There’s a subtext to this assassination attempt on former President Trump that must not be ignored, and it is simply this: America is being pushed to the brink of a national nervous breakdown.
More than 50 years after John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, America has become a ticking time bomb of political violence in words and deeds.
Magnified by an echo chamber of nasty tweets and government-sanctioned brutality, our politically polarizing culture of callousness, cruelty, meanness, ignorance, incivility, hatred, intolerance, indecency and injustice have only served to ratchet up the tension.
Consumed with back-biting, partisan politics, sniping, toxic hate, meanness and materialism, a culture of meanness has come to characterize many aspects of the nation’s governmental and social policies. “Meanness today is a state of mind,” writes professor Nicolaus Mills in his book The Triumph of Meanness, “the product of a culture of spite and cruelty that has had an enormous impact on us.”
This casual cruelty is made possible by a growing polarization within the populace that emphasizes what divides us—race, religion, economic status, sexuality, ancestry, politics, etc.—rather than what unites us: we are all Americans, and in a larger, more global sense, we are all human.
This is what writer Anna Quindlen refers to as “the politics of exclusion, what might be thought of as the cult of otherness… It divides the country as surely as the Mason-Dixon line once did. And it makes for mean-spirited and punitive politics and social policy.”
This is more than meanness, however.
We are imploding on multiple fronts, all at once.
This is what happens when ego, greed and power are allowed to take precedence over liberty, equality and justice.
This is the psychopathic mindset adopted by the architects of the Deep State, and it applies equally whether you’re talking about Democrats or Republicans.
Beware, because this kind of psychopathology can spread like a virus among the populace.
As an academic study into pathocracy concluded, “[T]yranny does not flourish because perpetuators are helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous.”
People don’t simply line up and salute. It is through one’s own personal identification with a given leader, party or social order that they become agents of good or evil. To this end, “we the people” have become “we the police state.”
By failing to actively take a stand for good, we become agents of evil.It’s not the person in charge who is solely to blame for the carnage. It’s the populace that looks away from the injustice, that empowers the totalitarian regime, that welcomes the building blocks of tyranny.
This realization hit me full-force a few years ago. I had stopped into a bookstore and was struck by all of the books on Hitler, everywhere I turned. Yet had there been no Hitler, there still would have been a Nazi regime. There still would have been gas chambers and concentration camps and a Holocaust.
Hitler wasn’t the architect of the Holocaust. He was merely the figurehead. Same goes for the American police state: had there been no Trump or Obama or Bush, there still would have been a police state. There still would have been police shootings and private prisons and endless wars and government pathocracy.
Why? Because “we the people” have paved the way for this tyranny to prevail.
By turning Hitler into a super-villain who singlehandedly terrorized the world—not so different from how Trump is often depicted—historians have given Hitler’s accomplices (the German government, the citizens that opted for security and order over liberty, the religious institutions that failed to speak out against evil, the individuals who followed orders even when it meant a death sentence for their fellow citizens) a free pass.
This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.
None of us who remain silent and impassive in the face of evil, racism, extreme materialism, meanness, intolerance, cruelty, injustice and ignorance get a free pass.
Those among us who follow figureheads without question, who turn a blind eye to injustice and turn their backs on need, who march in lockstep with tyrants and bigots, who allow politics to trump principle, who give in to meanness and greed, and who fail to be outraged by the many wrongs being perpetrated in our midst, it is these individuals who must shoulder the blame when the darkness wins.
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that,” Martin Luther King Jr. sermonized.
The darkness is winning.
It’s not just on the world stage we must worry about the darkness winning.
The darkness is winning in our communities. It’s winning in our homes, our neighborhoods, our churches and synagogues, and our government bodies. It’s winning in the hearts of men and women the world over who are embracing hatred over love. It’s winning in every new generation that is being raised to care only for themselves, without any sense of moral or civic duty to stand for freedom.
John F. Kennedy, killed by an assassin’s bullet five years before King would be similarly executed, spoke of a torch that had been “passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”
Once again, a torch is being passed to a new generation, but this torch is setting the world on fire, burning down the foundations put in place by our ancestors, and igniting all of the ugliest sentiments in our hearts.
This fire is not liberating; it is destroying.
We are teaching our children all the wrong things: we are teaching them to hate, teaching them to worship false idols (materialism, celebrity, technology, politics), teaching them to prize vain pursuits and superficial ideals over kindness, goodness and depth.
Freedom demands that we stop thinking as Democrats and Republicans and start thinking like human beings, or at the very least, Americans.
JFK was killed in 1963 for daring to challenge the Deep State.
King was killed in 1968 for daring to challenge the military industrial complex.
Robert F. Kennedy offered these remarks to a polarized nation in the wake of King’s assassination:
“In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. [Y]ou can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization…filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort … to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love… What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.”
Two months later, RFK was also killed by an assassin’s bullet.
We haven’t dared to dream that dream in such a long time.
But imagine…
Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to stand up—united—for freedom.
Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to speak out—with one voice—against injustice.
Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to push back—with the full force of our collective numbers—against government corruption and despotism.
John W. Whitehead is an attorney and author who has written, debated and practiced widely in the area of constitutional law, human rights and popular culture. He is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.
3,786 views 12 Jul 2024 Today we will watch Douglas Murray dismantling people as he debates them on immigration. He’s sharp and is quick to point out the facts, never sugar coating the honest truths most feel the need to hide. https://www.youtube.com/@thediplomat_…
After 14 years and 5,764 blogposts, Irish Genealogy News is taking its leave. Kind of. There will be no new blogposts but those that have already been published will remain online for a while… probably until the domain name comes up for renewal.
My website – Irish-Genealogy-Toolkit.com – will also be continuing for the time being. It will be receiving some much-needed attention over the next couple of months but should then be able to stand on its own legs without taking up too much of my newly-discovered liberty.
Many thanks to all those who have supported the blog over the years, recommending it to new researchers, sending me tip-offs, and whizzing off messages to make me aware of my latest typing blunder or broken links.
The second week of the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland’s release of records delivered the promised Census records (see teaser in Part I of Anniversary Gifts for Genies blogpost) and more.
So let’s get down to it. The following releases and plans for their expansion will delight Irish genealogists:
1821 Census of Ireland transcripts: There’s been a lot of detective work going on to make sense of paper scraps and scribbled notes to reveal names and places from this pre-Famine census. The resulting release sees the names of more than 4,000 individuals enter the public realm for the first time. These are sample households from each of the island’s four provinces.
The team working on this collection has already gathered 50,000 names and research suggests this could rise to 200,000. Every name that can be deciphered and placed in a precise location will come on stream in 2025. In the meantime, check out the team’s report – Census Gleanings – for more explanation and detail about this wonderful collection of previously lost family history.
Among the highlights is a partial (c35%) reconstruction of the 1821 census entries for Desertegny parish in County Donegal (most of the individuals are named Dougherty). Check out the townland-by-townland transcriptions here, and transcripts for Drogheda’s St Peter’s parish and St Mary’s parish.
For an understanding of how the research team have been able to reconstruct populations by combining different source materials, see the ‘Scope and Content’ info for Clonmel Town.
Deeds, Wills and Memorials: Volume 2 of the Registry of Deeds Transcript Books series is the latest addition to the VRTI from Tailte Éireann. Dating from March 1708, some 400 new items are ready to be explored. The update also includes the ‘Deeds, Wills and Memorials’ curated collection with its explanatory text; three printed volumes of the Irish Manuscript Commission’s abstracts of wills 1708–1832; and …drum roll… the collection is now fully searchable online.
By 2025, the Tailte Éireann collection will hold 20 volumes from the Registry of Deeds Transcript Book series, consisting of about 11,300 pages, some 10,300 memorials and 6.7million words of searchable content!
Landmark research on Irish Civl War fatalities has been published online by University College Cork. The project represents the first real attempt to investigate the number of all combatant and civilian death from the opening shots of the Civil War on 28 June 1922 and the ceasefire and dump arms order on 24 May 1923s. In collaboration with UCC’s Atlas of the Irish Revolution Team, the research findings have been cartographically represented in a searchable, interactive Civil War Fatalities map. Check it out here
CavanTownlands, an essential site for anyone with ancestors from County Cavan, has moved to an ‘ie’ domain. You can now freely enjoy all the maps, stories, insights and historical statistics at https://cavantownlands.ie.
Cork/Corcaigh: Irish Historic Towns Atlas, no. 31, by Howard B Clarke and Máire Ní Laoi, has been published by the Royal Irish Academy. It explores the city from its origins to the present day. The emergence of Cork from a monastic settlement on a marshland site through to today’s thriving city is explained in a thoroughly researched text and is illustrated with newly created thematic maps, early views and photographs. Historic maps are reproduced on large-format pages, showing how the topography transformed through time. A gazetteer of over 13,000 sites and an accompanying essay give the detailed topographical history of the city up to c1900.
The Irish Genealogical Research Society (IGRS) will be hostings its annual outing on August 2024. It’s Dublin-based, so no coach required. It takes in a tour of the Royal Hospital at Kilmainham, a leisurely lunch at the Hilton Kilmainham, and a tour of Goldenbridge Cemetery from Richmond Barracks. For details and costs for members and non-members, see the IGRS website.
Land War to Civil War 1900-1924: Donoughmore to Cork and Beyond, by Gerard O’Rourke, was launched last month by Cork Lord Mayor, Cllr. Kieran McCarthy. Its 480 pages tell a story of conflict and perseverance leading to Irish Independence, a journey that starts in Donoughmore and continues to locations through the County and to Cork City and abroad. It includes the executions of Mrs. Lindsay and Compton Smith, the Wallace’s ‘little shop’, the Dripsey Ambush, Civil War, executions, prison life, sport, culture, economic life, all tempered with impromptu little nuggets guaranteed to enthrall. It is packed with fascinating details including images not seen previously and supplemented with intriguing table data along with names that may be your ancestors. €15 of each copy sold will be donated to cancer care services in Cork. On sale via donoughmore.ie.
The first week of September will see the return of the NIFHS DNA Summer School. Full details are not yet available but if this sounds just the ticket for your research, keep an eye on the NIFHS Education pages. The full menu of classes and presentations will be along shortly.
There’s a good selection of discounts on newspapers and magazines, database subscriptions and DNA test kits running at the moment. Some of the offers are close to their expiry date so don’t waste any time checking them out on my website: Irish-Genealogy-Toolkit.com.
The National Library of Ireland‘s Main, Microfilm and Manuscript Reading Rooms, and the NLI Ticket Office will be open onthe following two Saturdays this month: 13 and 27 July from 9:30am to 1pm. These are in addition to their regular Monday to Friday openings.
Northern Ireland will have a bank holiday this Friday, 12 July, marking the Battle of the Boyne. PRONI and most other repositories and businesses will be closed on this Friday and Monday 15th.
Genealogists in Ireland and the UK can take advantage of a special sale price on Ancestry DNA test kits until 11:59pm on Monday 15 July.
Ancestry DNA is the number one selling dna test kit and gives you access to the world’s largest consumer dna network, so you’ve more chance of matching up with your genetic cousins and extending your family tree.
With this generous 30% discount, the kits cost £54 in the UK and €64 in Ireland (plus shipping, of course). Select your preferred ‘territory’ and currency below.
Ireland: Ancestry DNA kits reduced from €95 to €64, plus shipping.
United Kingdom: Ancestry DNA kits reduced from £79 to £54, plus shipping.
Don’t forget to place your order before the expiry date above!
Some of the above content contains affiliate links. This means I may earn a small commission if you buy via these links. This does not affect the price you pay as a consumer, but it does contribute to keeping Irish Genealogy News online. See Advertising Disclosure tab above.
Limerick Libraries has been busy digitising and developing its new local studies website at limericklocalstudies.ie.
Among the wide range of material now freely available on the site are 23 publications in the free digital books collection. These include Margaret Franklin’s Bibliography of Limerick, Tom Toomey’s definitive account of the history of The War of Independence in Limerick, Limerick City Street Names by Gerry Joyce, and Limerick Snapshots of the Treaty City and County 1840 – 1960, by Tom Donovan and Vincent Carmody.
The latter (here) is a heavily illustrated book containing informative articles about a range of industries and retail outlets, including Limerick’s Bacon Merchants, Undertakers, Jewellers, Furniture makers, Brewers and Iron foundrys, and will be of certain interest to those with ancestral connections to the city.
Added only a couple of days ago is a rare book – Historical Notes on Adare, by Rev. T. E. Bridgett that was published in 1885.
Separately, there is also (here) the downloadable Histories of Protestant Limerick 1912–1923, a collection of ten original essays edited by Seán William Gannon (Limerick City and County Library Service) and Brian Hughes (Department of History, MIC) which explores the experience of Limerick’s Protestant communities during the Irish revolutionary period.
Family historians should also be sure to check out the Genealogy section of the site as this includes online indexes to the following:
1829 Freeholders in Limerick City and Environs (4,275 entries)
Obituaries: All notices of deaths contained in the Limerick Chronicle (and other local newspapers) from 1781 to 1951. The database consists of death notices, obituaries, funeral reports and news stories pertaining to the death of Limerick persons. (34,310 entries)
I could go on…
Dive in, but be sure to come up for air every now and again.
The Irish Registry of Deeds Index Project has been updated and the main Index now holds 595,067 index records from 61,422 memorials of deeds. They are freely searchable.
Every one of these memorials has been indexed by a volunteer, releasing fascinating genealogical information unlikely to be available elsewhere, and likely to remain hidden away, undigitised, in Dublin’s Registry of Deeds for many years yet. This Index Project, set up in 2007 by Nick Reddan FIGRS, has moved on a pace since 2016 when FamilySearch uploaded its library of microfilmed images created many years ago.
These images are free to view at the FamilySearch site, allowing volunteers to index memorials from their own device in their own home, rather than having to visit the Dublin repository.
Volunteers can index a single memorial – perhaps one they have used in their own ancestral research – or index a batch of memorials at a time. There is no rigid commitment required of volunteers: each works at their own pace. If you’d like to join the indexing team, please check out this incredibly worthwhile Project (see this How To Index page). Its website offers many detailed guides to help volunteers, and being involved in it means you’ll be helping other researchers learn about their ancestors. You’ll also be gaining useful skills.
The Dublin Repository’s official digitisation project is still, sadly, years away.
The Dublin-based Irish Newspaper Archives is running its annual summer sale and marking Independence Day 2024 with big discounts.
The family-owned database holds more than six million pages of newspaper content from 249 titles published both North and South of the Irish border over a period of c280 years.
It includes a mix of historical and current titles.
This material is split across two distinct collections:
The Radical Archive holds 97 titles aimed at publicising developments and encouraging support for the island’s various protest groups during a period of great political tension. Most date from the late 19th century to the 1930s.
The main Irish News Archive holds 152 titles from across the island. They include national, regional and local publications with a mix of news and political viewpoints, plus some specialist interest papers.
There are two subscriptions packages: The Gold sub gives you access to all the titles in both archive collections. The discount on this sub is 40% for both monthly and annual packages. The Silver sub gives you access to the main Irish News Archive and comes with a 35% discount, again for both monthly and annual plans.
To find out more, make a note of the promo codes above. Then click the image above and enter the code for your preferred subscription. Your discounted price will then be applied.
The discounts will expire on Monday 8 July 2024.
If you already have a current subscription you can still take advantage of these discounts by using the promo code to buy a Gift membership; when your existing sub expires, you can then activate the discounted Gift membership.
It was all about headstones last month! Each one of the seven bundles of records added to Ireland Genealogy Projects Archives in June delivered a package of headstone photos and inscriptions. Those records are, as always, now freely available to Irish genealogists, having been collected and donated by other family historians for the benefit of our research community.
Gravestone to the Fleming and Underwood families in Kilmacree RC graveyard in Piercestown, Co Wexford. Click image for enlarged view. Photo courtesy of IGP Archives and the photographer Michelle Meadows-Rousseau.
CLARE Genealogy Archives – Headstones Killilagh Old Graveyard, Killilagh
FERMANAGH Genealogy Archives – Headstones St Patrick’s CoI Cemetery, Castle Archdale
RootsIreland.ie is offering a 20% saving on 12-month subscriptions to its database to those who order one before 11:59pm (GMT+1) on Tuesday 16 July 2024.
The RootsIreland database is managed by the Irish Family History Foundation (IFHF), a not-for-profit organisation that has been co-ordinating a network of 32 genealogy and heritage centres across the island for 30+ years. It currently holds more than 23 million records and continues to expand.
In the first six months of this year, the database has grown by more than 83,500 records from Kerry, Monaghan and Tipperary, and there’s plenty more to come in the second half of the year.
While this database holds civil BMDs, census records, headstone inscriptions and census substitutes, RootsIreland is probably most appreciated for its fabulous collection of church records.
Its Roman Catholic church record collection is widely considered the most complete and most accurate set available online, and its impressive holding of Protestant records including Church of Ireland, Baptist, Methodist, Congregational, Quaker and Presbyterian records is second to none. Most of the Protestant records are not accessible online anywhere else while the Roman Catholic collections typically extend beyond those in other online holdings by more than 20 years.
To take up this offer, click the logo above. Alternatively, go directly to the website to explore details of the online sources for each county, or to subscribe.
Listed below is a summary of newly-released and -updated genealogy collections for England, Scotland and Wales from the major genealogy databases. For previous list see 12 June blogpost.)
These regular listings are designed to help researchers whose Irish ancestors migrated, temporarily or permanently, to England, Scotland or Wales.
By default, they will also be useful to anyone carrying out research in those three nations, regardless of the origin of their ancestors.
Please note that I don’t usually include updates of fewer than 1,000 records.
NEW COLLECTIONS
Figures in parentheses are the numbers of records (or images, if browse-only) in each new collection.Ancestry
Deaths & Burials: Obituaries (20,000) From the Index Society, Musgrave’s Obituaries, and the Society of Friends.
Some of the above content contains affiliate links. This means I may earn a small commission if you buy via these links. This does not affect the price you pay as a consumer, but it does contribute to keeping Irish Genealogy News online. See Advertising Disclosure tab above.
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What we know about Thomas Matthew Crooks, the suspected Trump rally shooter
The FBI says the shooting by the 20-year-old gunman was an attempted assassination against the former president and Republican candidate.
Police snipers return fire after shots were fired while Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump was speaking at a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania [Gene J Puskar/AP]
Published On 14 Jul 202414 Jul 2024
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has identified 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks as the suspect in the attempted assassination of former US President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania’s Butler County.
The suspect, a resident of Bethel Park in Pennsylvania, was shot and killed by the Secret Service seconds after he allegedly fired shots towards a stage where Trump was speaking at the rally on Saturday days before the Republican convention.
Trump said on social media that a bullet “pierced the upper part” of his right ear before agents whisked him off stage. He also offered his condolences to the family of the rally attendee who was killed by the suspect.
In a new statement, Trump thanked people for their messages of support. “Thank you to everyone for your thoughts and prayers yesterday, as it was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.”
Al Jazeera’s Kimberly Halkett, reporting from the White House, said that “Americans are still trying to come to terms with the shocking news”.
“Some of them have never experienced anything like this – the last time was the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981.”
Crooks lived about an hour away from where the shooting took place in Butler. He graduated in 2022 from Bethel Park High School, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He received a $500 “star award” from the National Math and Science Initiative, according to the newspaper.
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A 2022 graduation ceremony video cited by The New York Times shows Crooks receiving his high school diploma to some applause. Video from that ceremony posted online shows Crooks with glasses in a black graduation gown and posing with a school official.
A statement from the Bethel Park School District received by local ABC affiliate WJET-TV confirmed he studied and graduated there.
“Our school district will cooperate fully with the active law enforcement investigation surrounding this case, and as such, we are limited in what we can publicly disclose,” the statement read.
Was the Trump shooter a Republican?
State voter records show that Crooks was a registered Republican and the upcoming November 5 election would have been the first time Crooks had been old enough to vote in a presidential race.
However, when he was 17 he made a $15 donation to ActBlue, a political action committee that raises money for left-leaning and Democratic politicians, according to a 2021 Federal Election Commission filing. The donation was earmarked for the Progressive Turnout Project, a national group that rallies Democrats to vote.
How did he shoot?
On Saturday, according to a video by California-based entertainment news site TMZ, Crooks is seen lying on his stomach on a rooftop with a rifle in hand.
“The guy has longer brown hair, and he seems to be wearing a grey shirt/khaki pants – and as you can see, he’s carefully trying [to] pinpoint a target from afar before pulling the trigger,” TMZ reported.
(Al Jazeera)
Trump, 78, had just started his speech when the shots rang out. He grabbed his right ear with his right hand, then brought his hand down to look at it before dropping to his knees behind the podium before Secret Service agents covered him.
He emerged about a minute later, his red “Make America Great Again” hat knocked off. He could be heard saying “wait, wait”, before pumping his fist in the air. Agents then rushed him to a black SUV.
A second video published by TMZ shows shaky footage of the same rooftop and a blurred body.
“You can see the guy there,” a person says off camera. “I think they hit him because the guy, he looks dead.”
Bob Ayers, a former CIA officer and international security analyst, has told Al Jazeera from Taunton in the UK that the US Secret Service unit responsible for securing the area “didn’t do a very good job”.
“There should not have been any possibility for a person armed with a rifle to climb right up a building and shoot at the [former] president,” Ayers said.
Explosive found in suspect’s car
Crooks was carrying explosives in his vehicle, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The US-based outlet cited unnamed people briefed on the investigation as saying that explosives were found inside the car, which was parked near the Trump rally.
Police received multiple reports of suspicious packages near where the shooter was, authorities said, prompting them to dispatch bomb experts. Investigators were still working to make sure the scene was clear well into the night.
The FBI has said investigations are ongoing to determine Crooks’s motive for the attack that came months before the presidential elections.
“We’re looking at photographs right now and we’re trying to run his DNA and get biometric confirmation,” Kevin Rojek, FBI special agent in charge, said during a press briefing.
Crooks’s father, Matthew Crooks, 53, told CNN that he was also trying to figure out what happened and would wait until he spoke to law enforcement before speaking about his son.
USA Today reported that dozens of law enforcement vehicles have been stationed outside a residence listed at the address on Crooks’s voter registration record. Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are also on the scene and a bomb squad is at the residence.
Meanwhile, the perimeter of the residence of the suspect has been guarded by yellow police caution tape and the Federal Aviation Administration has also closed the airspace over Bethel Park for “special security reasons.”
Frequent difficulty finding the right word can signal changes in the brain consistent with the early (“preclinical”) stages of Alzheimer’s disease – before more obvious symptoms emerge.
However, a recent study from the University of Toronto suggests that it’s the speed of speech, rather than the difficulty in finding words that is a more accurate indicator of brain health in older adults.
The researchers asked 125 healthy adults, aged 18 to 90, to describe a scene in detail. Recordings of these descriptions were subsequently analysed by artificial intelligence (AI) software to extract features such as speed of talking, duration of pauses between words, and the variety of words used.
Participants also completed a standard set of tests that measure concentration, thinking speed, and the ability to plan and carry out tasks. Age-related decline in these “executive” abilities was closely linked to the pace of a person’s everyday speech, suggesting a broader decline than just difficulty in finding the right word.
A novel aspect of this study was the use of a “picture-word interference task”, a clever task designed to separate the two steps of naming an object: finding the right word and instructing the mouth on how to say it out loud.
During this task, participants were shown pictures of everyday objects (such as a broom) while being played an audio clip of a word that is either related in meaning (such as “mop” – which makes it harder to think of the picture’s name) or which sounds similar (such as “groom” – which can make it easier).
Interestingly, the study found that the natural speech speed of older adults was related to their quickness in naming pictures. This highlights that a general slowdown in processing might underlie broader cognitive and linguistic changes with age, rather than a specific challenge in memory retrieval for words.
While the findings from this study are interesting, finding words in response to picture-based cues may not reflect the complexity of vocabulary in unconstrained everyday conversation.
Verbal fluency tasks, which require participants to generate as many words as possible from a given category (for example, animals or fruits) or starting with a specific letter within a time limit, may be used with picture-naming to better capture the “tip-of-the-tongue” phenomenon.
The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon refers to the temporary inability to retrieve a word from memory, despite partial recall and the feeling that the word is known.
These tasks are considered a better test of everyday conversations than the picture-word interference task because they involve the active retrieval and production of words from one’s vocabulary, similar to the processes involved in natural speech.
While verbal fluency performance does not significantly decline with normal ageing (as shown in a 2022 study), poor performance on these tasks can indicate neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
The tests are useful because they account for the typical changes in word retrieval ability as people get older, allowing doctors to identify impairments beyond what is expected from normal ageing and potentially detect neurodegenerative conditions.
The verbal fluency test engages various brain regions involved in language, memory, and executive functioning, and hence can offer insights into which regions of the brain are affected by cognitive decline.
The authors of the University of Toronto study could have investigated participants’ subjective experiences of word-finding difficulties alongside objective measures like speech pauses. This would provide a more comprehensive understanding of the cognitive processes involved.
Personal reports of the “feeling” of struggling to retrieve words could offer valuable insights complementing the behavioural data, potentially leading to more powerful tools for quantifying and detecting early cognitive decline.
Opening doors
Nevertheless, this study has opened exciting doors for future research, showing that it’s not just what we say but how fast we say it that can reveal cognitive changes.
By harnessing natural language processing technologies (a type of AI), which use computational techniques to analyse and understand human language data, this work advances previous studies that noticed subtle changes in the spoken and written language of public figures like Ronald Reagan and Iris Murdoch in the years before their dementia diagnoses.
While those opportunistic reports were based on looking back after a dementia diagnosis, this study provides a more systematic, data-driven and forward-looking approach.
Using rapid advancements in natural language processing will allow for automatic, detection of language changes, such as slowed speech rate.
This study underscores the potential of speech rate changes as a significant yet subtle marker of cognitive health that could aid in identifying people at risk before more severe symptoms become apparent.
Traumatic brain injuries (TBI) are very common. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), at least 1.7 million people suffer from a TBI every year. There are an estimated 5.3 million people currently living with a brain injury. If the brain injury occurs in an area of the brain that impacts speech and language, aphasia can occur.
Brain injuries are most common in adolescents and older adults. They are also more common in males than females. The number of TBIs each year has been steadily rising. However, deaths due to TBI are falling. Because of this, there are more people living with brain injuries.
A brain injury is most often caused by direct head trauma, such as a car accident or a severe fall. A penetrating TBI can occur in the case of a gunshot wound or other injuries that compromise the outer layer of the brain. The injury can be classified as either mild, moderate, or severe.
Aphasia and Traumatic Brain Injury
Aphasia is most common following a severe brain injury that impacts the brain’s language centers. Depending on the nature of the injury and extent of the damage, aphasia can be short-term or long-term. Aphasia as a result of TBI is very similar to aphasia that results from strokes and other conditions.
However, one difference is that people who have had a TBI are more likely to have pragmatic language impairments. Pragmatics refers to social communication. This can include staying on topic, taking turns in a conversation, and facial expressions.
People with brain injuries are likely to experience other impairments as a result of the injury. These can include:
Physical effects, including headaches, nausea, seizures, weakness/paralysis and movement impairments
Cognitive impairments, including attention, memory, reasoning, problem-solving, organizing and impulse control
Vision changes
Hearing loss and/or other hearing changes, such as tinnitus or hypersensitivity to sounds
Mood changes; may be over-reactive or unemotional with a flat affect
The effects of TBI vary significantly depending on the location and severity of the damage. Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) can work with people who have aphasia as a result of TBI. They can also work on strategies addressing the cognitive changes that have occurred.
Aphasia is a disorder that affects how you communicate. It can impact your speech, as well as the way you write and understand both spoken and written language.
Aphasia usually happens suddenly after a stroke or a head injury. But it can also come on gradually from a slow-growing brain tumor or a disease that causes progressive, permanent damage (degenerative). The severity of aphasia depends on a number of things, including the cause and the extent of the brain damage.
The main treatment for aphasia involves treating the condition that causes it, as well as speech and language therapy. The person with aphasia relearns and practices language skills and learns to use other ways to communicate. Family members often participate in the process, helping the person communicate.
Aphasia is a symptom of some other condition, such as a stroke or a brain tumor.
A person with aphasia may:
Speak in short or incomplete sentences
Speak in sentences that don’t make sense
Substitute one word for another or one sound for another
Speak unrecognizable words
Have difficulty finding words
Not understand other people’s conversation
Not understand what they read
Write sentences that don’t make sense
Patterns of aphasia
People with aphasia may have different strengths and weaknesses in their speech patterns. Sometimes these patterns are labeled as different types of aphasia, including:
Broca’s aphasia
Wernicke aphasia
Transcortical aphasia
Conduction aphasia
Mixed aphasia
Global aphasia
These patterns describe how well the person can understand what others say. They also describe how easy it is for the person to speak or to correctly repeat what someone else says.
Aphasia may develop slowly over time. When that happens, the aphasia may be labeled with one of these names:
Logopenic aphasia
Semantic aphasia
Agrammatism
Many people with aphasia have patterns of speech difficulty that don’t match these types. It may help to consider that each person with aphasia has unique symptoms, strengths and weaknesses rather than trying to label a particular type of aphasia.
When to see a doctor
Because aphasia is often a sign of a serious problem, such as a stroke, seek emergency medical care if you or a loved one suddenly develop:
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Causes
The most common cause of aphasia is brain damage resulting from a stroke — the blockage or rupture of a blood vessel in the brain. Loss of blood to the brain leads to brain cell death or damage in areas that control language.
Brain damage caused by a severe head injury, a tumor, an infection or a degenerative process also can cause aphasia. In these cases, the aphasia usually occurs with other types of cognitive problems, such as memory problems or confusion.
Primary progressive aphasia is the term used for language difficulty that develops gradually. This is due to the gradual degeneration of brain cells located in the language networks. Sometimes this type of aphasia will progress to a more generalized dementia.
Sometimes temporary episodes of aphasia can occur. These can be due to migraines, seizures or a transient ischemic attack (TIA). A transient ischemic attack (TIA) occurs when blood flow is temporarily blocked to an area of the brain. People who’ve had a are at an increased risk of having a stroke in the near future.
Complications
Aphasia can create numerous quality-of-life problems because communication is so much a part of your life. Communication difficulty may affect your:
Job
Relationships
Day-to-day function
Difficulty expressing wants and needs can result in embarrassment, frustration, isolation and depression. Other problems may occur together, such as more difficulty moving around and problems with memory and thinking.
Premiered on 11 Jul 2024 Global Capitalism The Decline of the US Empire – Military Losses: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine – Economic Losses: The Rise of BRICS – Political Losses: Israel, Sanctions – The Decline of US Capitalism: What Next? Co-sponsored by Democracy at Work and Left Forum Special messages to our audience: Please help sponsor Global Capitalism by becoming a monthly donor to Democracy at Work. Go to our website to learn more (www.democracyatwork.info/donate). Follow Democracy at Work on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Our four Democracy at Work books, three by Richard Wolff (Understanding Marxism, Understanding Socialism, and The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Cannot Save Us from Pandemics or Itself) and our latest by Robert Hennelly (Stuck Nation: Can the United States change course on our history of choosing profits over people?) are for sale on Lulu.com. Find direct purchase links on our website ( http://www.democracyatwork.info/books ), or find them directly on Lulu ( http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/democracyatwork ) Your support helps to produce and distribute these talks. Thank you.
Gen Zers are rejecting thankless corporate jobs and stifling college debt—and embracing the internet economy, this Gen Z cofounder says. His new venture, Whop, helps aspiring online entrepreneurs.
A third of Gen Z is skipping college before joining the workforce—and opportunities in the internet economy are a major reason why. It’s an inflection point that decades of corporate dread have been building toward.
As the first generation to be raised by the internet, Gen Z didn’t spend our childhoods outside—we spent them online. We exchanged ideas and connected with one another over chatbots long before we learned how to prepare for an interview or apply for a job.We participated in makeshift economies in virtual games long before we opened a bank account or submitted a summer job application.
Our comfort in exploring the internet is why we don’t feel tied to traditional models of work and life that kept people busy for decades—especially as burnout, low wages, and debt continue to dominate headlines post-pandemic.For Gen Z (and the generations to come) inheriting this new reality, the question has evolved from “Where should I apply to college?” to “How can I make money online?”
The rousing generational shift is bound to shape the future of work and our economy in ways we’re just starting to uncover.
Work Smarter, not harder. Get our editors’ tips and stories delivered weekly.
Steven Schwartz (@cultured) is the CEO and cofounder of Whop. Steven has a background in engineering and has been building internet companies and selling digital products since he was 13.More
Zimbabwe’s Lithium Gambit: Navigating China-US Rivalry – Analysis (…”mining and processing of lithium is concentrated within a handful of countries, these countries consider lithium a geopolitical leverage that can fuel their economy…)
As the world is going through the green energy revolution, a steady supply of critical minerals such as lithium is paramount.Yet, the lithium supply chain is interwoven with multiple vulnerabilities, including natural disasters, political uncertainties, and market fluctuations. Consequently, many countries have developed strategies to minimise their supply chain vulnerabilities. On the other hand, as the mining and processing of lithium is concentrated within a handful of countries, these countries consider lithium a geopolitical leverage that can fuel their economy.
Located in Southern Africa, Zimbabwe is the world’s fifth-largest miner and the top lithium producer in Africa. With the potential to meet 20 percent of global demand, the country is placing a significant wager on the mineral to boost its economy. In 2023, Zimbabwe produced 3,400 metric tons of lithium, a whopping 230 percent rise over 2022. Dubbed “white gold,” lithium exports earned Zimbabwe a record US$209 millionwithin the first nine months of 2023. Lithium is Zimbabwe’s third-largest mineral export after gold and platinum group of metals, bringing in US$2.46 billion and US$2.27 billion, respectively, in 2023. However, as Zimbabwe exports merely raw lithium, the amount is miniscule.
The Zimbabwean government is aware of the value of lithium to the country’s economy. Not surprisingly, it intends to refine battery-grade lithium domestically to create value locally and establish the nation as a lithium refining hub. Refining lithium domestically would not only boost economic growth but also create jobs for locals and pave the way for infrastructure development. Therefore, in 2022, under the Base Minerals Export Control Act, Zimbabwe prohibited the export of raw lithium. Additionally, the restriction was intended to stop raw lithium from smuggling across the nation’s porous borders with neighbouring South Africa and Mozambique.
Yet, two years after the ban, the country’s economy has not significantly benefitted. The major challenges hindering the growth of the lithium industry are ongoing power outages, shortages of foreign exchange, and policy uncertainties. Due to its US$17 billion debt and arrears to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, Zimbabwe is not eligible to receive fresh funding from multilateral development banks, which might be used to increase access to power and develop better energy infrastructure. Last but not least, lithium prices in China, the top consumer of lithium globally, were on a downtrend throughout the year.
Chinese investment in Zimbabwe’s lithium
Today, Zimbabwe is in severe need of fresh investments if it wants to attain its ambitious goal of a US$12 billion mining economy by 2030. China, the world’s largest producer of lithium batteries and refiner of lithium, has already made significant investments in Zimbabwe’s mining sector. A few years back, China declared a whopping US$ 2.79 billion investment plan in Zimbabwe’s lithium mining industry. Numerous Chinese mining companies exist in Zimbabwe, including Sinomine Resource Group, Chengxin Lithium Group, Yahua Group, Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, and Canmax Technologies.
Sinomine Resource Group’s local subsidiary, Bikita Minerals, has started trial production at a new spodumene and petalite factory in Masvingo province. The operation, with an investment of US$200 million, is expected to produce 300,000 tons of high-quality chemical-grade spodumene concentrate every year. In Goromonzi, around 80 kilometres from the capital, Harare, Prospect Lithium Zimbabwe, a subsidiary of Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt in China, inaugurated a US$300 million lithium processing facility. With its 4.5 million tonnes of hard rock lithium processing capacity, it can produce about 400,000 tonnes of concentrate annually for export. For US$422 million in 2021, Huayou Cobalt purchased the Arcadia mine from Prospect Resource, an Australian firm. Chengxin Lithium Group, another Chinese company, invested US$77 million to build a 300,000-tonne-per-year lithium concentrator at the Sabi Star mine in eastern Zimbabwe. The company invested an additional US$130 million in constructing its lithium processing plant.
China-US tango over lithium in Zimbabwe
The cost of building the lithium economy infrastructure is immense, and Zimbabwe requires multiple external investors to develop its domestic lithium industry.Yet, US sanctions since 2001 crippled its economy by restricting its ability to borrow money and attract investment. The sanctions imposed by the West were estimated to cost the nation almost US$42 billion in revenue. In the absence of adequate government capacity, the government faces a tremendous challenge in trying to revive Zimbabwe’s faltering economy.
As the US seeks to secure its production of green energy by severing China from the lithium value chain, it is attempting to confront China in Zimbabwe with a multifaceted strategy. Ironically, it was these US sanctions that pushed Zimbabwe closer to China.Indeed, China was probably the only nation that continued investing in Zimbabwe despite the sanctions. It is without doubt that compared to Western development and commercial banks, Chinese financiers are significantly more willing to engage in high-risk ventures.In the first half of 2023, the Zimbabwe Investment Development Agency reportedly received 160 lithium investment applications from Chinese investors, compared to just five from US investors.
After realising the geopolitical ramifications of its prolonged disregard for the lithium value chain and its vulnerability due to overdependence on China, the US government is finally prepared to alter its approach. The US lifted sanctions against Zimbabwe in March 2024. Instead, it enforced the Global Magnitsky Act of 2016, which gave the US the authority to sanction eight particular Zimbabwean people, including President Emmerson Mnangagwa. As the country-specific sanctions are lifted, the US or other Western nations will have no further restrictions towards investing in Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe has other challenges, such as the lack of trained manpower. Many other African nations, including Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia, have passed laws mandating that mining corporations provide locals with training. These trainings may guarantee investment retention and local workforce development with the necessary skills. The US may create its own capacity-building initiatives or collaborate with other like-minded nations like India. India is a signatory to the ambitious Minerals Security Partnership (MSP), spearheaded by the US, which aims to protect supply chains of vital minerals. India’s track record of developing capacity in Africa means that the United States may benefit from its engagement with India.
Lastly, as a landlocked country, Zimbabwe lacks the cross-border logistics and infrastructure needed to connect to a port.The US has declared plans to build the Lobito Corridor, a railroad that will link the Lobito port in Angola with Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Going forward, the USA might consider extending the corridor and connecting Harare.
Conclusion
Considering the tightly-knit nature of the world’s lithium supply networks, lithium exports might assist Zimbabwe in breaking free from its reputation as a pariah state. The fierce competition for its lithium augurs well for Zimbabwe. Access to secondary producers and international buyers is necessary to develop the lithium supply chain. China is now well ahead when turning metal into battery raw materials and controlling the whole value chain.
While this jubilant rhetoric from the West continues, China is steadily increasing the number of lithium projects in its portfolio across the nation, solidifying its status as an important trading and financial partner. Zimbabwe can gain from this competition as the US takes more interest in its lithium. However, everything will depend on how willing the US is to commit resources amid China’s strategic rivalry.
About the author: Samir Bhattacharya is an Associate Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation
György Buzsáki first started tinkering with waves when he was in high school. In his childhood home in Hungary, he built a radio receiver, tuned it to various electromagnetic frequencies, and used a radio transmitter to chat with strangers from the Faroe Islands to Jordan.
He remembers some of these conversations from his “ham radio” days better than others, just as you remember only some experiences from your past. Now, as a professor of neuroscience at New York University, Buzsáki has moved on from radio waves to brain waves to ask: How does the brain decide what to remember?
By studying electrical patterns in the brain, Buzsáki seeks to understand how our experiences are represented and saved as memories. New studies from his lab and others have suggested that the brain tags experiences worth remembering by repeatedly sending out sudden and powerful high-frequency brain waves. Known as “sharp wave ripples,” these waves, kicked up by the firing of many thousands of neurons within milliseconds of one another, are “like a fireworks show in the brain,” said Wannan Yang, a doctoral student in Buzsáki’s lab who led the new work, which was published in Science in March. They fire when the mammalian brain is at rest, whether during a break between tasks or during sleep.
Sharp wave ripples were already known to be involved in consolidating memories or storing them. The new research shows that they’re also involved in selecting them—pointing to the importance of these waves throughout the process of long-term memory formation.
It also provides neurological reasons why rest and sleep are important for retaining information. Resting and waking brains seem to run different programs: If you sleep all the time, you won’t form memories. If you’re awake all the time, you won’t form them either.“If you just run one algorithm, you will never learn anything,” Buzsáki said. “You have to have interruptions.”
During those interruptions is when the fireworks go off.
The Brain’s Rehearsal
Buzsáki will never forget the first time he heard a sharp wave ripple.It was 1981, and he was a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario listening to the brain activity of anesthetized rodents through a loudspeaker. After about nine years of research, he had become accustomed to the rhythmic, melodic oscillations that sounded as the awake animals explored their environments. He wasn’t prepared for the sudden “bong” that blared through his speaker when the rodents were asleep.
To Buzsáki, the sound was as profound as the dramatic refrain in Beethoven’s 5th symphony. “Da da da da,” he sang as he recalled his shock. And then another bong: “Da da da da.”
What was going on? The rodents’ waking brains had generated electrical activity that oscillated at a constant rate. When they were anesthetized, however, their brains seemed to irregularly fire off much faster patterns.
Other researchers had observed the fast waves too. Buzsáki’s postdoctoral adviser Cornelius Vanderwolf had described the irregular patterns in 1969, and the Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist John O’Keefe coined the term “ripples” to describe them in the 1970s. But it wasn’t until Buzsáki heard them for himself that he became obsessed.
He spent much of his lab time over the next decade trying to characterize these electrical bursts. In the late 1980s, researchers discovered that they could induce neurons to make stronger interconnections, linked to learning and memory, by artificially stimulating them to fire in rapid bursts. To Buzsáki, those bursts sounded a lot like his waves. In 1989, he first hypothesized that sharp wave ripples might be part of the brain’s mechanism for forming and consolidating memories.
“He had the idea that this was not some noisy activity, but it was relevant for the brain,” said Michaël Zugaro, a neuroscientist at the Collège de France who worked as a postdoc in Buzsáki’s lab in 2002. “That was a great anticipation of future discoveries because at the time very little was actually known.”
In the 1990s and early 2000s, researchers took advantage of improved computing power and new tools that could record electrical activity from over 100 neurons at once to better characterize sharp wave ripples.Buzsáki and other scientists discovered that the ripples seemed to replay brain activity from an animal’s experience, such as running through a maze—except that the replay ripples oscillated 10 to 20 times faster than the original signals. One 2002 paper, which “made sharp wave ripples very famous,” said Hiroaki Norimoto, a professor of neuroscience at Nagoya University in Japan, found that sharp wave ripples reactivate a sequence of neuronal activity.
“Even in these moments of wakeful rest, your brain continues to rehearse and replay the past.”
Lila Davachi, Columbia University
In 2009 and 2010, two papers, including one led by Zugaro, showed that sharp wave ripples were involved in consolidating memories to endure over the long term. When researchers suppressed or disrupted the ripples, rats performed worse on memory tasks. “When you destroy them, then the animal no longer remembers,” Zugaro said. Later studies showed that elongating or creating more ripples improved rats’ memory.
It became clear that the ripples were playing repeatedly to cement a memory. “The brain is rehearsing,” said Lila Davachi, a professor of psychology at Columbia University. “Even in these moments of wakeful rest, your brain continues to rehearse and replay the past.”
Imagine an experience as “a melody on the piano,” said Daniel Bendor, a neuroscientist at University College London. A specific sequence of neurons fires to record an experience, just as a pianist taps out a specific sequence of keys. Then, during sleep, the hippocampus replays that sequence—but faster and potentially hundreds or thousands of times. The frenetic sharp wave ripples propagate out from the hippocampus, a way station in the brain for “episodic memories” of particular experiences, toward the cortex, which is involved in long-term memory storage.
However, no one could explain why the ripples propagated while an animal was awake and resting. “[They] must serve some other purpose,” Bendor recalled thinking. Scientists had many ideas. Some proposed that waking ripples helped with planning or decision-making. Others suggested that they modified or reallocated memories in some way.
Another idea, which several groups proposed, was that replay while an animal was awake and replay during sleep were intimately tied—and that they could be the mechanism by which the brain chooses what experiences to remember.
Memory Trials
At NYU, boxes of resting and sleeping mice sat in an infrared-lit room. In the room next door were handcrafted mazes, constructed from plastic and tape. One at a time, the mice were placed in the mazes. They ran around, wearing electrodes that recorded the activity of around 500 hippocampal neurons, and learned that certain routes would earn them a reward of water. As they explored the maze, the mice took small breaks to rest or groom themselves. And after their trials were over, they were returned to their home cage for a snooze. The researchers continued to record their brain activity as they slept.
Yang analyzed the data by mapping which neurons fired during different trials. She saw a lot of variation—some neurons fired during early trials, and others fired during later ones. Sometimes they fired at different rates. That told her that the brain recorded an animal’s experience of individual trials differently. Notably, some trials were followed by bursts of sharp wave ripples, while others weren’t.
Then she compared the brain activity recorded during the mice’s maze experiences to the related ripples that appeared later. The trials that replayed more frequently as the mice rested were the same trials that replayed as they slept. And the trials that were not replayed when the mice were awake weren’t replayed during sleep either.
The team concluded that the resting ripples might be a mechanism by which the brain prioritizes experiences to remember. “Maybe awake ripples are those memory tags” that consolidate certain experiences for long-term storage, Yang said. “On the contrary, those that are not tagged are not replayed during sleep, and they will be forgotten.”
“There has to be some kind of triage to remember what is relevant and forget the rest,” Zugaro said. “Understanding how specific memories were selected for storage was still lacking … Now we have a good clue.”
Last December, a research team led by Bendor at University College London published related results in Nature Communications that anticipated those of Yang and Buzsáki. They too found that sharp wave ripples that fired when rats were awake and asleep seemed to tag experiences for memory. However, their analysis averaged a number of different trials together—an approach less precise than what Yang and Buzsáki accomplished.
The NYU team’s key innovation was to bring the element of time, which distinguishes similar memories from one another, into their analysis. The mice were running around in the same maze patterns, and yet these researchers could distinguish between blocks of trials at the neuronal level—a resolution never reached before.
The brain patterns are marking “something a little bit closer to an event, and a little bit less like a general knowledge,” said Loren Frank, a neuroscientist at UC San Francisco who was not involved in the research. “That strikes me as a really interesting finding.”
“They’re showing that the brain is maybe creating some kind of temporal code to distinguish between different memories occurring in the same place,” said Freyja Ólafsdóttir, a neuroscientist at Radboud University who was not involved with the work.
Shantanu Jadhav, a neuroscientist at Brandeis University, praised the study. “This is a good start,” he said. However, he hopes to see a follow-up experiment that includes a behavioral test. Demonstrating that an animal forgot or remembered particular trial blocks would be “the real proof that this is a tagging mechanism.”
The research leaves a burning question unanswered: Why is one experience chosen over another? The new work suggests how the brain tags a certain experience to remember. But it can’t tell us how the brain decides what’s worth remembering.
Sometimes the things we remember seem random or irrelevant, and surely different from what we’d select if given the choice. “There is a sense that the brain prioritizes based on ‘importance,’” Frank said. Because studies have suggested that emotional or novel experiences tend to be remembered better, it’s possible that internal fluctuations in arousal or the levels of neuromodulators such as dopamine or adrenaline and other chemicals that affect neurons end up selecting experiences, he suggested.
Jadhav echoed that thought, saying, “The internal state of the organism can bias experiences to be encoded and stored more effectively.” But it’s not known what makes one experience more prone to being stored than others, he added. And in the case of Yang and Buzsáki’s study, it’s not clear why a mouse would remember one trial better than another.
Buzsáki remains committed to exploring the roles that sharp wave ripples play in the hippocampus, although he and his team are also interested in potential applications that might arise from these observations. It’s possible, for example, that scientists could disrupt the ripples as part of a treatment for conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder, in which people remember certain experiences too vividly, he said. “The low-hanging fruit here is to erase sharp waves and forget what you experienced.”
But for the time being, Buzsáki will continue to tune in to these powerful brain waves to uncover more about why we remember what we do.
Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of theSimons Foundationwhose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
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