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This story, my story, built on memories and records, is my attempt to share a personal perspective, to reveal why I am. My source materials, anecdotes handed down by family I accept as true, evidence recorded in my baby books: The Book of Baby Mine and Life’s Milestones, as logged by my mother, although incomplete, informative, memories, narratives shared by my sister, and Voices In My Head. Some family history hidden for years until revealed on these pages. Some never to be revealed.
Unspoken.
Two voices will share these pages: the first voice is what I recall via multiple experiences, observations, and photographs. The second voice buried in conversations with my mother over the years as an adolescence and young adult, some written notes, articles, fore-mentioned baby books and photographs with truths existing beyond words.
Until recently, a source proving more informative than the written word, some enlightening while many distressing. Photographs. Some express joy, other times bitterness. I have felt both.
I cannot image why anyone would want to wade through this saga, but you are welcome to join the journey. Memories…… I understand that… some great, some tragic, most in between.
… memories occur when specific groups of neurons are reactivated. In the brain, any stimulus results in a particular pattern of neuronal activity—certain neurons become active in more or less a particular sequence. If you think of your cat, or your home, or your fifth birthday cake, different ensembles, or groups, of neurons become active. The theory is that strengthening or weakening synapses makes particular patterns of neuronal activity more or less likely to occur.
Adults rarely remember events from before the age of three and have patchy memories with things that happened to them between the ages of three and seven. It’s a phenomenon known as infantile amnesia.
But, it turns out that infants and small children can form memories. This includes both implicit memories (such as procedural memories, which allow us to carry out tasks without thinking about them) and explicit memories (like when we consciously remember an event that happened to us).
Our ability to remember things for long periods of time does, however, progressively get better throughout childhood.
The words to a corny love song, the moves to the Macarena, even the boring, everyday stuff—if it was part of our adolescence, we’re more likely to remember it 20, 30 or even 40 years later. Several studies have shown that adults over the age of about 30, that would include me, have more memories from adolescence and early adulthood than from any other time of their lives, before or after—a phenomenon known as the ‘reminiscence bump’.
Memory refers to the processes that are used to gain, store, keep, and later retrieve information. There are three major processes involved in memory: encoding, storage, and retrieval. Human memory involves the ability to both preserve and recover information we have learned or experienced. May 15, 2020.
https://www.dummies.com/health/diseases/alzheimers-and-dementia/memory-for-dummies/
By American Geriatrics Society (AGS),
A fully functional memory is vital for human existence. That’s because without some way of remembering what’s happened, every waking moment stands alone as a brand-new experience; you have no past and can’t plan for the future. Sadly, memory is one of the major casualties of the different dementia processes.
Two main types of memory exist: short-term and long-term memory. You also possess an emotional memory, which is completely preserved in dementia.
The development of long-term memory in the brain involves three crucial steps. If any of these steps don’t work, the memory is effectively lost — and that’s what can happen in dementia:
Encoding
Storage
Retrieval
Encoding can be thought of as how the nervous system labels a fact, emotion, smell, image, or whatever is to be remembered so we can store it for further use. It’s very similar to how librarians assign specific numbers to books depending on their subject-matter, so someone searching for them among the many bookshelves can easily find them.
Emotional memory allows you to recall the really important moments in your life, both good and bad. It stores not only the information about what happened but also an exact memory of how you felt. It means that if you find yourself in a similar situation in the future, you’ll probably experience those feelings again.
Classic short- and long-term memories created in a part of the brain called the hippocampus, and long-term memories stored in different parts of the outside of the brain are called the cerebral cortex. Cells in these areas and those that communicate between them can be damaged in dementia, stopping the encoding, storage, and retrieval processes.
In contrast, emotional memory appears to occupy much more primitive parts of the brain, particularly in the brain stem. These areas aren’t affected by dementia, meaning that emotional memory can remain intact.
Shall we begin……
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