What are the memories of men? How many can they be? Where are they? Who can tell them? What can they tell? Why is it worth talking about? How can they be found out? Should they be preserved? Where are they hiding? Memories are also called remembrance, they can be stored not only on the paper page, with images and symbols, but also in bits & bytes, on the digital page, which then becomes dynamic. MEDIUM is the ideal place.

Memories

Amelia and I will remember in days the memory of our wedding on August 3, 1972. It was a Thursday. Our first fifty years of marriage, celebrated in the Cathedral of Amalfi by Father Alfonso Arpino, my mother’s brother, together with Mons. Riccardo Arpino, concelebrant for the occasion.To make 50 years, half a century, it takes 600 months, 2608.93 weeks, 18.262.5 days, 26.298.000 minutes. This is the space we call time, provided we know what this space is made of.

Amelia and I

The word “time” is undoubtedly one of the most used and mysterious words in all languages. Yet its use does not explain its meaning. The word is referred to in countless contexts. The many possible synonyms make me lose myself in a forest of meanings that take me far away, but I will never be able to return to the decisive station, the one of departure: that Thursday fifty years ago at 18.00. The only thing I remember well is that there was a storm in the morning. Then came the clear.

A Mystery  Word

Saint Augustine wrote in his “Confessions”: “What is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to anyone who asks me, I don’t know   anymore." Enlightening statement.Time exists. How else would we fix our watches? Time organizes our universe both mentally and physically. Do you think it would be our world if things were always the same and there was no time to change them. The question we must rather ask ourselves is whether time is really necessary. Perhaps the questions I ask myself are too difficult and someone will say, with an easy joke, that I am wasting time. Maybe.

Time Exists

If I think about that day, I relive something and see someone still in the present, but I know well that absence dominates. All I have left is the image of a place that is still present, I miss that time that appears to be lost and I delude myself to find it again, remembering.The past and the future are real. Not everyone agrees on this point. Intuitively we can say that “now”, this particular moment, is real, while the past has somehow been “fixed”, plastered, and exists only in books, documents, papers, photos, voices recorded in vanished faces. and disappeared.

The Past & The Future

The future in this image at the exit of the Church, after the ceremony, does not yet exist because it has not yet taken place. But physics teaches us that every moment, in the form of an event in both the past and the future, implies a present moment. A difficult fact to admit in our everyday life, but it is so. Although we may not be aware of what is happening around us at all times, we live in a reality of four dimensions: length, height, depth, in a “continuum” which is time. This wedding photo is both past and future in their reality. Our reality that we are celebrating.

A "Continuum"

Each of us perceives the sense of time in a different way. This is true in both a biological and a physical sense. For Newton, time was universal and common to all. Then Einstein came and explained that instead time for a person is closely related to his moving in space and to the force of gravity. From a psychological and biological point of view, the time measured by atomic clocks is not as important as that measured by our internal rhythms and the amount of memory that accumulates in each of us. Everything happens differently, it depends on who we are, on what happens to us.

Newton & Einstein

As we get older we find that time passes much faster than before. And the writer knows it well. If I ask Amelia, what she remembers of that day, I discover that her memories are not mine, her time is different from mine, as is her past in this shared present that yesterday was the future.We live in the past. Each of our actions before it is received by our brain takes an amount of time to be registered and recognized. To be precise 80 milliseconds. If I touch the tip of my nose or that of my foot, it will take longer to feel the action in my brain.

As We Get Older ...

Our conscious experience takes longer to assemble the sequence of actions. The perception of the moment, of now, can therefore be said to have already passed. Therefore, we live in the past. The distance between the things that happen and their perception is about 80 milliseconds. Science says it with its instruments, but our brains, Amelia’s and Antonio’s, relive the distance of this time-space in a completely different way. A surreal coexistence has made the past become the future and we continue to relive it in the present always in a different way.

We Live In The Past

Our memory is not always reliable. When we remember an event that happened in the past, our brain uses a technique very similar to imagining the future. The process is not like playing a video, but rather like staging a text. If the text is wrong for any reason, you may have a distorted memory similar to the real one. For this reason, visual evidence is very questionable and subjective and not always convergent in a court of law. You will never find two people who see a thing in the same way.

Our Memory

Whenever Amelia tells the events of her journey to get to the Cathedral of Amalfi on time she adds something not said, not remembered, not felt then, but recognized or found today. Is such a thing possible? But, then, does memory deceive us, deceive us or even recreate what never happened?Consciousness depends on knowing how to manipulate time. Many cognitive abilities are important for consciousness and are not yet well known to us. It is clear, however, that the ability to manipulate time and its possibilities is a crucial aspect of the problem.

Does Memory Deceive Us?

Land animals, unlike those of water, manage to possess a very broad visual trend in order to have enough time to choose from a range of actions and decide for the best. Consciousness would not be possible without the ability to imagine another time. But how many humans know they have a conscience? Did Amelia and I know that we would have to find the way and the way to build a new time for us, in a space as new and mysterious as it is unexplored and dangerous? The space of these fifty years is an almost metaphysical testimony.

A Metaphysical Testimony

The clutter increases as time passes. The difference between the past and the future, memory, aging, randomness and free will, rests on the fact that the universe is constantly evolving from order to disorder. Entropy is constantly increasing in the opinion of physicists. There are many ways of being disordered, the condition of which provides for a high entropy, compared to the order which has a low entropy. The increase in the latter, therefore, is completely natural. But to understand the low entropy of past times, we need to go back to the Big Bang.

Back To The Big Bang

Scientists have not yet been able to give an answer to why entropy was low at that time and how this increase affects memory and its randomness. Fifty years later, after our Big Bang, I would not be able to assess whether the entropy of our coexistence has been elevated or reduced, whether we have proceeded from order to disorder or vice versa.Complexity comes and goes. Unlike those who consider themselves creationists, most people have no problem evaluating the difference between “order” and “disorder”, that is, between low and high entropy.

Complexity

This entropy increases but the complexity is ephemeral, volatile, increases and decreases intricately, not without surprise. The work done by complex structures is to increase entropy as in the case of the origin of life. But we are far from understanding this truly unique phenomenon. I can say one thing certain in any case, and that is this half century of life lived in common has shown that experiencing complexity is the great challenge of those who decide to choose marriage and live in a condition of “order” imposed by a law, not only of nature, but also of law.

An Experience 

Aging can be reversed. We all age and this is part of the race towards ever-increasing disorder. But it is only the universe as the whole that must increase in entropy, not just each of its components. If we reverse the arrow of time in a living organism, we make a technological challenge but not a physical impossibility. We are making progress on new fronts such as stem cells, yeast and even mice and human muscle tissue. Someone thinks of eternal life, which is not imminent, but sooner or later something will happen. Many dare to believe and hope for it. But to do what? I then ask myself.

The Arrow Of Time

Personally, I would like to have the opportunity to start all over again. I don’t know what Amelia would do if she could reverse the arrow of time and go back to that day fifty years ago. To tell the truth, I can’t say either. A return to the past? Perhaps the future is better than daring the arrow.The average time of a life is made up of one billion heartbeats. Both simple and complex organisms die. It is sad to say but it is a necessary part of the picture of the human condition: life pushes the new, eliminating the old.

Life Pushes The New

There is a simple scale of values ​​in this sense and it concerns the body’s metabolism.To make fifty years of married life it takes two billion beats to challenge time and space together towards the spiritual metabolism.

A Spiritual Metabolism

What are the memories of men? How many can they be? Where are they? Who can tell them? What can they tell? Why is it worth talking about? How can they be found out? Should they be preserved? Where…

Life

Half century. Fifty years of marriage

The nervous system of the starfish is very simple...there is no brain and there are not even any ganglia to coordinate movement. The nervous system is characterized by a nerve ring that surrounds the mouth. A radial nerve branches off of the nerve ring and extends to each arm.

Do starfish have a brain?

Daily Facts

Neuroscience for Kids - Invertebrate Nervous System

What is love?Scientists in fields ranging from anthropology to neuroscience have been asking this question for decades.The scientific basis of love is often sensationalized, and as with most science, we don’t know enough to draw firm conclusions about every piece of the puzzle.What we do know, however, is that much of love can be explained by chemistry.

The Science Behind Love

Think of the last time you ran into someone you find attractive. You may have stammered, you may have said something incredibly silly or foolish and tripped spectacularly. And chances are, your heart was thudding in your chest.It’s no surprise that, for centuries, people thought love (and most other emotions, for that matter) arose from the heart. As it turns out, love is all about the brain – which, in turn, makes the rest of your body go haywire.

Total Eclipse Of The Brain

According to a team of scientists led by Dr. Helen Fisher, romantic love can be broken down into three categories:<ul><li>lust - driven by testosterone and estrogen</li><li>attraction - created by dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin</li><li>attachment - mediated by oxytocin and vasopressin</li></ul>Though there are overlaps and subtleties to each, each type is characterized by its own set of hormones stemming from the brain.

Breaking Down Love

Lust is driven by the desire for sexual gratification. The evolutionary basis for this stems from our need to reproduce.The hypothalamus of the brain plays a big role in stimulating the production of the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen. While these chemicals are often stereotyped as being male and female, respectively, both play a role in men and women.Testosterone increases libido in everyone. The effects are less pronounced with estrogen, but some women report being more sexually motivated around the time they ovulate, when estrogen levels are highest.

Let's Get Chemical 

The testes and ovaries secrete the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen, driving sexual desire.Dopamine, oxytocin, and vasopressin are all made in the hypothalamus, a region of the brain that controls many vital functions as well as emotion.Lust and attraction shut off the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which includes rational behavior.

Chemical Breakdown

While we can certainly lust for someone we are attracted to, one can happen without the other. Attraction involves the brain pathways that control reward behavior which explains why the first few weeks or months of a relationship can be so exhilarating and even all-consuming.Dopamine, produced by the hypothalamus, is a particularly well-publicized player in the brain’s reward pathway – it’s released when we do things that feel good to us. In this case, these things include spending time with loved ones and having sex. High levels of dopamine and norepinephrine, are released during attraction.

Love Is Its Own Reward

These chemicals make us giddy, energetic, and euphoric, even leading to decreased appetite and insomnia. In fact, norepinephrine, also known as noradrenalin, which play a large role in the fight or flight response, kicks into high gear when we’re stressed and keeps us alert. Brain scans of people in love have actually shown that the primary reward centers of the brain, fire like crazy when people are shown a photo of someone they are intensely attracted to, compared to when they are shown someone they feel neutral towards.

Last but not least, attachment is the predominant factor in long-term relationships. While lust and attraction are pretty much exclusive to romantic entanglements, attachment mediates friendships, parent-infant bonding, social cordiality, and many other intimacies as well. The two primary hormones here appear to be oxytocin and vasopressin.

The Friend Zone

Oxytocin is often nicknamed “cuddle hormone” for this reason. Like dopamine, oxytocin is produced by the hypothalamus and released in large quantities during sex, breastfeeding, and childbirth.The common factor here is that all of these events are precursors to bonding. It also makes it pretty clear why having separate areas for attachment, lust, and attraction is important: we are attached to our immediate family, but those other emotions have no business there.

This all paints quite the rosy picture of love: hormones are released, making us feel good, rewarded, and close to our romantic partners. Love is often accompanied by jealousy, erratic behavior, and irrationality, along with a host of other less-than-positive emotions and moods. It seems that our friendly cohort of hormones is also responsible for the downsides of love.Dopamine is the hormone responsible for the vast majority of the brain’s reward pathway – and that means controlling both the good and the bad. We experience surges of dopamine for our virtues and our vices.

Love Hurts

The dopamine pathway is particularly well studied when it comes to addiction. The same regions that light up when we’re feeling attraction light up when drug addicts take cocaine and when we binge eat sweets.Cocaine maintains dopamine signaling for much longer than usual, leading to a temporary high. Attraction is much like an addiction to another human being.The same brain regions light up when addicted to material goods as when emotionally dependent on our partners. Addicts going into withdrawal are not unlike love-struck people craving the company of someone they can't see.

Attraction Addiction

Dopamine, which runs the reward pathways in our brain, is great in moderate doses, helping us enjoy food, exciting events, and relationships.However, we can push the dopamine pathway too far when we become addicted to food or drugs.Similarly, too much dopamine in a relationship can underlie unhealthy emotional dependence on our partners.While healthy levels of oxytocin help us bond and feel warm and fuzzy towards our companions, elevated oxytocin can also fuel prejudice.

The Dope In Dopamine

The story is somewhat similar for oxytocin: too much of a good thing can be bad. Recent studies on party drugs such as MDMA and GHB shows that oxytocin may be the hormone behind the feel-good, sociable effects these chemicals produce.These positive feelings are taken to an extreme in this case, causing the user to dissociate from his or her environment and act wildly and recklessly. Furthermore, oxytocin’s role as a “bonding” hormone appears to help reinforce the positive feelings we already feel towards the people we love.

Feel Good Drug

That is, as we become more attached to our families, friends, and significant others, oxytocin is working in the background, reminding us why we like these people and increasing our affection for them. While this may be a good things for monogamy, such associations are not always positive. For example, oxytocin has also been suggested to play a role in ethnocentrism, increasing our love for people in our already-established cultural groups and making those unlike us seem more foreign.

The Double Edged Sword

And finally, what would love be without embarrassment? Sexual arousal (but not necessarily attachment) appears to turn off regions in our brain that regulate critical thinking, self-awareness, and rational behavior, including parts of the prefrontal cortex.in short, love makes us dumb. Have you ever done something when you were in love that you later regretted?

Losing Your Self?

As we’ve realized by now, it’s not just the hormone side of the equation that’s complicated. Love can be both the best and worst thing for you – it can be the thing that gets us up in the morning, or what makes us never want to wake up again. I’m not sure I could define “love” for you if I kept you here for another ten thousand pages.In the end, everyone is capable of defining love for themselves. And, for better or for worse, if it’s all hormones, maybe each of us can have “chemistry” with just about anyone. But whether or not it goes further is still up to ourselves.

Formula For Love?

Love, Actually: The science behind lust, attraction, and companionship - Science in the News

At intoxicating levels, alcohol is a vasodilator (it causes blood vessels to relax and widen), but at even higher levels, it becomes a vasoconstrictor, shrinking the vessels and increasing blood pressure, exacerbating such conditions as migraine headaches and frostbite.

Is alcohol a vasodilator or vasoconstrictor?

Scientific American is the essential guide to the most awe-inspiring advances in science and technology, explaining how they change our understanding of the world and shape our lives.

Facts

What are the effects of alcohol on the brain?

For a human or animal to learn whether to avoid, or seek out, a particular experience again in the future, their brain must associate a positive or negative feeling, or “valence” with that stimulus. The brain’s ability to link these feelings with a memory is called “valence assignment”.

Valence And Valence Assignment

In 2016, Kay Tye, today a professor in Salk’s Systems Neurobiology Laboratory and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, discovered that a group of neurons in the brain’s basolateral amygdala (BLA) helps assign valence when mice are learning. One set of BLA neurons was activated with positive valence, as the animals learned to associate a tone with a sweet taste. A separate set of BLA neurons was activated with negative valence, as the animals learned to associate a different tone with a bitter taste.

The Neurons Assigning Valence

In the new study, the researchers homed in on the importance of the signaling molecule neurotensin to these BLA neurons. They already knew that neurotensin is a neuropeptide produced by the cells associated with valence processing, but so are a few other neurotransmitters. So, they used CRISPR gene editing approaches to selectively remove the gene for neurotensin from the cells—the first time that CRISPR has been used to isolate specific neurotransmitter function.

The Molecule Signaling Valence 

Without neurotensin signaling in the BLA, mice could no longer assign positive valence and didn’t learn to associate the first tone with a positive stimulus. Interestingly, the absence of neurotensin did not block negative valence. The animals instead became even better at negative valence, having a stronger association between the second tone and a negative stimulus.

Blocking Valence

The findings suggest that the brain’s default state is to have a bias toward fear—the neurons associated with negative valence are activated until neurotensin is released, switching on the neurons associated with positive valence. From an evolutionary perspective, Tye says, this makes sense because it helps people avoid potentially dangerous situations—and it probably resonates with people who tend to find the worst in a situation.

Negative Valence Is The Default State

“We can actually manipulate this switch to turn on positive or negative learning,” says co-first author Hao Li, a postdoctoral fellow in the Tye Lab. “Ultimately, we’d like to try to identify novel therapeutic targets for this pathway.”The researchers still have questions about whether levels of neurotensin can be modulated in people’s brains to treat anxiety or PTSD. They are also planning future studies to probe what other brain pathways and molecules are responsible for triggering the release of neurotensin.

Manipulating Valence

“We’ve basically gotten a handle on the fundamental biological process of how you can remember if something is good or bad,” says senior author Kay Tye. “This is something that’s core to our experience of life, and the notion that it can boil down to a single molecule is incredibly exciting.”

Valence And Prevalence (Valēre And Praevalēre)

Researchers discovered a specific neurotransmitter that helps assign either positive or negative emotions to memories. Their discovery paves the way for a better understanding of why some people are more likely to retain negative emotions than positive ones—as can occur with anxiety, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Researchers discovered a specific neurotransmitter that helps assign either positive or negative emotions to memories.

Half century. Fifty years of marriage

Neuroscience for Kids - Invertebrate Nervous System

Love, Actually: The science behind lust, attraction, and companionship - Science in the News

What are the effects of alcohol on the brain?

What’s Making a Memory Positive or Negative

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