Sublime

At first, the impact that this memory difficulty might have was unclear. Then it was found that the more people tended to retrieve memories in this non-specific way, the more difficulty they had in letting go of the past and the more affected they were by things going wrong in their lives right now and rebuilding their lives again after an upset.5

our minds are wired to wander. Wandering is their default. Whenever our thoughts are suspended between specific, discrete, goal-directed activities, the brain reverts to a so-called baseline, “resting” state—but don’t let the word fool you, because the brain isn’t at rest at all. Instead, it experiences tonic activity in what’s now known as the

two types of effects on stored memories:

In Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past,

K. Anders Ericsson. He was a psychology professor at Florida State University and the author of an article titled “Exceptional Memorizers: Made, Not Born.”

It is not accidental, in this context, that the inability to reimagine one’s life is a primary indicator of traumatic experiences, and its reversal represents a key sign of recovering and, in some cases, of entering a new phase of post-traumatic growth.

An unconscious image enters sensory areas but creates only a modest wave of activity in the prefrontal cortex. Attention, concentration, processing depth, and conscious awareness transform this small wave into a neuronal tsunami that invades the prefrontal cortex and maximizes subsequent memorization.8

brains are already organized and knowledgeable.

How can we make sense of these gradations of moral responsibility when brains and their background influences are in every case, and to exactly the same degree, the real cause of a woman’s death?