"Remembering is just a great trick of the mind..."

The title of this post comes from a great book for young teens called Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick. In the book, two misfits find each other, go on quests, encounter danger . . . basically all the motifs of American fiction you'd find in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . But it's new, and fresh, and, at least for boys, it's a great read.

Anyway, one of the main characters, Freak, tells his friend, Max, that "Remembering is just a great trick of the mind, and if you try hard enough, you can remember just about anything." I've always found that interesting, especially given that eyewitness testimony can sometimes be unreliable for just this very reason.

So here's the hard segue into today's topic--human memory. In terms of science, you really can't beat the lab of the modern neuroscientist for a place to find people searching for the holy grail of human existence, at least in a biological sense. What is consciousness? How do we recognize faces? Why do we react to music so profoundly? Such marvelous questions and all the study focused on this grapefruit sized organ encased in our skulls. You'll do yourself a world of good if you read this series of four articles from the LA Times.