Mind secrets and a "Play" on memory.
February 14th 2008 21:19
Signture Tune
American Woman's Memory May Help Brain Researchers
Feb 14 2008 By Joanne Curran
A WOMAN who can recall every day for more than 30 years in detail may help unlock the secret of how our minds work.
The 42-year-old Californian, known as AJ, can recall clearly what she was doing and what made the news on any date since the mid 70s.
She was able to give the correct date for events such as the "Who Shot J.R.?" episode of TV soap Dallas.
Prof James McGaugh, who has tested AJ, said although she was not autistic, she was unusually interested in dates, like some autistic savants.
Her memory in other fields is not similarly developed.
McGaugh said: "There's something about attention to the calendar that accounts for part of this.
"Differences in memory don't seem to be the result of innate differences but more the kinds of skills that are developed."
From : DailyRecord.co.UK Glasgow,Scotland. UK
And: From Karen D'Souza Mercury News US comes a play on the memory theme.
Charles Mee's ode to remembrance sings with the unchained melody of memory. The playwright catches the way the mind lights on one thing after another as if the past were made up of a tumble of objects stored in the museum that is the brain.
In this West Coast premiere at Crowded Fire, the talismans are half surreal, half mundane. A sandbox filled with dirt evokes a playground and a grave. A tattered lampshade serves as a coat rack. Like Proust's madeleine, to which Mee pays homage alongside sources as eclectic as Sophocles, Allen Ginsberg and the New York Times, each thing unleashes a torrent of feelings and fears about something that has been lost or will inevitably slip beyond our grasp.
The playwright doesn't just break the rules of conventional narrative. He makes up his own games as he goes. A historian who didn't emerge as a playwright until reaching his 60s, Mee is a little bit in love with the past, always echoing the classics even when giving birth to a thoroughly new style of theatrical assemblage that scoffs at the linear. He samples from songs and histories and plays like a turntablist of the stage, turning from the ancient to the kitschy on a dime. Shards of poetry, flashes of pop music and fractured bits of ballets coalesce into his works, from "Big Love" and "bobrauschenbergamerica" to "Summertime."
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