henry Molaison, who went by the initials HM and spent most of his life in a nursing home in Connecticut before dying in 2008. (Individuals in the medical literature always go by initials to protect their identities. HM’s name was revealed after his death.) As a child, HM suffered from epilepsy, which began after a bike accident at age nine. By the time he was twenty-seven, he was blacking out several times a week and unable to do much of anything. A neurosurgeon named William Scoville thought he could relieve HM’s symptoms with an experimental surgery that would excise the part of the brain that he suspected was causing the problem.

In 1953, while HM lay awake on the operating table, his scalp anesthetized, Scoville drilled a pair of holes just above the patient’s eyes. The surgeon lifted the front of HM’s brain with a small metal spatula while a metal straw sucked out most of the hippocampus, along with much of the surrounding medial temporal lobes. The surgery reduced the number of HM’s seizures, but there was a tragic side effect: It soon became clear that he’d also been robbed of his memory.

Over the next five decades, HM was the subject of countless experiments and became the most studied patient in the history of brain science. Given the horrific outcome of Scoville’s surgery, everyone assumed HM would be a singular case study.

EP shattered that assumption. What Scoville did to HM with a metal straw, nature did to EP with herpes simplex. Side by side, the grainy black-and-white MRIs of their brains are uncannily similar, though EP’s damage is a bit more extensive. Even if you have no idea what a normal brain ought to look like, the two gaping symmetrical holes stare back at you like a pair of shadowy eyes.

Like EP, HM was able to hold on to memories just long enough to think about them, but once his brain moved on to something else, he could never bring them back. In one famous experiment conducted by the Canadian neuroscientist Brenda Milner, HM was asked to remember the number 584 for as long as possible. He spoke aloud as he was doing it:

It’s easy. You just remember 8. You see, 5, 8, and 4 add to 17. You remember 8, subtract it from 17 and it leaves 9. Divide 9 in half and you get 5 and 4 and there you are: 584. Easy.

He concentrated on this elaborate mantra for several minutes. But as soon as he was distracted, the number dissolved. He couldn’t even remember that he’d been asked to remember something. Though scientists had known that there was a difference between long- and short-term memory since the late nineteenth century, they now had evidence in HM that the two types of memory processes happened in different parts of the brain, and that without most of the hippocampal area, HM couldn’t turn a short-term memory into a long-term one.

Researchers also learned more about another kind of remembering from HM. Even though he couldn’t say what he’d had for breakfast or name the current president, there were some things that he could recall. Milner found that he could learn complicated tasks without even realizing it. In one landmark study in 1962, she showed that HM could learn how to trace inside a five-pointed star on a piece of paper while looking at its reflection in a mirror. Each time Milner gave HM the task, he claimed never to have tried it before. And yet, each day his brain got better at guiding his hand to work in reverse. Despite his amnesia, he was remembering.

Subsequent studies of amnesics, including tests conducted on EP, have found that people who lose their memories are still capable of yet other kinds of unremembered learning. In one experiment, Squire gave EP a list of twenty-four words to memorize. As expected, within a few minutes, EP had no recollection of any of the words, or even that the exercise had happened at all. When asked whether he’d seen a given word before, he answered correctly only half the time. But then Squire sat EP in front of a computer monitor and gave him a different test. This time, forty-eight words were flashed on the screen for twenty-five milliseconds each, just long enough for the eye to catch some, but not all, of them (an eye blink, by comparison, happens in 100 to 150 milliseconds). Half the words were from the list that EP had read over and forgotten, and half were new. Squire asked EP to read each word after it flashed on the screen. Surprisingly, EP was far better at reading the words he’d seen before than the ones that were new. Even though he had no conscious recollection of them, somewhere in the recesses of his brain they had left an impression.

This phenomenon of unconscious remembering, known as priming, is evidence of an entire shadowy underworld of memories lurking beneath the surface of our conscious reckoning. Though there is disagreement about just how many memory systems there are, scientists generally divide memories broadly into two types: declarative and nondeclarative (sometimes referred to as explicit and implicit). Declarative memories are things you know you remember, like the color of your car, or what happened yesterday afternoon. EP and HM had lost the ability to make new declarative memories. Nondeclarative memories are the things you know unconsciously, like how to ride a bike or how to draw a shape while looking at it in a mirror (or what a word flashed rapidly across a computer screen means). Those unconscious memories don’t seem to pass through the same short-term memory buffer as declarative memories, nor do they depend on the hippocampal region to be consolidated and stored. They rely primarily on different parts of the brain. Motor skill learning takes place largely in the cerebellum, perceptual learning in the neocortex, habit learning in the basal ganglia. As EP and HM have so strikingly demonstrated, you can damage one part of the brain, and the rest will keep on working. Indeed, most of who we are and how we think—the core material of our personalities—is bound up in implicit memories that are off-limits to the conscious brain.

Within the category of declarative memories, psychologists make a further distinction between semantic memories, or memories for facts and concepts, and episodic memories, or memories of the experiences of our own lives. Recalling that I had eggs for breakfast this morning would be an episodic memory. Knowing that breakfast is the first meal of the day is a semantic memory. Episodic memories are located in time and space: They have a where and a when attached to them. Semantic memories are located outside of time and space, as free-floating pieces of knowledge. These two different types of remembering seem to make use of different neural pathways, and rely on different regions of the brain, though both are critically dependent on the hippocampus and other structures within the medial temporal lobes. EP has lost both types of memory in equal measure, but curiously his forgetfulness extends back only for the last sixty or so years. His memories have faded along a gradient.

One of the many mysteries of memory is why an amnesic like EP should be able to remember when the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima but not the much more recent fall of the Berlin Wall. For some unknown reason, it’s the most recent memories that blur first in most amnesics, while distant memories retain their clarity. This phenomenon is known as Ribot’s Law, after the nineteenth-century French psychologist who first noted it, and it’s a pattern found also in Alzheimer’s patients. It suggests something profound: that our memories are not static. Somehow, as memories age, their complexion changes. Each time we think about a memory, we integrate it more deeply into our web of other memories, and therefore make it more stable and less likely to be dislodged.

But in the process, we also transform the memory, and reshape it—sometimes to the point that our memories of events bear only a passing resemblance to what actually happened. Neuroscientists have only recently begun to observe this process happening inside the brain, but psychologists have understood for a long time that there are qualitative differences between old and new memories. Sigmund Freud first noted the curious fact that older memories are often remembered as if captured by a third person holding a camera, whereas more recent events tend to be remembered in the first person, as if through one’s own eyes. It’s as if things that happened to us become simply things that happened. Or as if, over time, the brain naturally turns episodes into facts.

How this process works at the level of neurons still remains a riddle. One well-supported hypothesis holds that our memories are nomadic. While the hippocampus is involved in their initial formation, their contents are ultimately held in long-term storage in the neocortex. Over time, as they are revisited and reinforced, memories are consolidated in a way that makes them impervious to erasure. They become entrenched in a network of cortical connections that allows them to exist independently of the hippocampus. All this raises a tantalizing question: Were EP’s memories since 1950 completely obliterated when the virus ate its way through his medial temporal lobes, or did those memories just become inaccessible? Did the virus burn down half the house, or did it just throw away the key? We don’t know.

It’s thought that sleep plays a critical role in this process of consolidating our memories and drawing meaning out of them. Rats that have spent an hour running around a track apparently run through the same track in their sleep, and exhibit the same patterns of neural firings with their eyes closed as when they were learning the mazes in the first place. It has been suggested that the reason our own dreams so often feel like a surreal recombination of elements plucked from real life is that they are just the by-product of experiences slowly hardening into long-term memories.

Sitting with EP on the couch in his living room, I wonder if he still dreams. Of course, he can’t tell, but I ask him anyway, just to see what he’ll say. “From time to time,” he tells me matter-of-factly, though his response is most certainly a confabulation. “But dreams are hard to remember.”

We all come into the world as amnesics, and quite a few of us exit just the same. The other day, I was quizzing my three-year-old nephew about his second birthday party. Though the event took place more than a third of a lifetime ago, his recollections were surprisingly exact. He remembered the name of the young guitarist who had entertained him and his friends, and could recite some of the songs they had sung. He remembered the miniature drum set I’d given him as a gift. He remembered eating ice cream with cake. And yet, ten years from now, it is almost certain that he will remember none of this.

Until the age of three or four, almost nothing that happens to us leaves the sort of lasting impression that can be consciously recalled as an adult. The average age that people report having their earliest memory is three and a half, and those tend to be just blurry, fragmentary snapshots that are often false. How strange that during the period when a person is learning more rapidly than at any other point in his life—when one is learning to walk and talk and make sense of the world—so little of that learning is of the kind that is explicitly memorable.

Freud thought that infantile amnesia was a matter of adults repressing the hypersexualized fantasies of early childhood, which only become shameful in later life. I’m not sure you could find too many psychologists who still cling to that interpretation. The more likely explanation for this strange early forgetting lies in the fact that our brains are maturing rapidly during the first couple years of life, with unused neural connections getting pruned back, and new connections constantly forming. The neocortex is not fully developed until about the third or fourth year, around the time that children start laying down permanent memories. Anatomy, however, may only tell part of the story. As infants, we also lack schema for interpreting the world and relating the present to the past. Without experience—and perhaps most important, without the essential organizing tool of language—infants lack the capacity to embed their memories in a web of meaning that will make them accessible later in life. Those structures only develop over time, through exposure to the world. The vital learning that we do during the first years of life is virtually entirely of the implicit, nondeclarative kind. In other words, everyone on earth has had some taste of EP’s condition. And like EP, we’ve all forgotten what it’s like.

I’m curious to see EP’s unconscious, nondeclarative memory at work, so I ask him if he’s interested in taking me on a walk around his neighborhood. He says, “Not really,” so I wait and ask him again a couple minutes later. This time he agrees. We walk out the front door into the high afternoon sun and turn right—his decision, not mine. I ask EP why we’re not turning to the left instead.

“I’d just rather not go that way. This is just the way I go. I don’t know why,” he says.

If I asked him to draw a map of the route he takes at least three times a day, he’d never be able to do it. He doesn’t even know his own address, or (almost as improbably for someone from San Diego) which way the ocean is. But after so many years of taking the same walk, the journey has etched itself on his unconscious. His wife, Beverly, now lets him go out alone, even though a single wrong turn would leave him completely lost. Sometimes he comes back from his walks with objects he’s picked up along the way: a stack of round stones, a puppy, somebody’s wallet. He can never explain how they came into his possession.

“Our neighbors love him because he’ll come up to them and just start talking to them,” Beverly tells me. Even though he thinks he’s meeting them for the first time, he’s learned through force of habit that these are people he should feel comfortable with, and he interprets those unconscious feelings of comfort as a good reason to stop and say hello.

That EP has learned to like his neighbors without ever learning who they are points to how many of our basic day-to-day actions are guided by implicit values and judgments, independent of declarative memory. I wonder what other things EP has learned through force of habit. What other nondeclarative memories have continued to shape him over the decade and a half since he lost his declarative memory? Surely, he must still have desires and fears, emotions, and cravings—even if his conscious recollection of those feelings is so fleeting that he cannot recognize them for long enough to verbalize them.

I thought of my own self fifteen years ago, and how much I’ve changed in the same period. The me who exists today and the me who existed then, if put side by side, would look more than vaguely similar. But we are a completely different collection of molecules, with different hairlines and waistlines, and, it sometimes seems, little in common besides our names. What binds that me to this me, and allows me to maintain the illusion that there is continuity from moment to moment and year to year, is some relatively stable but gradually evolving thing at the nucleus of my being. Call it a soul, or a self, or an emergent by-product of a neural network, but whatever you want to call it, that element of continuity is entirely dependent on memory.

But even if we are at the mercy of our memories in establishing our identities, it is clear that EP is much more than just a soulless golem. In spite of everything he’s lost, there is still a person there, and a personality—a charming personality, in fact—with a unique perspective on the world. Even if a virus wiped clean his memories, it didn’t completely wipe clean his personhood. It just left a hollow, static self that can never grow and can never change.

We cross the street and walk away from Beverly and Carol, leaving me alone with EP for the first time. He doesn’t know who I am, or what I’m doing at his side, although he seems to sense that I’m there for some good reason. He looks at me and purses his lips, and I can see that he’s searching for something to say. Rather than try to fill the empty silence, I let it linger for a moment to see where the discomfort might lead. I guess I’m hoping for some fleeting recognition of how odd it all must be, this scene without a prologue. But no such recognition comes, or if it does, EP never lets it surface. He is trapped, I realize, in the ultimate existential nightmare, utterly blind to the reality in which he lives. The impulse strikes me to help him escape, at least for a second. I want to take him by the arm and shake him. “You have a rare and debilitating memory disorder,” I want to tell him. “The last fifty years have been lost to you. In less than a minute, you’re going to forget that this conversation ever even happened.” I imagine the horror that would descend upon him, the momentary clarity, the gaping emptiness that would open up in front of him, and close just as quickly. And then the passing car or the singing bird that would snap him back into his oblivious bubble. But of course I don’t do it.

“We’ve gone far enough,” I tell him, and point him in the direction from which we came. We turn around and walk back down the street whose name he’s forgotten, past the waving neighbors he doesn’t recognize, to a home he doesn’t know. In front of the house sits a car with tinted windows. We turn to look at our reflections. I ask EP what he sees.

“An old man,” he says. “That’s all.”

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Reasons Why People Forget

4 Key Reasons for Forgetting

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Shaheen Lakhan, MD, PhD, is an award-winning physician-scientist and clinical development specialist.

GrapeImages / Getty Images

While you might find yourself wondering why is my memory so bad , forgetting is part of life. In fact, people forget surprisingly fast. Research has found that approximately 56% of information is forgotten within an hour, 66% after a day, and 75% after six days.

The reality is that while the brain is capable of impressive feats, its capacity to store and recall details is limited. There are a few different ways and reasons that we forget things.

What Does Forgetting Mean?

Forgetting is the loss or change in information that was was previously stored in short-term or long-term memory. It can occur suddenly or it can occur gradually as old memories are lost. While it is usually normal, excessive or unusual forgetting might be a sign of a more serious problem.

This article discusses some of the more common reasons for forgetting. It also explores some other possible factors that can lead to forgetting.

Forgetting Caused by Decay

Have you ever felt like a piece of information has just vanished from your memory? Or maybe you know that it's there, but you just can't seem to find it. The inability to retrieve a memory is one of the most common causes of forgetting.

So why are we often unable to retrieve information from memory? One possible explanation of retrieval failure is known as decay theory.

According to this theory, a memory trace is created every time a new theory is formed. Decay theory suggests that over time, these memory traces begin to fade and disappear. If​ the information is not retrieved and rehearsed, it will eventually be lost.

One problem with this theory, however, is that research has demonstrated that even memories which have not been rehearsed or remembered are remarkably stable in long-term memory .

Research also suggests that the brain actively prunes memories that become unused, a process that is known as active forgetting. As memories accumulate, those that are not retrieved eventually become lost.

Forgetting Caused by Interference

Sometimes people forget due to a phenomenon known as interference. Some memories compete and interfere with other memories . When information is very similar to other information that was previously stored in memory, interference is more likely to occur.

There are two basic types of interference:

• Proactive interference is when an old memory makes it more difficult or impossible to remember a new memory.
• Retroactive interference occurs when new information interferes with your ability to remember previously learned information.

Sometimes the act of remembering something can lead to other things being forgotten. Research suggests that retrieving some information from memory can lead to retrieval-induced forgetting. This is particularly common when memory retrieval cues are very similar.

While this causes forgetting, research also suggests that this type of forgetting can actually be adaptive. By forgetting one memory in favor of another, it reduces the chance of interference happening again in the future.

While interference can make it difficult to remember some things, there are things you can do to minimize its effects. Rehearsing new information is often the most effective approach. By essentially overlearning new things, it is less likely that old information will compete with new.

Forgetting Caused by Failure to Store

Sometimes, losing information has less to do with forgetting and more to do with the fact that it never made it into long-term memory in the first place. Encoding failures sometimes prevent information from entering long-term memory.

In one classic experiment, researchers asked participants to identify the correct U.S. penny out of a group of drawings of incorrect pennies. While people are familiar with this everyday object, they were surprisingly bad at being able to detect key details.

The reason for this is that only details necessary for distinguishing pennies from other coins were encoded into your long-term memory. Identifying a penny does not require knowing the exact image or words found on the coin. Because this information is not really needed, most people never memorize it and commit it to memory.

Memories also tend to get simplified. While you might remember the overall gist of something, you are likely to forget many of the details. This is actually an adaptive function that allows you to efficiently store important information that you need to remember in the future.

Motivated Forgetting

Sometimes we may actively work to forget memories, especially those of traumatic or disturbing events or experiences. Painful memories can be upsetting and anxiety-provoking, so there are times we may desire to eliminate them. The two basic forms of motivated forgetting are suppression, which is a conscious form of forgetting, and repression, an unconscious form of forgetting .

However, the concept of repressed memories is not universally accepted by all psychologists. One of the problems with repressed memories is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to scientifically study whether or not a memory has been repressed .

Also note that mental activities such as rehearsal and remembering are important ways of strengthening memory, and memories of painful or traumatic life events are far less likely to be remembered, discussed, or rehearsed.

Forgetting painful memories and traumas may help people cope better. While these events might not be entirely forgotten, forgetting the vivid details can help blunt the difficult emotions that are attached to those memories and make them easier to live with.

Other Explanations for Forgetting

There are also a number of other factors that can play a role in why people forget. Other common causes of forgetfulness include:

• Alcohol : Drinking alcohol can have a negative effect on memory, so it is best to stick to no more than one or two drinks per day.
• Depression : Common symptoms of depression include low mood and loss of interest, but difficulty concentrating and forgetfulness can also occur with depressive disorders.
• Lack of sleep : Sleep plays an important role in memory consolidation , so a lack of quality sleep can have a negative impact on your memory.
• Medications : Some medications can affect memory including antidepressants, sedatives, and cold and allergy medications.
• Stress : Excessive stress, both acute and chronic, can also play a role in causing forgetfulness.
• Age : Age-related forgetting is common and normal since people tend to experience certain types of cognitive declines as they grow older. However, significant problems with forgetting as a person ages may be a sign of a more serious problem such as Alzheimer's disease.

If you are concerned about your forgetting or if it is accompanied by other symptoms, talk to your doctor. Early intervention may help improve outcomes for some memory problems and conditions, so it is important to seek help right away.

How to Minimize Forgetting

While some forgetting is inevitable, there are some things you can do to help cement important information in your memory. Some practices that may help reduce forgetfulness include:

• Exercise : Research suggests that exercise can lead to rapid improvements in memory function. There's no need to spend hours on the treadmill or at the gym to get this benefit. Results suggest that brief, very light exercise leads to quick enhancements in memory function.
• Get plenty of sleep : Adequate sleep is essential for both physical and mental health . While sleep needs can vary, the typical recommendation for adults is seven to nine hours per night.
• Rehearse the information : Sometimes the best way to commit something to memory and reduce the chances it will be forgotten is to use the old standby: rehearsal. Go over the information repeatedly until you've committed it to memory.
• Write it down : When all else fails, write down important information so that you can refer to it later. In some cases, the act of writing it down may actually help you remember it more later.

While forgetting is often viewed negatively, it can actually help improve memory. Being able to let go of irrelevant memories and only hold on to the important information helps keep those saved memories stronger, a phenomenon known as adaptive forgetting.

A Word From Verywell

While forgetting is not something that you can avoid, understanding the reasons for it can be useful. There are a number of reasons why you forget. In some cases, a number of factors may influence why you struggle to recall information and experiences. Understanding some of the factors that influence forgetting can make it easier to put memory-improvement strategies into practice.

Frequently Asked Questions

Forgetting can happen for a number of reasons. Three common explanations include depression, lack of sleep, and stress. However, it can also occur due to medical conditions, brain disorders, substance use, and other reasons. You should always talk to your doctor if you are concerned about your memory or find yourself forgetting more than normal.

The four main types of forgetting are decay, interference, failure to store, and motivated forgetting.

Forgetting is often normal, but it can also be a symptom of a number of conditions including depression, infections, brain disorders, or Alzheimer's disease. It can also be happen as a side effect of some medications.

Forgetting is also sometimes referred to as disremembering. The loss of memory of events from the past is known as amnesia, which can be retrograde (which affects the ability to access old memories) or anterograde (which affects the storage of new memories).

Murre JMJ, Dros J. Replication and analysis of Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve . Chialvo DR, ed. PLoS ONE . 2015;10(7):e0120644. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0120644

Davis RL, Zhong Y. The biology of forgetting—a perspective . Neuron. 2017;95(3):490-503. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2017.05.039

Storm BC, Levy BJ. A progress report on the inhibitory account of retrieval-induced forgetting . Mem Cognit . 2012;40(6):827-43. doi: 10.3758/s13421-012-0211-7

Wimber M, Alink A, Charest I, Kriegeskorte N, Anderson MC. Retrieval induces adaptive forgetting of competing memories via cortical pattern suppression [published correction appears in Nat Neurosci. 2018 Oct;21(10):1493].  Nat Neurosci . 2015;18(4):582-589. doi:10.1038/nn.3973

Nickerson RS, Adams MJ. Long-term memory for a common object . Cognitive Psychology . 1979;11(3):287-307. doi:10.1016/0010-0285(79)90013-6

National Institute on Aging. Do memory problems always mean Alzheimer's disease ?

Suwabe K, Byun K, Hyodo K, et al. Rapid stimulation of human dentate gyrus function with acute mild exercise . Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A . 2018;115(41):10487-10492. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1805668115

Mander BA, Rao V, Lu B, et al. Prefrontal atrophy, disrupted NREM slow waves and impaired hippocampal-dependent memory in aging . Nat Neurosci . 2013;16(3):357-364. doi:10.1038/nn.3324

Nørby S. Why forget? On the adaptive value of memory loss . Perspect Psychol Sci . 2015;10(5):551-78. doi: 10.1177/1745691615596787

National Institutes of Health. Things forgotten: Simple lapse or serious problem ?

National Institute on Aging. Memory, forgetfulness, and aging: What's normal and what's not ?

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Home — Essay Samples — Life — Personal Experience — An Unforgettable Experience In My Life

An Unforgettable Experience in My Life

• Categories: Death Personal Experience

About this sample

Words: 719 |

Published: Sep 19, 2019

Words: 719 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

Works Cited

• Barry, M. (2010). The death of a loved one: A primer for grieving. Journal of Psychosocial Nursing and Mental Health Services, 48(11), 12-15.
• Davis, C. G., Nolen-Hoeksema, S., & Larson, J. (1998). Making sense of loss and benefiting from the experience: Two construals of meaning. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(2), 561-574.
• Goss, K., & Gilbert, P. (2002). Bereavement following traumatic death: A conceptual analysis and review. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 15(3), 181-191.
• Holland, J. M., Currier, J. M., & Neimeyer, R. A. (2006). Meaning reconstruction in the first two years of bereavement: The role of sense-making and benefit-finding. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 53(3), 175-191.
• Kübler-Ross, E. (1969). On death and dying. Macmillan.
• Nolen-Hoeksema, S., & Davis, C. G. (1999). "Thanks for sharing that": Ruminators and their social support networks. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(4), 801-814.
• Parkes, C. M. (2015). Bereavement: Studies of grief in adult life. Routledge.
• Schut, H., & Stroebe, M. S. (2005). Interventions to enhance adaptation to bereavement. Journal of Palliative Medicine, 8(S1), S140-S147.
• Stroebe, M. S., Schut, H., & Stroebe, W. (2007). Health outcomes of bereavement. The Lancet, 370(9603), 1960-1973.
• Thompson, L. W., Gallagher, D., & Breckenridge, J. N. (1989). Comparative effectiveness of psychotherapies for depressed elders. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 57(3), 403-407.

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Gerhard Richter’s painting ‘Betty’ (1988) at the Saint Louis Arts Museum. Photo by Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters

A good forgetting

Personal identity is tied to memory, but sometimes we find peace, clarity and a true sense of completeness in the lapses.

by Marianne Janack   + BIO

I teach a course on personal identity, and one of the authors we read is John Locke, the 17th-century English philosopher who tells us that our memory constitutes who we are. He poses the following thought experiment: if a prince and a cobbler were to exchange memories, so that the body of the cobbler carried with it the prince’s memories and the prince’s body carried the cobbler’s memories, who would be whom?

Locke tells us that, to other people, the cobbler’s body would still seem to be the cobbler and the prince’s body would still seem to be the prince, but from the internal perspective – which is the one that matters – the cobbler would think he’d landed in a new body, and the prince would think the same. That is, this would be a body transplant for the cobbler and the prince, whose identities would have travelled to new bodies, the princely identity cobbled onto the cobbler’s body; the cobbler’s identity nobly arrayed.

And so, we imagine, the prince inside the cobbler’s body would be declaring to all and sundry that he was not a cobbler, but was in fact a prince. The cobbler might be a little happier with his new body but would, to himself, still be the cobbler with a particular past and history that now, presumably, includes being given a new body.

Of course, we no longer imagine that memories and what Locke calls ‘consciousness’ could be disembodied and re-embodied in this way. However, if you just add a brain to this story, then people start to think it’s more plausible. That is, if we say instead that the cobbler’s brain is put into the prince’s body, and vice versa, people usually think that this thought experiment makes more sense. And though the medium of identity transport changes, one thing does not: the sense that many of us have that our identities are constituted by our memories, and those are ‘inscribed’ in our brains in some mysterious way.

T his summer, I had a dinner party at my house, and the discussion turned to the malleability (or lack thereof) of sexual identity. A lesbian friend insisted that she, for one, did not have a malleable sexual identity. She’d always been attracted to girls, she said, even before she had the kind of terminology that would have made sense of that, and told the story of her early crush on a female teacher. I asked how she could be certain that this wasn’t a mundane memory of the usual teacher crush, and why she interprets it as a sign of something larger. She answered that she remembered it very clearly, and so it couldn’t be that she was misremembering. That memory was her evidence, she said, that her sexuality, at least, was not malleable. Its vividness told her that it was true, and that it was the basis upon which she knew that she was ‘born’ gay.

I raised the usual objections about the reliability of memory. Another guest, a biologist (hetero-, for the record) who studies marine invertebrates, objected to my suggestion that this memory might have undergone some revision, saying that she thought that recent memories might be prone to such rewriting, but that important memories from long ago were less susceptible to that process. Those, she thought, were more reliable as touchstones of truth. I doubted that there was empirical evidence for that claim, but I dropped the subject anyway. People don’t generally like it when you start challenging the accuracy of their memories, at least when it comes to these kinds of things. Challenge your friend’s memories about what she ate for lunch the other day – OK. But challenge your friend’s memories about these central elements of her history, and your intellectual discussion becomes something much less benign.

If forgetfulness serves the goal of bliss, who wouldn’t pursue it?

Going along with Locke’s view of memory as identity is the narrative theory of identity – the idea that one forges and maintains an identity by weaving a coherent narrative out of memories, tying one’s present to one’s past. Memory and the process of remembering are essential to this. Forgetting is an enemy, causing narrative gaps and undermining the sense of having a coherent narrative.

But that does not seem to be the end of the story. Some people court forgetfulness. My students like to quote the old adage that ‘ignorance is bliss’ when we talk about memory and forgetting; from this they think it follows, as night follows day, that ignorance is to be preferred to knowledge when such knowledge undermines happiness. If forgetfulness serves the goal of bliss, who wouldn’t pursue it? Yet our relationship to our memories, and their accuracy, complicates this story.

Lois Lowry recently gave an interview about the new film version of her children’s science-fiction novel The Giver (1993), in which she said that what made her interested in writing that book was an experience with her father, who had lost many of his memories with age. The Giver presents us with a world in which forgetting is the entry fee that must be paid for happiness – or at least it is the price to pay to avoid war, envy and greed. Oddly, people often refer to the novel as ‘dystopian’; one would think that a book in which there is peace and plenty would be ‘utopian’. But it seems that most assume that the ability to remember things accurately is too valuable to be given up, even for such valued aims. So memory is part of who we are, but memories can be painful, and can interfere with happiness, making things more difficult for the better angels of our nature to hold sway. If happiness requires forgetting, it seems, some of us would rather have the unhappiness.

I n the 1960s, my maternal grandmother received treatments for what was then called ‘a nervous breakdown’. She spent some time at what was the Marcy State Hospital, near Utica in New York State. After she was discharged, she continued to receive out-patient treatments in Syracuse as well. The regimen was electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), also called ‘electroshock’. I don’t really know if it worked, since I didn’t know what my grandmother had been like before the treatments, though it seems to have cured the most troubling symptoms.

According to my Auntie Carol, sometimes my grandmother would just ‘not be there’. She would bang repetitively on things – windows, plates – until they broke. ‘She didn’t know what she was doing,’ Auntie Carol says, when I ask about the symptoms. It’s not something that my mother and her sisters like to talk about. Courting forgetfulness seems to be the dominant strategy when it comes to painful elements of the family history. One can see the appeal. Indeed, what I have heard other writers refer to as ‘misery porn’ seems to be a vice born of too much remembering; too much of a willingness to talk about one’s sufferings. Sometimes not talking and not remembering seem like virtues.

ECT was introduced in 1938 to control difficult or violent mental patients, pioneered by a neurologist at the Sapienza University of Rome. Since the time my grandmother was treated, in the 1960s, the technology has been refined so that sessions are now less arduous and the side-effects less extreme.

Today, ECT involves administering a current of 0.9 amps to the patient by means of electrodes attached to one or both sides of the head. An anesthetic or sedative is given intravenously for the procedure, and patients get 100 per cent oxygen through a mask that covers the nose and mouth. The patient’s muscles are temporarily paralysed with the drug succinylcholine; this is to prevent the violent jerking motions that, in the early days of the treatment, led to broken bones.

ECT still has a bad image, thanks to movies such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

The treatment involves passing an electrical current through the patient’s brain with the goal of inducing a grand mal or tonic-clonic seizure, in today’s terminology. This ‘brain seizure’ is the element of the therapy that makes it effective. The twitching toes, clenched fists, or heaving chest are some of the signs that the seizure has occurred, and clinically effective seizures generally last from about 30 seconds to just over a minute. Upon awakening after the procedure, patients might suffer from headache, nausea, temporary confusion and muscle stiffness.

ECT became a treatment of last resort in the late 1970s, even as it was being refined, usually when medications lost their effectiveness or had such unpleasant side-effects that nothing else would help. Its public image is still mostly bad, something that Max Fink, a neurologist emeritus at the Stony Brook School of Medicine in New York and author of Electroconvulsive Therapy: A Guide for Professionals and Their Patients (2008), attributes to the influence of movies, particularly One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). Nevertheless, Kitty Dukakis, the wife of the former governor of Massachusetts, wrote a book in which she claimed that it saved her life; the late US novelist David Foster Wallace opted for it twice, once when he first started to suffer from depression, and again when he lost confidence in antidepressants. The first time seems to have helped, but the second was only about a year before his suicide.

I was surprised by how favourably ECT was portrayed in the movie Autumn Leaves (1956). Joan Crawford plays Millie, the significantly older woman married to a mentally ill young man named Burt. Reluctantly, she has him committed to a psychiatric institution. As Burt enters the room where his treatment is to take place, his terror-stricken cries seem to portend an ECT horror story – yet, in fact, one sunny day he walks out of the hospital, takes Millie’s hand, and they walk off to enjoy married life once more.

Today, studies show that ECT has a fair shot of working for patients with refractory depression who fail drug therapy – patients for whom there is otherwise no treatment at all. Though the exact mechanism of ECT is unknown, neuroscientists now say that it works by inducing neuroplasticity in the brain, especially in those with small hippocampi, the seahorse-shaped regions on either side of the brain involved in consolidating memory. A paper published in Biological Psychiatry this March shows that ECT increases the volume of both the hippocampus and the amygdala, a brain organ that is a seat of emotion and fear. Moreover, the smaller the hippocampi at the start of ECT therapy, the more likely a patient is to improve. All this might start to explain why a seizure, induced by the passage of huge volts of electricity through the brain, restores in the desperate and suicidal a will to live once more.

M emory loss is a fairly common complaint of those who have undergone ECT. In fact, it is the side-effect that many find most horrifying, and that seems to be ineradicable. Specialists who have studied it and tried to improve the therapy admit that there is a limit to the extent to which this side-effect can be controlled. Nevertheless, they say that the memory loss is mostly short-term, and that critics have over-emphasised it. If the trade-off is between some short-term memory loss and a life-saving treatment, they ask, who wouldn’t take the memory loss?

My mother once told me that after her treatments, my grandmother wouldn’t remember things. Not big important things, but things that you wouldn’t expect people to forget. Where she was the day before or after a treatment. Who drove her. This was more disturbing to my mother, I think, than it was to my grandmother.

What I remember, very vividly, is a visit my grandmother and my aunts made to our house when I was very little – four, or maybe five. It must have been soon after a treatment, or maybe soon after my grandmother was released from her stay at Marcy, because they all spoke in rather hushed tones. Usually, when they got together for tea in the middle of the day on a weekday, they laughed, their voices rising almost to yells as they joked excitedly and teased each other. It was a warm day, I think – I remember that the house was warm, that we all gathered around the small faux-wood kitchen table in our tiny house. The walls were painted a light lemon yellow; Auntie Carol brought donuts in a large white box, which she’d picked up after doing her morning school bus run. I picked some dandelions to give to my aunts and my grandmother.

I liked to sit at the table with them, pretending to be a grown-up, listening to their chatter, drinking tea. I had just started to try to copy their habit of tea-drinking, and I watched my grandmother, to see how she engaged the ritual. Her hand trembled, and her teacup rattled against the little china saucer underneath as she accepted her cup of tea and raised it to her mouth. Thinking that this was part of the ceremony, I, too, made my hand tremble so that my teacup would rattle against the saucer. Did someone interrupt my attempt at imitation before my grandmother saw? I don’t think so. I feel ashamed when I think of this, even now.

I have often wondered if I remember this scene correctly. It is as if I can bring it all back with a little effort – the brown kitchen table; the white hulking stove; the warmth of the day; my aunts, mother, grandmother and me packed tightly around the tea set; my brown hands attached to thin brown arms shakily lifting the teacup to my mouth. I hear the rattle of the cup against the saucer.

I expect that most of us have these kinds of memories: things we remember doing, perhaps minor, that get magnified through remembering, and squat there like ugly gargoyles that we can’t get past and can’t exorcise. If that is so, then the question seems even more important: why is it that we value remembering, and remembering truly, so much?

Imagine that your unpleasant memories aren’t about the petty meannesses or insensitivities that we all experience and enact, but are about large, awful things you’ve done, or that have been done to you. It would seem, then, that forgetting should be your goal, not remembering.

Part of the problem seems to be that the things we forget are not necessarily the things we want to forget: where we put the car keys; the name of that classmate at our 25th reunion; when our doctor’s appointment is. And the things we remember might not always be the things we want to remember.

remembering is truly important to our histories, even though there are benefits to forgetfulness

But what if you could remember things that you did, or that happened to you, but without the pain or emotional colouring? If you could remember painful things – things you said in anger; things you did that you regret; trauma; abuse – the same way you remember that 26 November 1993 was a Friday, or the name of your first‑grade teacher, or who played third base for the Yankees in the 1978 sudden-death game against Boston?

Assume, for the sake of the example, that you still got pleasure from good memories: from remembering your daughter’s toddlerhood, or your graduation day. It would be just the bad memories that you’d view in a detached manner, as if they had happened to a third person. If we could remember bad memories without their pain, we could preserve the sense that remembering is truly important to our histories, and yet still gain the benefits of forgetfulness. If the people in The Giver could all remember the tragic history of human strife, but not feel any painful or negative emotions about those events, would we not have the same happy and peaceful society achieved in the book by forgetting? If, for instance, those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder could still remember the trauma, yet recount and remember it with detachment, it would seem that we have preserved their memories while also allowing them to be happier.

If you, like me, find this vaguely disturbing, then why? Is it just irrational? Or have we, by removing the emotional and affective element of the memory, changed it? Has it been transformed from the memory of an experience to the memory of a fact, and, in that transformation, been falsified despite our best efforts at preserving the truth of memory while eradicating its emotional content? To put it another way: are some memories in their very essence painful, because they are experiential, rather than simply factual? And must remembering things accurately retain that aspect?

I often wonder if my grandmother’s ‘nervous breakdown’ was just an instance of too much truth. Perhaps she was just a woman with too many children and too little food and money during the Great Depression, a person whose husband was intermittently discriminated against and unemployed because he was a German in the US during World War II. Just maybe, a good dose of forgetfulness was all the cure she needed. I think about my students who are haunted by the memory of their own misdemeanours, or by minor trespasses or cruelties perpetrated against them, and in those cases I am fairly confident that some forgetfulness is in order, otherwise self-flagellation and vendettas lie ahead.

But then there are the people who seem to forget too easily, who have little trouble getting beyond the memory of the cruelties and crimes for which they’ve been responsible. And they, I think, could use a dose of memory-enhancement, assuming that it would have the appropriate chastening effect. Then there are the saints: those who, seemingly with ease, forget the wrongs done them and go on to lead lives free of recrimination. They, it seems, are of another species, but still live among us.

Though the brain is an anatomical organ that functions through complex electrochemical processes, if we think that our questions about memory and forgetting are answered in those terms, we have missed something important. Remembering truly and forgetting well are questions not just about the anatomy and electrochemistry of the brain, but about what kinds of animals we are, who think that the questions of memory, truthfulness and happiness are themselves important.

Pleasure and pain

Me versus myself

I work against myself through procrastination, distraction and addiction. Why do I consistently sabotage my own life?

Eliane Glaser

Global history

The route to progress

Anticolonial modernity was founded upon the fight for liberation from communists, capitalists and imperialists alike

Frank Gerits

Thinkers and theories

Paper trails

Husserl’s well-tended archive has given him a rich afterlife, while Nietzsche’s was distorted by his axe-grinding sister

Peter Salmon

Philosophy of mind

The problem of erring animals

Three medieval thinkers struggled to explain how animals could make mistakes – and uncovered the nature of nonhuman minds

Moral progress is annoying

You might feel you can trust your gut to tell right from wrong, but the friction of social change shows that you can’t

Daniel Kelly & Evan Westra

The disruption nexus

Moments of crisis, such as our own, are great opportunities for historic change, but only under highly specific conditions

Roman Krznaric

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The most unforgettable person, everyone has that person or people they will never forget in their life. this is one of mine..

I am currently studying to retake my CBEST and I have been writing essays to prepare. They asked me to write about someone unforgetable in my life and I thought I would share that here.

A few years ago I went to Africa with a gentleman that would soon introduce me to the woman that would become my mentor. We were hanging out at church they were being followed around by three children that I fell head over heels for and offered to babysit if they ever needed. They quickly took me up on that offer and that's when I began my friendship with his wife. Her name is Julie. Julie kind, compassionate, and giving. She has supported me in many endeavors, helps me control my anxiety, and teaches me new things on a daily basis. Without her I honestly don't know where my life would be. She has easily become the most unforgettable person in my life outside my family.

My life is constantly changing, whether that be through internships in Uganda, career changes, and the most recent Peace Corps Service for two years in Uganda. Julie as been there through it all. Our relationship is currently her in America and me living in Uganda and yet she is still here supporting me in all the things that I am doing. I remember when I first decided to join the Peace Corps Julie was thrilled for me and encouraged me to pursue that dream and see what would come out of it. I knew that moving away for two years was a crazy idea and most of my friends and family where not thrilled or supportive. Julie however, knew my heart and my desire to move to Africa and supported my decision to move and helped me be excited instead of scared. I may not have been able to move had she not supported me the way she had. Julie not only supports me but she also helps me maintain my anxiety.

A pretty well known fact about myself is the fact that I have anxiety. When I was living in the states I was able to control it pretty well because I knew my triggers and I the environment that I lived in. However, moving to Uganda has caused my anxiety to slightly worsen and I have much less control. Julie is here for me through all of my anxiety. She had given me phrases to remind myself that the thoughts my anxiety bring are just lies. She has also prayed for me and reminded me that anxiety is just temporary and my life is so much more than what my anxiety brings. I still don't have full control of my anxiety yet because of the constant environment and cultural changes living in a foreign country. Although, with Julie in my corner I am able to one day at a time have more control over my anxiety and that is a life savior. With teaching me how to control my anxiety she also just teaches me things in general.

Julie is a stay at home mom who also home schools her kids. She is constantly teaching me how to be an incredible parent, different tips and tricks on teaching, and how to communicate better with others especially in my relationships. I don't think she realizes how much she teaches me because most of the time it's just through our daily conversations that I learn new things from her. Especially about being a mom. She i constantly talking about her kids and different things about how she raises them and that has really sunk in with me and showed me different ways of how I some day want to parent. I think the biggest thing she has taught me is how to better communicate with my boyfriend. Julie and her husband has been married for ten years, and they have gone through a lot. Since they have been through so much Julie shares such things with me and gives me tips on how to communicate with my boyfriend since she too has been through those things. Julie doesn't even realize how much she teaches me in each of our conversations.

Julie is hands down one of the most unforgettable person in my life. Through her support, her help with my anxiety, and all that she teaches me she has brought me through some incredibly dark moments. She has helped me to see how brave I am, how strong I am, and how through hard work and perseverance I can get through anything. If I hadn't went to Uganda with her husband and been introduced to Julie I don't know where I would be right now in life.

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25 beatles lyrics: your go-to guide for every situation, the best lines from the fab four.

For as long as I can remember, I have been listening to The Beatles. Every year, my mom would appropriately blast “Birthday” on anyone’s birthday. I knew all of the words to “Back In The U.S.S.R” by the time I was 5 (Even though I had no idea what or where the U.S.S.R was). I grew up with John, Paul, George, and Ringo instead Justin, JC, Joey, Chris and Lance (I had to google N*SYNC to remember their names). The highlight of my short life was Paul McCartney in concert twice. I’m not someone to “fangirl” but those days I fangirled hard. The music of The Beatles has gotten me through everything. Their songs have brought me more joy, peace, and comfort. I can listen to them in any situation and find what I need. Here are the best lyrics from The Beatles for every and any occasion.

And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make

The End- Abbey Road, 1969

The sun is up, the sky is blue, it's beautiful and so are you

Dear Prudence- The White Album, 1968

Love is old, love is new, love is all, love is you

Because- Abbey Road, 1969

There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be

All You Need Is Love, 1967

Life is very short, and there's no time for fussing and fighting, my friend

We Can Work It Out- Rubber Soul, 1965

He say, "I know you, you know me", One thing I can tell you is you got to be free

Come Together- Abbey Road, 1969

Oh please, say to me, You'll let me be your man. And please say to me, You'll let me hold your hand

I Wanna Hold Your Hand- Meet The Beatles!, 1964

It was twenty years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play. They've been going in and out of style, but they're guaranteed to raise a smile

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band-1967

Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see

Strawberry Fields Forever- Magical Mystery Tour, 1967

Can you hear me? When it rains and shine, it's just a state of mind

Rain- Paperback Writer "B" side, 1966

Little darling, it's been long cold lonely winter. Little darling, it feels like years since it' s been here. Here comes the sun, Here comes the sun, and I say it's alright

Here Comes The Sun- Abbey Road, 1969

We danced through the night and we held each other tight, and before too long I fell in love with her. Now, I'll never dance with another when I saw her standing there

Saw Her Standing There- Please Please Me, 1963

I love you, I love you, I love you, that's all I want to say

Michelle- Rubber Soul, 1965

You say you want a revolution. Well you know, we all want to change the world

Revolution- The Beatles, 1968

All the lonely people, where do they all come from. All the lonely people, where do they all belong

Eleanor Rigby- Revolver, 1966

Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends

With A Little Help From My Friends- Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967

Hey Jude, don't make it bad. Take a sad song and make it better

Hey Jude, 1968

Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. Now it looks as though they're here to stay. Oh, I believe in yesterday

Yesterday- Help!, 1965

And when the brokenhearted people, living in the world agree, there will be an answer, let it be.

Let It Be- Let It Be, 1970

And anytime you feel the pain, Hey Jude, refrain. Don't carry the world upon your shoulders

I'll give you all i got to give if you say you'll love me too. i may not have a lot to give but what i got i'll give to you. i don't care too much for money. money can't buy me love.

Can't Buy Me Love- A Hard Day's Night, 1964

All you need is love, love is all you need

All You Need Is Love- Magical Mystery Tour, 1967

Whisper words of wisdom, let it be

Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings and learn to fly. all your life, you were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Blackbird- The White Album, 1968

Though I know I'll never lose affection, for people and things that went before. I know I'll often stop and think about them. In my life, I love you more

In My Life- Rubber Soul, 1965

While these are my 25 favorites, there are quite literally 1000s that could have been included. The Beatles' body of work is massive and there is something for everyone. If you have been living under a rock and haven't discovered the Fab Four, you have to get musically educated. Stream them on Spotify, find them on iTunes or even buy a CD or record (Yes, those still exist!). I would suggest starting with 1, which is a collection of most of their #1 songs, or the 1968 White Album. Give them chance and you'll never look back.

14 Invisible Activities: Unleash Your Inner Ghost!

Obviously the best superpower..

The best superpower ever? Being invisible of course. Imagine just being able to go from seen to unseen on a dime. Who wouldn't want to have the opportunity to be invisible? Superman and Batman have nothing on being invisible with their superhero abilities. Here are some things that you could do while being invisible, because being invisible can benefit your social life too.

1. "Haunt" your friends.

Follow them into their house and cause a ruckus.

2. Sneak into movie theaters.

Going to the cinema alone is good for your mental health , says science

Considering that the monthly cost of subscribing to a media-streaming service like Netflix is oft...

Free movies...what else to I have to say?

3. Sneak into the pantry and grab a snack without judgment.

Late night snacks all you want? Duh.

4. Reenact "Hollow Man" and play Kevin Bacon.

America's favorite son? And feel what it's like to be in a MTV Movie Award nominated film? Sign me up.

5. Wear a mask and pretend to be a floating head.

Just another way to spook your friends in case you wanted to.

6. Hold objects so they'll "float."

"Oh no! A floating jar of peanut butter."

7. Win every game of hide-and-seek.

Just stand out in the open and you'll win.

8. Eat some food as people will watch it disappear.

Even everyday activities can be funny.

9. Go around pantsing your friends.

Even pranks can be done; not everything can be good.

10. Not have perfect attendance.

You'll say here, but they won't see you...

11. Avoid anyone you don't want to see.

Whether it's an ex or someone you hate, just use your invisibility to slip out of the situation.

12. Avoid responsibilities.

Chores? Invisible. People asking about social life? Invisible. Family being rude? Boom, invisible.

13. Be an expert on ding-dong-ditch.

Never get caught and have the adrenaline rush? I'm down.

14. Brag about being invisible.

Be the envy of the town.

But don't, I repeat, don't go in a locker room. Don't be a pervert with your power. No one likes a Peeping Tom.

Good luck, folks.

19 Lessons I'll Never Forget from Growing Up In a Small Town

There have been many lessons learned..

Small towns certainly have their pros and cons. Many people who grow up in small towns find themselves counting the days until they get to escape their roots and plant new ones in bigger, "better" places. And that's fine. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought those same thoughts before too. We all have, but they say it's important to remember where you came from. When I think about where I come from, I can't help having an overwhelming feeling of gratitude for my roots. Being from a small town has taught me so many important lessons that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

1. The importance of traditions.

Sometimes traditions seem like a silly thing, but the fact of it is that it's part of who you are. You grew up this way and, more than likely, so did your parents. It is something that is part of your family history and that is more important than anything.

2. How to be thankful for family and friends.

No matter how many times they get on your nerves or make you mad, they are the ones who will always be there and you should never take that for granted.

3. How to give back.

When tragedy strikes in a small town, everyone feels obligated to help out because, whether directly or indirectly, it affects you too. It is easy in a bigger city to be able to disconnect from certain problems. But in a small town those problems affect everyone.

4. What the word "community" really means.

Along the same lines as #3, everyone is always ready and willing to lend a helping hand when you need one in a small town and to me that is the true meaning of community. It's working together to build a better atmosphere, being there to raise each other up, build each other up, and pick each other up when someone is in need. A small town community is full of endless support whether it be after a tragedy or at a hometown sports game. Everyone shows up to show their support.

5. That it isn't about the destination, but the journey.

People say this to others all the time, but it takes on a whole new meaning in a small town. It is true that life is about the journey, but when you're from a small town, you know it's about the journey because the journey probably takes longer than you spend at the destination. Everything is so far away that it is totally normal to spend a couple hours in the car on your way to some form of entertainment. And most of the time, you're gonna have as many, if not more, memories and laughs on the journey than at the destination.

6. The consequences of making bad choices.

Word travels fast in a small town, so don't think you're gonna get away with anything. In fact, your parents probably know what you did before you even have a chance to get home and tell them. And forget about being scared of what your teacher, principle, or other authority figure is going to do, you're more afraid of what your parents are gonna do when you get home.

7. To trust people, until you have a reason not to.

Everyone deserves a chance. Most people don't have ill-intentions and you can't live your life guarding against every one else just because a few people in your life have betrayed your trust.

8. To be welcoming and accepting of everyone.

While small towns are not always extremely diverse, they do contain people with a lot of different stories, struggle, and backgrounds. In a small town, it is pretty hard to exclude anyone because of who they are or what they come from because there aren't many people to choose from. A small town teaches you that just because someone isn't the same as you, doesn't mean you can't be great friends.

9. How to be my own, individual person.

In a small town, you learn that it's okay to be who you are and do your own thing. You learn that confidence isn't how beautiful you are or how much money you have, it's who you are on the inside.

10. How to work for what I want.

Nothing comes easy in life. They always say "gardens don't grow overnight" and if you're from a small town you know this both figuratively and literally. You certainly know gardens don't grow overnight because you've worked in a garden or two. But you also know that to get to the place you want to be in life it takes work and effort. It doesn't just happen because you want it to.

11. How to be great at giving directions.

If you're from a small town, you know that you will probably only meet a handful of people in your life who ACTUALLY know where your town is. And forget about the people who accidentally enter into your town because of google maps. You've gotten really good at giving them directions right back to the interstate.

12. How to be humble .

My small town has definitely taught me how to be humble. It isn't always about you, and anyone who grows up in a small town knows that. Everyone gets their moment in the spotlight, and since there's so few of us, we're probably best friends with everyone so we are as excited when they get their moment of fame as we are when we get ours.

13. To be well-rounded.

Going to a small town high school definitely made me well-rounded. There isn't enough kids in the school to fill up all the clubs and sports teams individually so be ready to be a part of them all.

14. How to be great at conflict resolution.

In a small town, good luck holding a grudge. In a bigger city you can just avoid a person you don't like or who you've had problems with. But not in a small town. You better resolve the issue fast because you're bound to see them at least 5 times a week.

15. The beauty of getting outside and exploring.

One of my favorite things about growing up in a rural area was being able to go outside and go exploring and not have to worry about being in danger. There is nothing more exciting then finding a new place somewhere in town or in the woods and just spending time there enjoying the natural beauty around you.

16. To be prepared for anything.

You never know what may happen. If you get a flat tire, you better know how to change it yourself because you never know if you will be able to get ahold of someone else to come fix it. Mechanics might be too busy , or more than likely you won't even have enough cell service to call one.

17. That you don't always have to do it alone.

It's okay to ask for help. One thing I realized when I moved away from my town for college, was how much my town has taught me that I could ask for help is I needed it. I got into a couple situations outside of my town where I couldn't find anyone to help me and found myself thinking, if I was in my town there would be tons of people ready to help me. And even though I couldn't find anyone to help, you better believe I wasn't afraid to ask.

18. How to be creative.

When you're at least an hour away from normal forms of entertainment such as movie theaters and malls, you learn to get real creative in entertaining yourself. Whether it be a night looking at the stars in the bed of a pickup truck or having a movie marathon in a blanket fort at home, you know how to make your own good time.

19. To brush off gossip.

It's all about knowing the person you are and not letting others influence your opinion of yourself. In small towns, there is plenty of gossip. But as long as you know who you really are, it will always blow over.

Grateful Beyond Words: A Letter to My Inspiration

I have never been so thankful to know you..

I can't say "thank you" enough to express how grateful I am for you coming into my life. You have made such a huge impact on my life. I would not be the person I am today without you and I know that you will keep inspiring me to become an even better version of myself.

You have taught me that you don't always have to strong. You are allowed to break down as long as you pick yourself back up and keep moving forward. When life had you at your worst moments, you allowed your friends to be there for you and to help you. You let them in and they helped pick you up. Even in your darkest hour you showed so much strength. I know that you don't believe in yourself as much as you should but you are unbelievably strong and capable of anything you set your mind to.

Your passion to make a difference in the world is unbelievable. You put your heart and soul into your endeavors and surpass any personal goal you could have set. Watching you do what you love and watching you make a difference in the lives of others is an incredible experience. The way your face lights up when you finally realize what you have accomplished is breathtaking and I hope that one day I can have just as much passion you have.

SEE MORE: A Letter To My Best Friend On Her Birthday

The love you have for your family is outstanding. Watching you interact with loved ones just makes me smile . You are so comfortable and you are yourself. I see the way you smile when you are around family and I wish I could see you smile like this everyday. You love with all your heart and this quality is something I wished I possessed.

You inspire me to be the best version of myself. I look up to you. I feel that more people should strive to have the strength and passion that you exemplify in everyday life.You may be stubborn at points but when you really need help you let others in, which shows strength in itself. I have never been more proud to know someone and to call someone my role model. You have taught me so many things and I want to thank you. Thank you for inspiring me in life. Thank you for making me want to be a better person.

Waitlisted for a College Class? Here's What to Do!

Dealing with the inevitable realities of college life..

Course registration at college can be a big hassle and is almost never talked about. Classes you want to take fill up before you get a chance to register. You might change your mind about a class you want to take and must struggle to find another class to fit in the same time period. You also have to make sure no classes clash by time. Like I said, it's a big hassle.

This semester, I was waitlisted for two classes. Most people in this situation, especially first years, freak out because they don't know what to do. Here is what you should do when this happens.

Don't freak out

This is a rule you should continue to follow no matter what you do in life, but is especially helpful in this situation.

Email the professor

Around this time, professors are getting flooded with requests from students wanting to get into full classes. This doesn't mean you shouldn't burden them with your email; it means they are expecting interested students to email them. Send a short, concise message telling them that you are interested in the class and ask if there would be any chance for you to get in.

Attend the first class

Often, the advice professors will give you when they reply to your email is to attend the first class. The first class isn't the most important class in terms of what will be taught. However, attending the first class means you are serious about taking the course and aren't going to give up on it.

Keep attending class

Every student is in the same position as you are. They registered for more classes than they want to take and are "shopping." For the first couple of weeks, you can drop or add classes as you please, which means that classes that were once full will have spaces. If you keep attending class and keep up with assignments, odds are that you will have priority. Professors give preference to people who need the class for a major and then from higher to lower class year (senior to freshman).

Have a backup plan

For two weeks, or until I find out whether I get into my waitlisted class, I will be attending more than the usual number of classes. This is so that if I don't get into my waitlisted class, I won't have a credit shortage and I won't have to fall back in my backup class. Chances are that enough people will drop the class, especially if it is very difficult like computer science, and you will have a chance. In popular classes like art and psychology, odds are you probably won't get in, so prepare for that.

Remember that everything works out at the end

Life is full of surprises. So what if you didn't get into the class you wanted? Your life obviously has something else in store for you. It's your job to make sure you make the best out of what you have.

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An Unforgettable Experience in My Life

An Unforgettable Experience in My Life - Essay Example

• Subject: English
• Type: Essay
• Level: College
• Pages: 5 (1250 words)
• Downloads: 0

Extract of sample "An Unforgettable Experience in My Life"

One of the most unforgettable experiences in my life was when I experienced one of the best days ever. It all started with a surprise visit from one of my closest friends after months apart due to the pandemic. That day, we decided to go on an adventure and explore a nearby city that neither of us had been to before. We spent the entire day wandering around, taking in the sights and sounds of a new place. From trying out interesting street food to participating in local customs, it was an experience unlike any other. As we watched the sunset over the city skyline, I knew that this would be one of my most treasured memories that I would hold onto for years to come.

A Memorable Trip That Changed My Life: Reflections on an Unforgettable Experience

The unforgettable experience that I will never forget is my trip to South Korea. It was a life-changing journey that changed the way I look at the world and myself. The memories of this trip stay with me to this day, and they have profoundly shaped how I think about travel, relationships, and life in general.

From the moment I stepped foot in South Korea, I felt a sense of belonging like never before. Everywhere I looked there were friendly faces and warm smiles that made me feel welcome. The people there were so kind, helpful, and passionate about their culture—something that was extremely foreign to me at the time.

My trip to South Korea was also packed with amazing experiences that I will never forget. From exploring the breathtaking landscapes of Jeju Island to eating delicious Korean cuisine, this trip was an unforgettable learning experience filled with memorable moments.

I remember how special it felt to be able to connect and communicate with people from a different culture—something I had only dreamed of before my trip. The relationships I made during my journey were incredibly meaningful and impactful, and many of them have lasted to this day.

My trip to South Korea was the best experience of my life because it changed the way I view travel, culture, and myself. It showed me the value of immersing yourself in different cultures, connecting with people from all walks of life, and pushing yourself outside your comfort zone. All of these lessons have stayed with me since then and continue to shape my life today.

How a Journey of Self-Discovery Brought Me Closer to Finding My Purpose in Life

My journey of self-discovery started when I decided to take a break from school and work for some soul searching. It was one of the best decisions I have ever made. During this time, I engaged in activities that allowed me to explore my inner passions and interests, including writing an essay about one of the happiest days of my life.

This essay gave me the opportunity to reflect on the experiences and moments that made me the happiest, from spending time playing with my siblings as a child to finally reaching a personal goal. Through this process of introspection, I was able to identify what truly brought me joy and fulfillment in life.

I also used this time to experience different cultures, meet new people, and learn more about myself. I traveled to remote parts of the world and volunteered in a variety of fields. Through these experiences, I developed an appreciation for life's diversity and a better understanding of the values that are important to me.

These activities opened my eyes to many things that were previously unknown to me, and I came away with a renewed sense of purpose. I was inspired to make more meaningful changes in my life, such as setting new goals and exploring different career paths. This journey of self-discovery has helped me reconnect with my innermost desires and take steps towards achieving them.

Finding Strength in the Unfamiliar: My Transformative Experience

When I look back, my journey to find strength in the unfamiliar has been a long and winding road. It all began with one of the best days of my life - spending a year abroad in another country. That experience was truly transformative for me and propelled me further down an unknown path filled with new experiences and lessons.

I learned that sometimes the best moments of life are found in an unfamiliar place. I learned to embrace change and not be afraid of it, but instead use it as an opportunity to grow. Exploring a new culture allowed me to break out of my comfort zone and gain perspective on issues I had formerly been unaware of or taken for granted. It also helped me to gain insight into my own culture and how I could contribute to it in a meaningful way.

The experience of living abroad taught me that embracing the unfamiliar can lead to some of the most rewarding experiences imaginable. I came away with a newfound appreciation for both myself and others, as well as an understanding that we all have the power to find strength in the unknown.

This essay is my attempt to share this transformative experience with others, and hopefully inspire them to open their minds and hearts to all that life has to offer. While it may be difficult at times, the rewards of finding strength in the unfamiliar are worth every step taken. From learning new languages and customs to gaining valuable insight into different cultures, I have come to understand the value of challenging yourself and exploring unfamiliar territory.

Living abroad has given me courage and strength in ways that I never could have imagined. My journey is far from over, but I am now confident that with each new challenge, I will be able to find strength in the unfamiliar and emerge even stronger than before.

My experience has taught me that life is all about creating and navigating your own path, and that when you do so with an open heart and mind, amazing things can happen. I urge everyone to take a risk and explore what lies beyond their comfort zone – it may just be the best decision you ever make.

A Life-Changing Journey That Shows What Is Truly Important to Me

Growing up, I never thought much about the importance of life experiences. But, one day changed everything for me. It was a life-altering journey that showed me what truly matters in my life.

My best day ever began when I decided to take a solo trip to explore the world. Leaving my home and family, I set out to discover new cultures and ways of life. This journey was a real eye-opener as it taught me to appreciate the little things in life that often go unnoticed.

The moment that made this journey so meaningful for me was when I visited an orphanage for children with disabilities. Seeing the courage and strength these kids had and the determination they displayed in their daily lives was truly inspiring. This experience changed my perspective on life forever.

The journey taught me resilience, strength, courage, and humility. Through this experience, I learned to value the simple things that make life precious: family, friends and love. My life-changing journey showed me what is truly important to me.

I am now more appreciative of life’s moments and try my best to make the most out of every experience I have. This journey has me realize that it’s not about how much money you have or how successful you are in your career, but rather what kind of impact you can make in other people’s lives.

My journey has given me a perspective that I will carry with me for the rest of my life, and it has allowed me to appreciate life and all its beauty. This is why I consider this journey to be the best day of my life and the happiest moment of my life – because it taught me what truly matters.

This experience has also made me realize that life is a journey, and no matter how hard it may seem at times, if you keep your head up and push through the difficult moments, great things can come out of it. I am grateful for this life-changing journey because it taught me so much about myself and the world around me. It has shown me what is truly important to me.

In conclusion, I believe that life is a journey and it is up to us to make the most of it. My unforgettable experience has shown me that there are many moments in life that should be cherished, no matter how small they may seem. This journey taught me what truly matters: family, friends, love and the courage to keep pushing forward. Through this life-changing experience, I am thankful to have found a newfound appreciation for life and all its beauty.

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Chasing Ancestors

Finding stories…, the most unforgettable person….

My Dad wrote a composition for his 9 th grade English class titled “The Most Unforgettable Person I Ever Knew.” He said he can’t remember writing it, but gave permission for me to use it anyway. (I transcribed it as originally written, even though it seems like he left something out.)

The Most Unforgettable Person I Ever Knew

Small, lean, slow, and deliberate in his movements, he could do more work than most men one half his age. My great-grandfather drove a tractor when he was 88. He rode a bicycle 4 miles a day in all kinds of weather until he wrecked it and couldn’t buy parts for it because of its age. My great-grandfather was 90 years old then. He then walked the four miles every day. He was 92 years of age when he painted it the last time. It was painted from ladders instead of from running boards because he might fall off a running board. The day he died he was digging a ditch. My great-grandfather was then 93 1/2 years of age.

My great-grandfather was a typical Quaker and was always studious. He read the Bible 26 times, and never missed a Sunday at church for 10 years.

My great-grandfather kept weather records for years. The weather bureau sometimes checked with him because his records were older and more accurate than theirs were.

My great-grandfather’s name was Lewis Elwood Millikan. He died in March 1949.

Lewis Elwood Millikan, the only son of Clark Millikan (1824-1926) & Lydia Hinshaw Millikan (1833-1917), was born October 10, 1855 in Randolph County, North Carolina. He moved to Indiana with his family soon after the end of the Civil War. He married Martha Ellen Barker (1858-1932) February 23, 1882. They had two children, Arza (1883-1964) and Edna (1886-1966). He raised his family on a farm on Mulebarn Road south of Sheridan, IN. His farm was not very far away from Clark’s.

When Arza got married in 1916, Elwood and Mattie moved to town and settled in a house on Sheridan’s Main Street. Elwood “retired” & Arza and his wife, Mary Boone Millikan (1897-1992), took over the farm. However, both Arza and Elwood worked their farm as well as helped out with Clark’s farm along with hired help until Clark died in 1926. So, when the essay says Elwood rode his bicycle 4 miles a day, he was riding from his house in Sheridan to the farm & back home.

Here’s a picture of him painting the farm house at the age of 92. Can’t say I’d want to be up on that ladder!

He was active in the Friend’s church. Some papers I have indicate he was a delegate to regional meetings as well as clerk for his Meeting. A news article from the time of his 92 nd birthday, states that the church gave him a Bible for perfect attendance. He was a member of Sheridan Friends at that time. The church also held an open house to celebrate his birthday.

I’m impressed that he read the Bible through so many times. He was interviewed by Wayne Guthrie with the Indianapolis News sometime after he turned 93. He said he had read the Bible through 23 times and was reading the Gospel of Luke for the 24 th time. He said he started reading it through in 1915. He said he liked reading the Gospels, “but it takes the whole Bible if you want to understand it right.” In one sense, I guess there weren’t as many distractions back then to interrupt the reading. Anyway, I admire his diligence.

The Indianapolis News article also discussed his bicycle riding. He said he bought the bicycle in 1918. He said that he had to quit riding it because when he tried to fix it, it made it worse. No surprise, for a 30 year old bike that may have been used almost every day!

Weather changes were important for farming. My Grandmother gave me a few of Elwood’s weather journals. I have the records for about 1936 through 1949. Each day, Elwood would enter the temperature. Starting with the 1940 journal, he also entered the weather conditions every day. He added a few notations of his activities on some days. My Grandmother included temperatures & weather conditions in her diary entries as well. Elwood’s final entry was Wed. March 16, 1949. It was 22 degrees and cloudy. This was the day he died.

Elwood died of a heart attack while he was helping dig a ditch. He died at the farm. He was 93 years old. He had been widowed for 17 years. He was survived by his son & daughter as well as 7 grandchildren and 10 great grandchildren. He was buried at Union Grove Cemetery.

So there is a little more to share about Elwood’s early life & I hope to do that at a later date. But even without that, it does seem like Lewis Elwood Millikan was quite an Unforgettable Person.

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• Dear Life Kit
• Life Skills

Forgot where you put the keys? Experts (and a trivia buff) share tips to boost memory

Andee Tagle

Margaret Cirino

Where did I put the keys? Tips to improve memory

Eugene Mymrin/Getty Images hide caption

You don't have to be a trivia buff to be great at remembering things.

Monica Thieu , a four-time Jeopardy! contestant and winner of the game's 2012 college championship, uses memory techniques like mnemonic devices and flash cards to retain world capitals, TV shows, Olympic cities and more.

"With practice, absolutely everyone can make their memory stronger," says Thieu, who also researches memory, human cognition and emotion as a postdoctoral scientist at Emory University.

Listen to the podcast episode: Where did I put the keys? Tips to improve memory

That's because memory is selective. What our brains choose to remember is something we can train, says Charan Ranganath , director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California, Davis, and author of Why We Remember . "It can be biased, warped and reconstructed."

If you want to improve your memory, even if it's just remembering where you parked or where you put your keys, try these science-backed strategies from our experts.

Pay attention to what you want to remember

"The first necessary ingredient in creating a memory that lasts longer than the present moment is attention," says Lisa Genova , a neuroscientist and the author of Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting . "We need that input — otherwise that memory doesn’t get made, even if your eyes see it."

When people gripe about having memory problems, they're often having attention problems, she adds. For example, if you blame your memory because you can't find your parking spot, you probably weren't paying attention to it in the first place. So slow down and focus on what you want to remember.

Don't always depend on GPS. Your sense of direction will thank you

Create a rule and a habit.

If you repeatedly lose track of an object like your keys, wallet or cellphone, pick a designated spot in your home and keep it there when it's not in use, says Genova. That way, you don't have to expend effort trying to remember where you placed it.

"If you put it in the same place every time, you've made it [a fact], sort of like your address and birthday: My keys always go in this bowl. There's a rule and a habit," she says.

The more details the merrier

To form memories you'll naturally keep, make them as immersive as possible, says Thieu. This is especially helpful when you're tackling a subject that you find difficult to connect with.

Let's say you're trying to learn more about the Renaissance era. Commit the period to memory by absorbing information about it through a variety of mediums, says Thieu. Make a playlist of music from the era. Watch period dramas set at that time. And "any time you have an opportunity to learn something in a richer way, do it" — like going to a theater performance on the subject matter.

Our brains love to remember anything that's "meaningful, emotional, surprising or new," says Genova. So the more details you can give your brain to latch onto, the stronger that a memory becomes and the easier it is to recall later.

For relationship advice (plus health, finance and parenting tips and more),  subscribe to Life Kit’s newsletter .

Trigger your memory

When your brain creates a memory, it naturally weaves together all the sights, sounds, tastes and smells associated with that memory, says Genova. So use those connections to your advantage.

Let's say you're studying for a vocabulary test. If you always listen to Dua Lipa while you're studying and "have a chance to listen to Dua Lipa while you take the test, it might help you remember those words," says Genova. Psychologists call this process "context-dependent memory."

Genova suggests enhancing your study space with smells, music or certain tastes. Try chewing a piece of cinnamon gum, for example, while you're preparing for a big exam — and then again while you're taking it. Your senses can act as triggers for the rest of your memory to fall into place.

Negotiating isn't just for job offers. Here's how to use it in everyday life

"chunk" long strings of information.

If you have a big load of information to recall at once, Ranganath suggests a strategy that researchers call " chunking ." It's a way to organize longer strings of information to make them easier to recall. Let's say you want to remember the phone number (130) 555-1212. "That’s 10 digits, which is a lot to juggle around in my mind."

So "chunk" it into three parts, he says: 130, 555, 1212. Instead of recalling each number individually, you can recall the entire group — and then retrieve each individual number more easily.

Create a "mind palace"

Need to remember to grab eggs, milk and coffee creamer from the store? Ranganath suggests a method that memory researchers, as well as memory champions, call a "mind palace" — or the method of loci , which means "places" in Latin. You may have seen this ancient mnemonic device on TV shows like Sherlock .

This technique allows you to pair a place you know well, like your childhood home, with new information. Picture yourself placing the items of your grocery list around the house. Place a carton of eggs on your couch. Put milk on the kitchen counter. Put some creamer on the coffee table. Later on at the supermarket, recall this path through your house as you're shopping. It'll help you remember your grocery list.

How to start a new habit: think small

Try good old flash cards.

Don't overlook the power of reviewing flash cards, says Thieu. "Some of the best trivia experts I know do a lot of flash-carding."

Thieu likes to watch old Jeopardy! reruns and create flash cards for the information in each episode. Then, she'll use the cards to quiz herself. She also uses this technique to drill lists of more specific trivia information — say, the world's longest rivers or deepest lakes.

Take your flash-carding one step further by testing yourself before you learn the information, to see what you already know, and then afterward to see what you were able to remember. A pre-lesson test primes your brain for what you'll need to recall later on.

"We learn the most when we challenge ourselves — and that's an extraordinarily powerful tool for retaining information in the long run," says Ranganath.

Go easy on yourself

Lastly, don't expect your memory to be perfect, say our experts. It's normal to occasionally misplace your keys or forget to pay a bill.

"Life is an open-book test," says Genova. You're not cheating if you look something up or write it down. It could save your mental energy for something more meaningful.

The audio portion of this episode was produced by Margaret Cirino. The digital story was edited by Malaka Gharib. The visual editor is Beck Harlan. We'd love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at [email protected].

Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts  and Spotify , and sign up for our newsletter .

Grief and Loss: Personal Experience Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Every person faces situations of loss and grief at some time in his or her life. A person passes all stages of grief from denial to acceptance to cope with grief and return to life. I was 36 when I experienced the first serious loss in my life. Certainly, there were other ones before this event, but they did not influence me strongly. Thus, my grandmother died two years ago. She lived in the United States and died in her home. She was diagnosed with lung cancer half a year before her death, and despite the treatment she took and the first successes, she did not manage to fight the disease. We were very emotionally close as a grandmother and a granddaughter. I wish I had the same relationships with my grandchildren if I have any. We could share secrets, ask for advice, and talk about everything in the world.

I believe I experienced some impacts that should be mentioned about this loss. The first immediate impact was psychological. I was stressed by the event and could not behave as usual. Although I knew that this outcome was inevitable, it was difficult to acknowledge that I would not talk to her over the cup of tea in her kitchen again. Despite my family and friends who were very supportive, I felt lonely and was getting depressed. Another immediate impact was physical. I remember I lost appetite and had some sleep problems during the first days, but later I managed to cope with that condition and returned to normal life. Finally, the impact that came to power overtime was a spiritual one. At first, I was questioning my spiritual beliefs. However, I suppose I came to a conscious need of religion and strengthened my spiritual beliefs after my grandmother passed away. I cannot say I became passionately religious, but a short silent prayer before I went to bed was calming.

Although I was an adult woman and realized the inevitability of a lethal outcome, the death of my grandmother was a great loss for me. I knew I had to do something to deal with it and live my usual life. First of all, I remembered that she would not have been happy if I cried. My grandmother was an optimistic person and could make other people smile. So I spend some evenings with my mother looking at grandmother’s photos and remembering some warm and funny moments of our life together. It was useful for coping with the loss both for me and my mother. Also, I took my grandmother’s dog to live with me. People say that a dog resembles its owner, and this dog became another reminder of grandmother’s happy days and our walks in the park.

I believe people around me were also affected by this event. My grandmother had an active social life and worked in a community center after she retired. Thus, many of her colleagues and friends were also in grief because she was a real thought leader in the center, and her death was a loss for them as well as for the community as a whole. Her colleagues from the community center planted roses to commemorate my grandmother because she planned to create a rose alley but the disease did not let her accomplish the plan. The rest of our family were also in shock and despair. Our grandmother had the talent to unite people and contributed to our being one big family. Certainly, we remained a family after she passed on but our further meetings lacked some particular ingredient, which she used to bring in. Also, I became closer with my mother. This loss helped me to understand that we should spend as much time with our close people as we can because life is unpredictable and nobody knows when it will finish.

Looking back at that time, I am grateful to the people who managed to support me and were helpful. For example, my grandmother’s friends, colleagues, and just acquaintances were supportive both before and after a funeral. They were telling stories about their experiences with my grandmother and made me believe that she would not have wanted me to grieve and to cry. In fact, these people helped me to recover. Two of her best friends still phone me on Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I usually send them small presents on holidays. My best friend was very helpful by being near and asking no questions about my feelings until I was ready to discuss them. Still, she was always trying to make me a sandwich or a cup of tea because I had no appetite at that time, and she helped me to live the first days after the loss, which were the most complicated. Certainly, my family was supportive as well. Grandmother’s death was a loss for all of us and the opportunity to share grief was valuable.

Apart from the people who were helpful at that time, there were some who managed to hurt me, although not intentionally. Thus, my grandmother’s neighbor spoke to me and said that the grandmother was already old and that I should not have been in such grief. At that time, I could not percept these words normally and became even more upset. Two years later I came to realize that the woman tried to comfort me and said that my grandmother lived a long and happy life in a big family and achieved everything a woman could desire and that I should accept the situation and not be angry or disappointed.

I developed some rituals, which proved to be helpful at that time. One of them included our meetings with my mother. She was in grief as well, and we had an opportunity to speak about something that was worrying us. We gathered together once in a week or two, stayed home watching grandmother’s photos, or went for a walk to her favorite places. Later we could talk not only about our feelings of loss and grief but just enjoy our time together. I should admit that we became very close during those two years. Another ritual was bringing the flowers. My grandmother loved the flowers, and I went to the cemetery at least once a month to bring fresh flowers. I felt a need to do it, and these visits made me feel better.

My grandmother and I were very close. I even kept her photo in a wallet. After her death, this small picture of her smiling became a link, which helped me feel connected to my grandmother. It provided me with the comfort my grandmother managed to give to all of us when she was alive. Another connection was her dog I took to live in my house. It was a real friend of my grandmother and having him provided me with some comfort.

At present, I have preserved my ritual of visiting a cemetery and bringing flowers. It is the only thing I can do for her now. She always loved the flowers, and it is my pleasure to select them and imagine how happy she could have been to see them. Our meetings with the mother are also a kind of a ritual. Still, they are not always connected with our loss, we just enjoy spending time together.

I believe I experienced normal grief. I did not have a long denial stage, did not avoid my grandmother’s favorite places, my grief did not have a negative impact on my relationships with other people, and the emptiness I felt did not last long. The first days after my grandmother’s death was complicated, but support from my family and friends was helpful. Despite the fact that I knew that her death was just a matter of time, it was difficult to acknowledge that it came so fast. However, as a person involved in healthcare, I knew it was a good outcome for her before the severe pain came.

Remembering these past events, I realize that I could have acted differently at that time. During the first days, I was concentrated on my grief and did not know that my mother also felt bad because her mother died. As far as I can judge, I have skipped some stages of grief, or they were not distinct. Thus, I do not remember any absolute denial. I was shocked by the sad news, but it did not last long. After denial, anger came. I remember this feeling well enough. I was angry because, despite the wide choice of treatments for cancer, it did not help my close person. The stage of bargaining was not very evident in my experience. I returned to work at that time and tried to work as much as I could to avoid the sad thoughts. Still, I was sometimes asking the questions, such as what if the disease could have been diagnosed earlier or the treatment had been more effective?). However, I did not have the answers except that everything could have been different. I have experienced a short stage of depression, but it was quickly followed by acceptance and did not influence me much.

I believe the course was useful for me because I managed to discover some secret sides of my personality. After analyzing the situation of loss and grief, I realize that I am stronger than I expected. I have learned that I am a personality able to solve the complicated problems. Moreover, I realized that, in fact, every problem has a solution until a person passes away. After death, the only problem is to manage one’s grief and the feeling of loss. However, having the knowledge from the course, in case a similar situation happens, I will be able to act thoughtfully. Also, I will be more useful to other people in grief because I will be able to manage my feelings and thus help them overcome complicated situations related to grief and loss of something or somebody significant.

• Dealing With Grief and Loss
• Stage Theory and Stages of Grief
• Late Adulthood: Loss, Grief, Bereavement
• Successful and Unsuccessful Aging: My Grandfather' Story
• Personal Grief and Loss
• The Concept of Thinking Traps
• The Summer Undergraduate Mentorship Program
• "Getting Away with It": Listening to Audio Stories
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2021, May 14). Grief and Loss: Personal Experience. https://ivypanda.com/essays/grief-and-loss/

"Grief and Loss: Personal Experience." IvyPanda , 14 May 2021, ivypanda.com/essays/grief-and-loss/.

IvyPanda . (2021) 'Grief and Loss: Personal Experience'. 14 May.

IvyPanda . 2021. "Grief and Loss: Personal Experience." May 14, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/grief-and-loss/.

1. IvyPanda . "Grief and Loss: Personal Experience." May 14, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/grief-and-loss/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Grief and Loss: Personal Experience." May 14, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/grief-and-loss/.