Stephanie West Allen blogged about (and turned me onto) an article by John Darling about to keep our brains fit as we advance in years. One of Darling’s suggestions (quoting “Brain Fitness” teacher Lorraine Jarvi) is to write your memoirs:

If reading is stimulating, writing is stimulation tenfold. Jarvi says keep a journal, challenging yourself to explore complex topics or current events. Also, write your memoirs, which stimulates the vital part of your brain used for memory — and it’s guaranteed to have interested readers at some point down the road.

I was reminded of the recent excellent HBO series on John Adams, who lived past 90 and seemed sharp to the end (at least in the mini-series). Bored after retirement, Adams wrote his memoirs.

Stephanie West Allen turned me on to this entertaining video from Ira Glass’s This American Life Showtime series. It tells the tale of a guy whose wife experienced an embarrassing incident while waving to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis on the streets of New York City. In the story, the man is with his wife … but the punchline is that he wasn’t actually there. His memory of the incident is apparently false.

In addition to its being an amusing story, the video resonated with me both because I have my own (probably) false-memory story and a story of encountering Jackie Onassis on the streets of New York.

False Memory (probably): My parents were having a cocktail party when I was about 6. I got out of bed, went downstairs and outside, stretched my arms out and flew across our driveway. I was about 5 or 6 feet off the ground and did not swoop around but rather stayed at an even altitude during my flight. This memory had always been so vivid that my brain is convinced I really flew across the driveway.

Jackie Onassis: I was a young teenager, maybe 14 or so, and I was visiting my dad in New York City on Easter weekend. We were walking along Fifth Avenue during the “Easter Parade,” and my father turned to me after we passed someone and said, “Do you know who that was?” “No,” I said, “I didn’t see.” “It was Mrs. Onassis,” he said. My big chance at a celebrity sighting, and I hadn’t even been paying attention to people passing us!

The World's Greatest Yoga Instructor, Emma Tranter, turned me onto this fascinating video presentation, from "TED," Technology, Entertainment, Design, which "started (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Taylor tells an amazing story that takes on special meaning because of her role as a neuroanatomist. Through her stroke, she gains new "insider" insight into the brain's function and the human ability to achieve an astonishing state of being.

One morning, a blood vessel in Jill Bolte Taylor's brain exploded. As a brain scientist, she realized she had a ringside seat to her own stroke. She watched as her brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, self-awareness ...

Amazed to find herself alive, Taylor spent eight years recovering her ability to think, walk and talk. She has become a spokesperson for stroke recovery and for the possibility of coming back from brain injury stronger than before. In her case, although the stroke damaged the left side of her brain, her recovery unleashed a torrent of creative energy from her right. From her home base in Indiana, she now travels the country on behalf of the Harvard Brain Bank as the "Singin' Scientist."

"How many brain scientists have been able to study the brain from the inside out? I've gotten as much out of this experience of losing my left mind as I have in my entire academic career."
– Jill Bolte Taylor

How can storytelling help you interpret your dreams? A new piece of research by Teresa DeCicco reveals a technique.

In her article, "What is the Story Telling? Examining Discovery with the Storytelling Method (TSM) and Testing with a Control Group," in the academic journal Dreaming, DeCicco notes that her research showed a "significant relationship" between word association and "dreamer discovery" when dreamers created a story after completing word association about their dreams. "Discovery, insight, and bridging to waking-day circumstances was more likely with [the storytelling method]," DeCicco writes. She found a "significant difference between a group that interpreted a dream with [the storytelling method] and those who used the method with word association alone."

DeCicco explains that:

Most dream interpretations are based on two guiding principles: (a) a description of the dream and (b) associations made by the dreamer on the basis of dream content... [The storytelling method] begins with these two fundamental steps and then expands on the basic principles by adding a third step to the process. The third step involves taking the associations and making a meaningful story from them. People make meaning from events based on their own lives in terms of their experiences, personality, and perceptions.

Here's a paraphrased, brief outline of the storytelling method of dream interpretation:

1. Write down the dream in as much detail as possible upon waking.

2. Underline the most important/salient phrases in the dream.

3. Make a list of underlined words.

4. Make an association with each word or phrase on the list.

5. Take the new list of associations and make a meaningful story from these words -- in the exact order they appear on the list.

6. Try to bridge this story to any situation in your waking life and journal about it based on insight from the dream. As questions such as:

• Does this story have meaning for you? Explain.


• Does this story relate to your waking life in some way? Explain.


• Does this story relate to any specific events in your waking life?


• Did this analysis give you any clear insights?


• If yes, write about that insight and how it relates to your life?

Researcher Nicole Speer conducted an experiment to see if humans are physiologically disposed to break down activities into narratives.

Excerpts from an article describing the research:

As expected, activity in certain areas of the brain increased at the points that subjects had identified as the beginning or end of a segment... Consistent with previous research, such boundaries tended to occur during transitions in the narrative such as changes of location or a shift in the character's goals. Researchers have hypothesized that readers break down narrated activities into smaller chunks when they are reading stories. However, this is the first study to demonstrate that this process occurs naturally during reading, and to identify some of the brain regions that are involved in this process....The fact that these results occurred with narratives that described mundane events is particularly important to our understanding of how humans comprehend everyday activity. Speer writes that the findings "provide evidence not only that readers are able to identify the structure of narrated activities, but also that this process of segmenting continuous text into discrete events occurs during normal reading."

A fascinating article in New Scientist by Helen Phillips focused on "confabluation," a tendency for folks in older age to "develop amnesia about recent happenings while retaining memory of their younger days." Wrote Phillips:

"Until fairly recently it was seen simply as a neurological deficiency - a sign of something gone wrong. Now, however, it has become apparent that healthy people confabulate too. ... we may all confabulate routinely as we try to rationalise decisions or justify opinions. Why do you love me? Why did you buy that outfit? Why did you choose that career? At the extreme, some experts argue that we can never be sure about what is actually real and so must confabulate all the time to try to make sense of the world around us."

Ah yes, there is no objective reality. Reality is socially constructed through language, through story.