I watched a movie several years ago called “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” which is a 2004 American romantic science-fiction comedy-drama movie. The summary of this movie is as follows: After a painful breakup, Clementine undergoes a procedure to erase memories of her former boyfriend Joel from her mind. When Joel discovers that Clementine is going to extremes to forget their relationship, he undergoes the same procedure and slowly begins to forget the woman that he loved. This movie explores the implications of trying to erase memories, even ones that seem bad in the moment. In the movie, while Joel is getting his memories erased, he relives them and realizes that he doesn’t want to completely forget Clementine; he wants some memories to remember her by. I came across a very interesting article when I was looking for more information on this movie (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-06/02/restoring-memories). It is about in 2014, when scientists reported that they’d successfully manipulated mice’s memories, or at least the emotions associated with those memories. We form the informational part of our memories—the facts and events—in the hippocampus of our brain. The emotions connected to them—how we feel about those facts and events—are stored in the amygdale. Scientists messed with these mice’s amygdale and basically reversed how they “felt” about prior lab experiences, changing an unpleasant event into a pleasant one, and vice versa. Then, the scientists were quick to point out that while this could be useful in erasing a person’s negative emotions about something in their past (PTSD, for example), it would be a bad idea to actually make them forget that these events had happened because they would be losing important memories.

            The main reason people would want to erase any bad memories is because they don’t want to remember any tough time in their lives. However, it is these tough times that help us grow, we experience these hardships and learn from them. If we were to completely erase it, we would be creating holes in our growth. For example, on an extreme level, let’s say that you wanted to erase all your memories of high school because they were the worst four years of your life; okay so you do, wouldn’t you then also lose all your knowledge that you gained from school those years? You would forget geometry, algebra, biology etc. Wouldn’t this then be a regression? Also, let’s say you need to later remember something that happened during high school, you wouldn’t be able to. Memories are the building blocks to our knowledge; you need to be very careful when trying to move even one, because everything could be disturbed. 

            

It will always upset me that I don’t have memories before the age of 4, and probably because I was living in India until I was four and my mom always told me so many stories of me during that time, but I just can’t remember. Even if I do, I don’t know if it’s my actual memory or a fabrication I made up from one of my mother’s stories. So I always wondered, why can’t we remember our lives as infants or toddlers? Is it because we are so young that we cannot comprehend that we need to remember these things? Is it because we are too focused on remembering other things like talking and walking that we don’t remember other things? While I was doing research trying to find an answer, or something that would help me understand better, I found this very helpful article; (http://www.vox.com/2014/5/8/5695500/why-cant-you-remember-being-a-baby-science-explains).

            To summarize, the article says that the reason we cannot remember our lives as babies is because we constantly make new cells throughout our life, this is a process called neurogenesis. In babies however, the rate of neurogenesis is much higher; this produces new neurons at a much higher rate. And this process is active particularly in the hippocampus, also known as the memory center. While most of the time neurogenesis leads to better learning and memory, extremely high rates of neurogenesis (as seen in babies) can increase forgetfulness. So basically, these new neurons are coming in by the boat load and pushing out old neurons that hold our baby memories. One person points out that this could be a good thing because if we have too many memories, we can lessen our ability to learn more things and gain new knowledge. Scientists did an experiment on young mice which showed that heightened rates of neurogenesis led to forgetfulness. They also did this with young guinea pigs and degu and found the data to be consistent with the mice. Of course there is no way of knowing what exactly happens in human brains because these experiments were done on rodents, but considering the similarity of mammal brains; this is a very good basis to build on top on. I guess when we are young, we need to learn so many new things that we need so many new neurons and we don’t have enough space in our tiny brains that we need to compromise somewhere. Memory is so fragile and losely constructed, you constantly add and take out memories, all this change can lead to mis consolidation of memories. We may even lose memories that were not 'put back' in our memory.

           

Have you ever wanted to feel no emotions? You wouldn’t feel hurt, upset, sadness or anger. But you also wouldn’t feel happiness, joy, love or excitement. People with Alexithymia feel exactly that- nothing. They are not able to describe or identify emotions in themselves. I got interested in this because I saw this article: (http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150818-what-is-it-like-to-have-never-felt-an-emotion). In the article they introduced “alexes”, or people with Alexithymia. This made me curious and I came up with the question “What are the advantages and disadvantages of not feeling emotions?” I wanted to know how these people felt, I wanted to know if they wanted to be able to feel feelings or if they didn’t want to feel emotions and were happy the way they were. Now, I cannot say for certain what it feel like to not feel. But I can try my best to weigh the advantages and disadvantages.

            To start with the advantages, you wouldn’t feel any emotion that would depress your mood. You wouldn’t feel shame, guilt, anger, sadness etc. You could go on living your life without feeling bad about what you are doing, you wouldn’t feel guilt so you could rob a bank and not feel bad. Basically, you would not be able to sympathize with others. This could be good in the sense that you would be immune to any hate, like bullying. But this could also be bad because our ability to feel emotions and feel for others is what makes us human; it gives us the ability to be compassionate.

            Now, the disadvantages of not feeling emotions. What about the happy things? What about the things that make you feel so much joy when you think about them? If we lost the ability to feel emotions (or never had them to begin with) we wouldn’t be able to feel joy, happiness, love, excitement, surprise etc. all the things that make us smile. Arguably, if laughing were an emotion, you wouldn’t be able to laugh. If you couldn’t feel, does that mean you couldn’t fall in love? Does that mean love is considered and emotion? If you couldn’t feel, that means you wouldn’t enjoy anything, because if you did, then that means that thing made you happy; but if you couldn’t identify that feeling of happiness, then that could mean that you never had or felt it.

            Emotions are very transparent, the lines are blurred when it comes to what is considered an emotion and what is not. Like I said before you could consider laughter as an emotion but someone else might not. This confuses the category if what it’s like to not feel emotions. It’s very tricky to describe and categorize emotions because everybody has their own opinion on what is an emotion and what is not. But what I think we can all agree on is that emotions help us understand ourselves and others better because a person’s emotions can act as a guide to try to identify how someone is feeling on the inside.

           

 I realize that this question is very broad but I didn’t know the correct way to phrase this idea. Basically, I want to discuss how the ‘placebo effect’ affects our knowledge through sense perception. I watched a Ted- Ed video titled ‘The power of the placebo effect - Emma Bryce’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z03FQGlGgo0).  This short video talked about the placebo effect, its history, how it is used etc. I found this video very interesting and I was curious on how this effect actually works and how it affects our knowledge and in turn our actions and emotions. To start, the ‘placebo effect’ also called the ‘placebo response’ is a medical phenomenon in which a placebo (which is a fake treatment; an inactive substance such as sugar, distilled water, or saline solution) can sometimes improve a patient's condition simply because the person has the expectation that it will be helpful. Scientists and medical doctors still haven’t found out exactly why this works but they have conducted many experiments that prove that the ‘placebo effect’ is actually real. Many people who were on the placebo [in an experiment] actually started to feel better even though they got no real treatment. There have been theories that this effect is physiological and connects to our body, if we think we are getting better, then we really are getting better. However, as the video mentions, there can be downsides to this because the patient might not actually be getting better, but since they think they are getting better- they might refuse further treatment that has been proven to work and end up getting sicker than before. So, I want to explore how sense perception affects our knowledge and actions when it comes to the ‘placebo effect’.

            Sense perception is our ability to understand the world around us through the use of our five senses; smell, sight, taste, touch and hearing. While we may not use these senses specifically when it comes to how we think our body is acting, we would still use sight as a main way to somewhat diagnose how healthy we are. For example, if I got a cut on my leg, I would see how bad it looks or maybe touch around it to see how much it hurts. In the same way, if I had a condition where I was in a trial and I know that I have a 50/50 percent chance of getting the actual drug or the placebo; when I got the treatment, and if I got the placebo, I would think I got the actual treatment. Because of this, I might stop noticing symptoms that are related to my condition because I think it’s the treatment working. Basically, placebos mess with your head and trick you into thinking that you are getting better even if you are not; this affects your sense perception because you might begin to ignore possible indications that your condition worsened. Although placebos were never meant to work in that way, they unintentionally lead people to believe that their health is improving, again, this can cause problems because they are believing wrong things about themselves which can be dangerous especially with a life- threatening condition.

I thought about this question because I was flipping through TV channels and one channel was showing the 1997 film, Titanic. So I started watching it; it had just started; it was on the scene where old Rose started telling her story of her time on the Titanic and everyone was gathered around listening intently. The Titanic is “James Cameron's epic, action-packed romance set against the ill-fated maiden voyage of the R.M.S. Titanic; the pride and joy of the White Star Line and, at the time, the largest moving object ever built. She was the most luxurious liner of her era - the "ship of dreams" - which ultimately carried over 1,500 people to their death in the ice cold waters of the North Atlantic in the early hours of April 15, 1912.” Watching the scene, I started wondering how Rose remembered all this stuff about the Titanic- I realize that for plot progression sake she needed to know enough to build an entire movie on but in reality, she was very old and it would have been impossible for her to remember in such great detail what happened to her when she was 17. Because of her old age and other possible factors, her memory must have been blurred or altered. If this was the case, then why would all the researchers take her words for truth; especially if they didn't have any other information to cross check with? Finally i came to the conclusion question- ‘How reliable memory when used to recount historical events?’ especially in the case of elderly eyewitnesses. Similarly, for example, if a person- they don't necessarily have to be old- recounts a historical event incorrectly, and if the researches don't have any other research of facts to compare to- they will probably take the eyewitness’ information for fact. This can lead to serious problems because if he eyewitness said something wrong, history will, in essence, be wrong. If a small part of history is recorded incorrectly, then it will just keep building and building and our historical foundation will be based on false information. A bit of a slippery slope, I realize, but it is very possible.

I found an example of this in an article written by the guardian about Boa Sr. she was the last person fluent in the Bo language in Andaman, this loss broke a link with a 65,000 year old culture. (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/04/ancient-language-extinct-speaker-dies). It says in the article that Boa was not able to communicate with anyone in Bo most likely because there was no one left that spoke that same language. Because of this distance from her language for years, she must have lost the knowledge of how to say some words, grammar etc. This could be a problem for history because if researches were to come to her in her later years and ask her translate her language, she might not be able to do so effectively or even correctly. This is problematic because there is also no way for those researches to cross check Boa’s information with another person who speaks Bo because there isn't anyone left. This could change history because wrong information could be written down as fact.