what i do

so, many people have asked me to explain what i do, professionally, academically, whathaveyou, and i till this point have typically provided circuitous answers and evasions. it's not that i don't love you, it's just that eyes tend to gloss over when you mention words like "cortex" and "semantic encoding." but this hurts me, deep, like a knife. The short answer is that i study the biological basis of memory. glaze. What i do is interesting, at least to me, and though i have given short answers, i shy away from explanation because, frankly, who likes to talk shop?

But it is important, or at least interesting to discuss this sort of thing. These are things we use everyday, and i personally might benefit from you thinking about it and telling me what you think.

So, imagine that when you think about boobs, something in your brain happens. Whether you are thinking about what boobs look like, what boobs feel like, the last time you saw boobs, or the last time you felt (your own or someone else's) boobs, something in your brain is active and helping you think about those particular boobs. Keep thinking about that particular pair. Please.

So, let's say that you are thinking about the last time you touched the aforementioned boobs. Do you remember their softness? Do you remember how they looked? Do you remember that they made you feel grrrreat? There are lots of components to your memoryboobs, whether you are a more visual person, or a more emotional person, or you just slobber. These different qualities of your memoryboobs are things that i'm not really interested in. (Well, of course i am, but we're speaking academically.)

What i go after is what happens in your brain when you did what you just did. You brought up a thought of boobs. You had to use some sort of quality to get there, whether it was touch, taste, smell or emotion, but once you were thinking of your memoryboobs, you didn't rely just on those qualities. You could answer any number of questions about those boobs, desipite the most memorable feature. In otherwords, the qualities of a memory (of boobs and other things) have to come together somewhere. I study that coming together.