My first memory looks something like Chairry from Pee-Wee's Playhouse. Pretty much what I remember is laying on my parents blue carpet, looking at their old ripped up chair, closing my eyes, and imagining the chair with a face like the one above and it moved closer and closer to me until it was almost touching me and then I opened my eyes. It really freaked me out! I don't really know when it was but I have such a clear memory of it. I also remember I was stuck laying on my belly and I was scared but I couldn't go anywhere so I assume it was before I could crawl. My dad also used to watch Pee-Wee's playhouse with me when I was just a baby so maybe it was a night mare... or daymare from that. After that my memories start at around two or three in preschool, mostly nosebleeds and sandboxes.

       In class on Tuesday we played a super fun game of Win Lose or Draw and discussed G.J. Winthrow’s What is Time?  That night we read excerpt 2 from What is Time? which I thought was a lot more interesting than the first. I thought the part about the flatworms was crazy. “An even more astonishing claim, first mad a few years ago in the United States, was that if the original trained worms are chopped up and fed to the untrained ones the latter absorb the learned behavior along with their food.” Woah! So my first question comes from this reading, the author then goes on to say “In none of these experiments is there yet any firm evidence that memory has really been transferred from one animal to another and it’s not just some substance that speeds up the learning process.” But he didn’t say they re-trained the worms to re-learn the behavior, he said the behavior was absorbed with the food right? So if worms have this new behavior all of a sudden that isn’t natural and wasn’t re-taught, then what other explanation is there other then they really did transfer the memory to the second set of worms?

      After class on Thursday my mom called me to tell me about an article she had read. She told me she felt bad because she always used to tell me to find one comfortable quiet place and make it my study room. However the article she had just read suggested studying in multiple places is the way to go because it's easier to recall something when you have multiple associations with it. That was interesting, but what was even more interesting was that we had just discussed the same thing in class about twenty minutes before she called! Weird...

     In addition to our discussion of What is Time? we watched Momento, a movie about a man suffering from short term memory loss. I had seen it a few years ago and was totally confused, so it was definitely nice to watch it a second time. It most definitely related to everything we've been doing with the concept of time and memory and fit in with the strange warped time videos that we had already seen in class. We haven't finished it yet so I'm excited to get to class on Tuesday!

      I've decided to research memory in general because apart from our reading I know nothing about it. Hopefully I'll be learning a bit more in Psych 101! According to exploratorium.edu, there are three main subdivisions of memory; working memory, long-term memory, and skill memory. Working memory occurs in the prefrontal cortex. This memory coordinates long-term memories with sights, sounds, and feelings, so you can respond to events as they happen. Long-term memory stores permanent information ranging from a knowledge of yourself to your understanding of the world. It is processed in the hippocampus. The last subdivision of memory is skill memory which is processed in the cerebellum, and then stored in the basal ganglia. 

(Cerebellum) 

It is responsible for coordination and sequencing of movements. 

I also learned that hippocampus is the Greek word for seahorse :) It is the spiraled part of the brain. 

http://www.exploratorium.edu/memory/index.html

Here's some cool links:

Memory Artist (there's also a section about time and memory) 

Sheep Brain Dissection

Earliest Memories Guestbook

http://www.exploratorium.edu/memory/index.html <-- pretty much the whole site is interesting.