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Scientia - 2007-08

an institute for the history of science and culture founded by Salomon Bochner

2007-2008 Scientia Program theme:

"Memory"

Memory: the faculty by which things are remembered: the capacity for retaining, perpetuating or reviving the thought of things past" (OED)

Human memory is dazzling in its varieties and complexities.   The faculty by which memories are formed and accessed in the brain has a material, biochemical basis, but because human memory is a complex tapestry of sensory, emotional, and symbolic elements, unraveling its functioning is a major challenge.   Humans have dramatically extended their capacity for retaining, perpetuating and reviving the thought of things past by reliance on language-based cultural systems in which material culture can function as a mnemonic device that evokes complex streams of remembered events.   How the brain creates memories, how we represent the nature and functioning of memory, how human culture encodes and uses memory, and how memory forms the necessary pathways for our social and emotional lives are all topics that will be considered in this lecture series.  

Scientia is an institute of Rice University faculty founded in 1981 by the mathematician and historian of science Salomon Bochner. Scientia provides an opportunity for scholarly discussion across disciplinary boundaries; its members and fellows come from a wide-range of academic disciplines.

Scientia sponsors an annual series of colloquia (past years' programs are listed near the bottom of this page) devoted to the exploration of a broad topic from a variety of points of view. These colloquia are open to the general public. The topic of the 2006-2007 Scientia colloquia is "Constructing the Human Being."   Almost all of the colloquia consist of one speaker and a period for questions from the audience, and occasionally, there will be a panel of discussants, who respond to the speaker's remarks. Unless otherwise noted, the colloquia will take place on the specified Tuesdays at 4:00 p.m., in the McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall (enter the main/foyer entrance and then room 1055, the fourth door right). A wine and cheese reception will follow each event.

The high point of the year is the distinguished Bochner Lecture, which is held in the evening, instead of in the afternoon (details forthcoming).

 

Fall of 2007 - Colloquia Schedule:

Tuesday, 18 September 2007, 4:00 p.m., McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall

Co-Sponsor: Department of Computer Science

Jim Gemmell, Senior Researcher, Microsoft's Next Media research group

"MyLifeBits: Digital Memories and Ubiquitous Computing"

Video available here:

MyLifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush's 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks. MyLifeBits is both an experiment in lifetime storage and a software research effort.

As an experiment, Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime's worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio.

In this talk, we will demonstrate the software we have developed for MyLifeBits, which leverages SQL server to support: hyperlinks, annotations, reports, saved queries, pivoting, clustering, and fast search. MyLifeBits is designed to make annotation easy, including gang annotation on right click, voice annotation, and web browser integration. It includes tools to record web pages, IM transcripts, radio and television. The MyLifeBits screensaver supports annotation and rating. We are beginning to explore features such as document similarity ranking and faceted classification. We have collaborated with the WWMX team to get a mapped UI, and with the SenseCam team to digest and display SenseCam output. www.mylifebits.com has more information.

 

Tuesday, 9 October 2007, 4:00 p.m., McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall

Jessica M. Logan, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Rice University

"Brain and Behavior: How We Create and Maintain Memory in Early Adulthood and Advanced Age"

Video available here:

No one likes it, but it happens to the best of us--that frustrating feeling of trying to remember something you know that you knew at one time, but which now inexplicably eludes you.   From older adults lamenting another "senior moment" to students stumped on a final exam, memory failures are an unwelcome but woefully familiar experience for everyone.   This talk will focus on research that strives to help us understand how some of these failures occur and how we can improve our chances of avoiding them in the future.   Cognitive research that integrates both behavioral and neuroimaging (fMRI) techniques to explore memory formation and retrieval in healthy younger and older adults will be discussed.

 

THE BOCHNER LECTURE

Friday, 16 November 2007, 7:00 p.m., McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall

Eric R. Kandel, M.D., University Professor, Physiology and Cell Biophysics, Psychiatry, Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, Columbia University - 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology of Medicine

" The Long and Short of Long Term Memory Storage "

Video available here:

This talk considers the molecular mechanisms that contribute to learning-related, long-term synaptic plasticity.   First, I will briefly outline some of the recent studies in Aplysia that have led to the conclusion that the requirement for protein synthesis which characterizes long-term memory is reflected, on the cellular level, in the activation of a cascade of genes and that this cascade leads to the growth of new synaptic connections.   I will then go on to consider in more detail studies which have examined the cell biological consequences of having a long-term memory process that require gene transcription and synaptic growth.

 

Tuesday, 4 December 2007, 4:00 p.m., McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall

Sarah Kielt Costello, Instructional Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, University of Houston

"Stealing Memory: Temples, Shamans and the Struggle for Power in Early Mesopotamian State Formation"

Video available here:

Long before the invention of writing, the people of the Ancient Near East used images and objects to help them remember. The imagery suggests that the practice of memory was associated with shamanistic religious beliefs. The continuities both in memory tools and visual expression over thousands of years were interrupted with the advent of cities, centralized temples, and the invention of writing. This talk will investigate how the village-based systems of memory and associated religious practices were co-opted by the urban temple and its scribes.

 

Spring of 2008 - Colloquia Schedule:

Tuesday, 15 January 2008, 4:30 p.m., McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall

Rachelle Smith Doody, Effie Marie Cain Chair in Alzheimer's Disease Research and Professor, Department of Neurology, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas

"Aspects of Memory"

Video available here:

Remembering is an activity that we all recognize within ourselves.   Memory, on the other hand, is an artificial construct meant to represent the act of remembering or how well someone remembers.   In psychological terms, memory is divided with respect to time (immediate, recent, and remote) or modality (visual, verbal).   By use of these parsing arrangements, we can quantify aspects of memory; define what is normal, superior or flawed; and apply technologies, such as neuroimaging techniques, to the study of remembering.

By all definitions, dementia involves "loss of memory," as if memory is a thing that can be misplaced.   This tendency to think of your memory or of individual memories as objects with identity and constancy is part of Western philosophical tradition and the physicality of our theories about memory lead some to the conclusion that the theories must be wrong.   Curiously, although all dementia patients have problems remembering, our current therapies do not often improve the measurable features ascribed to memory. Whether this observation represents a problem with the medications or with the concept of memory itself is an unresolved issue.

Remediation of dementia, most especially Alzheimer's disease, is a pressing, global concern.   We are prepared to accept many outcomes, including delaying the onset of AD or slowing the cognitive losses associated with established disease in the absence of complete prevention or cure.   We will accept these outcomes whether or not they are associated with improved remembering.

Panelists

Terrence Doody, Professor of English, Director of Undergraduate Studies, Rice University

Sydney M. Lamb, Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor Emeritus, Linguistics Department, Rice University

 

Tuesday, 19 February, 2008, 4:00 p.m., McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall

Geoffrey C. Bowker, Executive Director, Regis and Dianne McKenna Professor, Center for Science, Technology, and Society, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California

"The Forgotten Frontier: Memory and Oblivion in a Digital Age"

Video available here:

In an age where everyday appliances are loaded with gigabytes of storage, it seems we "should" be remembering everything.   However, as we are collecting and storing vast amounts of information, we are selectively destroying an equal amount.   I explore the ecology of remembering and forgetting, drawing examples from the sciences on the one hand and everyday life on the other

 

Tuesday, 18 March, 2008, 4:00 p.m., McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall

Lisa Geraci, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Texas A&M University

"Implicit Memory and Aging?"

Video available here:

We know that older adults have worse memory than younger adults when asked to intentionally (or explicitly) retrieve events from the past. But most of the time, the past influences our behavior through implicit memory, which is defined as the unintentional and unconscious use of memory.   Unlike explicit memory, it is not clear whether implicit memory is affected by healthy aging. Results obtained from this line of inquiry are important because they could identify some of the cognitive processes that are uniquely affected by aging, and provide a starting point from which to distinguish these processes from those indicative of disease, such as Alzheimer's disease.   In this talk, I will discuss current research and theorizing on this topic.

 

Tuesday, 22 April, 2008, 4:00 p.m., McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall

Charles Dove, Director, Rice Cinema; Lecturer,Visual and Dramatic Arts Department, Rice University

Video available here:


"Impossible Memory: Cinema, History, Information
(on Chris Marker's Sans Soleil)"

A transitory experience held in darkness, cinema has always had a troubled relationship with memory.  With the historic changes of beginning in the early 1980s, changes in technology and distribution, cinema altered its course and therefore its relationship with memory. While a viewer's memories of a film may once have been embellished with mistakes, imaginings, or misrecognitions, now the viewer could have the film itself at hand in tape or disk or electronic form to confirm or negate the memory - or to manipulate it.  Film essayist Chris Marker, in his study of human survival Sans Soleil (1982) explores these early days of the emergence of this new media, and its implications for human survival.  In the film a filmmaker writes a series of letters about his travels and his feelings towards the footage he has shot, received, and carefully pieced together. Memory, in Marker's film, is filtered through ceremony, photography, and other media. 

 

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