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He received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize for his philosophy of " Reverence for Life", expressed in many ways, but most famously in founding and sustaining the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Lambaréné, now in Gabon, west central Africa (then French Equatorial Africa).

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Check this out! I promise this post doesn't stink.

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You've probably experienced this: you come home to a plate of freshly baked cookies in the kitchen, and when the scent of chocolatey goodness hits your nose you're instantaneously transported back to your grandmother's house.

The phenomenon is called odor-evoked biographical memory, but how exactly does it allow for specific scents to magically bring back a memory?

"There's a big difference between the way your body handles sight, sound, taste and touch and the way it processes smells," Hank Green, host of the YouTube series SciShow, says in a new episode (above).

Unlike other senses, when a smell is processed in the brain, it travels directly to the amygdala and the hippocampus -- regions that both deal with emotion and memory respectively. This allows for the scent to be stored in your brain as a memory along with a certain experience or emotion.

Now, go call your grandma and reminisce!

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Here's Why Smelling Cookies Makes You Think Of Grandma's House

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You've probably experienced this: you come home to a plate of freshly baked cookies in the kitchen, and when the scent of chocolatey goodness hits your nose you're instantaneously transported back to your grandmother's house. The phenomenon is called odor-evoked biographical memory, but how exactly does it allow for specific scents to magically bring back a memory?

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The Human Sciences: A focus on Memory as a Way of Knowing

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The Human Sciences: A focus on Memory as a Way of Knowing

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When instructed complete the following google form:

https://goo.gl/SBA2El

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On 23rd March 2017, Condor Airlines flight 358 left Frankfurt to fly to Rabat. It was a cloudy day with fairly good visibility. Jack Randall was the principle flight attendant on duty that day. As the plane took off, a man at the back of the plane stood up, brandishing a Magnum 57 pistol. He announced that he was a member of the group “The People’s Movement for the liberation and reintegration of Cyprus.” He demanded to speak with the pilot and to re-route the plane to Malta. The flight attendant led the man up to the flight deck in order to speak to Jane Maddock, the pilot. After explaining his situation, the pilot told him that he would have to speak to the air-traffic control in Germany. Turning away from the man, the pilot then threw the microphone at the hijacker. He was hit in the head and fell back into the passenger area of the plane, where angry passengers took over from there.

The plane then made a U-turn and headed back to Germany where the hijacker was then arrested.

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The reliability of memory as a way of knowing:

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The reliability of memory as a way of knowing:

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So far this year, we have touched on some “ways of knowing” which include sense perception, language and reasoning. We have also explored Mathematics, Human Sciences and the Natural Science Areas of Knowledge. A concept that combines some of these ways of knowing and is central to these AOK's is memory, and many times people rely on their memory to make knowledge claims. So, the question here would be, is memory a reliable way of knowing?

Memory is a mix of emotion, and sense perception, and experiences from the past. Although these ideas are considered, by many people, to be very reliable, there are some cases where they turn out to be faulty and untrustworthy. Listen to the podcast called Memory and Forgetting by RadioLab, (http://www.radiolab.org/story/91569-memory-and-forgetting/ ) and there are countless Youtube clips related to the fallibility of eye witness accounts including titles such as Eyewitness Testimony Errors; The case of Mistaken Identity with a Rape Victim. These provide  multiple accounts of when Memory proved to be simply unreliable and have given reasons for it. In the podcast, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich interview and talk about how easy it is to remove memories with the help of a drug, and how easy it is to change or create a new memory by just saying or suggesting something to someone. They then talked about how one’s memory is rapidly changing, and something that one remembers more than once becomes less and less true over time if they continue to relive the memory. Another example they gave was where somebody was at the scene of a crime when it happened, and the detectives were asking questions. They asked if there was a red Camaro car when the crime was committed and at first the person was sure there wasn’t, but once they were asked this question again and it was specifically emphasized, the person suddenly began imagining this red Camaro which really wasn’t there. The way our brain treats our memories is really different than what we think. It doesn’t store it away safely like it would be if it were filed into a file cabinet. It’s vulnerable in the way that it can easily be influenced or manipulated without one giving it “permission”. This verifies that relying on memory as a way of knowing can be very unreliable because once you begin thinking about a past experience and the emotions that were attached, they become less and less real over time and also because it is so easily altered by someone else. I find this really interesting as I used to think that the more someone thought about a memory they had, the clearer it would get; however, it is completely the opposite.

The Youtube videos including the one that I watched on the case of the rape victim was also a very fascinating insight on this topic. A woman was sexually assaulted and then was later brought in to pick who the rapist was, and after studying some number of photos for a while, she felt so certain that it was one of the men in the selection of photos, who turned out to be innocent. In fact, in the line-up of people, the actual rapist was not present. Despite the fact that she knew there was a possibility that he wasn’t in the group of suspects, she felt that he was definitely one of them. Even when the real perpetrator sat in the same room as her and she looked at him, she felt nothing. This contrasted greatly with her reaction when the man whom she “remembered” raped her came in to the court, she became very nervous and felt strong emotions towards him including hatred and fear. The way her memory was so easily influenced by the idea that she WANTED to find the rapist shows that we cannot really rely on our memory to find the truth. Claiming that the man she had mistaken as the man who committed the crime was all based on memory which she now knows is rather unreliable and untrustworthy. She not only relied on the memory of the experience and what she saw when she relived the torture of that moment, but she also used her emotional response to the two men to make her decision. Again, it proved to be suspect once they found out that he was innocent.

Although most of the time, people do think about the past and search through their memory in order to make knowledge claims which usually turn out to be the real truth, it is not necessarily always the best thing to turn to when proving that you know something. From these two examples, it is clear that memory can easily be altered and destroyed or new memories which aren’t exactly the truth can be created. Therefore, we can clearly say that memory is not the most reliable way of knowing.

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Reconstructive nature of memory - the fiction of memory

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Elizabeth Loftus: How reliable is your memory?

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Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus studies memories. More precisely, she studies false memories, when people either remember things that didn't happen or remember them differently from the way they really were. It's more common than you might think, and Loftus shares some startling stories and statistics -- and raises some important ethical questions.

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Context: Alcohol and Memory

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Yes, alcohol disrupts the memory system. But, in very specific circumstances, it can actually help recall. This is the phenomenon known as state-specific recall. External context can help you recall a memory; you're better able to recall it if you are in the same environment where the memory was acquired. But, and here's the clever bit, this also applies to the internal context, or "state", hence state-dependent recall. To put it simply, substances such as alcohol or stimulants or anything that alters brain activity bring about a specific neurological state. When the brain is suddenly having to deal with a disruptive substance washing around everywhere, this does not go unnoticed, any more than you wouldn't notice that your bedroom was suddenly full of smoke.

This can also apply to mood: if you learn something while in a bad mood, you're more likely to recall it later if you're in a bad mood again. It is a massive oversimplification to describe moods and mood disorders as "chemical imbalances" in the brain (despite many who do just that), but the overall levels of chemical and electrochemical activity that result in and from a specific mood is something the brain can recognise, and does. Thus, the context inside your head is potentially just as useful as the one outside your head when it comes to triggering memories.

Alcohol does disrupt memories, but only after a certain point; it's perfectly possible to have the pleasant buzz of a few beers or glasses of wine and still remember everything the next day. But if you were to be told some interesting gossip or useful information after a couple of glasses of wine, your brain would encode your slightly intoxicated state as part of the memory, so would be better able to retrieve this memory if you were to have another couple of glasses of wine (on a different night, not right after the first two). In this scenario, a glass of wine can indeed improve your memory.

Please don't take this as a scientific endorsement for drinking heavily when studying for exams or tests. Turning up drunk for a test will be problematic enough to cancel out any minor memory advantages this provides you with, especially if it's a driving test.

But there is still some hope for desperate students: caffeine affects the brain and produces a specific internal state that can help trigger memories, and a lot of students pull caffeine-fuelled all-nighters when cramming for exams. So if you attend the exams similarly stimulated by excessive caffeine, then it could well help with remembering some of the more important details from your notes.

This is an edited extract from The Idiot Brain by Dean Burnett (Guardian Faber, £12.99). To order a copy for £7.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
Topics

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Yes, alcohol disrupts the memory system. But, in very specific circumstances, it can actually help recall. This is the phenomenon known as state-specific recall. External context can help you recall a memory; you're better able to recall it if you are in the same environment where the memory was acquired.

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What happens to your brain when you make a memory

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We all have memories, as far as I can remember. But where do these memories come from and how do they get made?

People often compare the brain to a computer, but the brain doesn't have USB slots that allow you to pick up new information by jamming a flash drive in your ear. That would be convenient, if a little painful.

So where do we get all this information sloshing around in our skulls? You might imagine human memory is a bit like a Santa's sack filled with life events, song lyrics and the first half of jokes. But in truth, "memory" is not one single solid thing. It is a term covering lots of types of recollections that are surprisingly distinct, and used constantly in different combinations by a typical human.

Short-term memory - like writing your name with a sparkler

We've all heard about short-term and long-term memory. While people tend to use the phrase "short-term memory" to refer to our recall of things that happened recently - in the last hour or day - technically speaking, it's actually far more fleeting. Short-term memory typically lasts between 15 and 30 seconds: it's a bit like writing your name in the air with a sparkler. Any memory that can be recalled after that length of time is a long-term memory.

In computer terms, short-term memory is like the RAM - it holds the information we're currently working with or using for cognitive tasks (thinking). This can be new information delivered by our senses, for example, or old information retrieved from the long-term memory. Neuroscientists theorise that all this thinking is supported by patterns of neuron activity in the prefrontal cortex (that bit at the front of your brain).

Long-term memory - information becomes a physical 'thing'

Luckily, for memories we actually want to keep, there's also long-term memory. If short-term memory is the RAM of a computer, long-term memory is the hard drive, which keeps everything from your failed screenplays to Minesweeper scores.

Unlike short-term memories, long-term memories have a physical presence in the brain, and aren't dependant purely on specific patterns of activity. Neurons make new physical connections and synapses with each other when a new long-term memory is formed. This connection endures whether it's being used or not.

Long-term memory can be split into explicit and implicit memory. Implicit memories include habits and skills that we can do automatically, such as rolling a cigarette, driving a car, forging your boss's signature on expense forms.

Explicit memories are things we're consciously aware of and are intentionally trying to remember. There are two kinds of explicit memory: episodic and semantic. Episodic memory is memory for things and events that happened to you. Semantic memory is for more general knowledge. Knowing Paris is the capital of France is a semantic memory, remembering being sick on your trip to Paris is an episodic memory.

Encoding - a terrifyingly complex tapestry in real time

When we actually want to learn something, it is long-term memories we are interested in. So how are they formed? The first step is to encode a piece of information - otherwise it quickly disappears, like breath on a mirror.

Information is channelled to the hippocampus, the brain region crucial for the formation of new memories and one of the only places in the brain where brand new neurons are regularly generated. The hippocampus links all of the relevant information together and encodes it into a new memory by forming new synapses. It's basically like someone knitting a terrifyingly complex tapestry in real time.

But not all information is equal in the eyes of the hippocampus. "Important" things are encoded more readily and effectively than routine or incomprehensible things, like an uneventful daily commute, or the lyrics of a dance song in a language you don't recognise. The hippocampus will prioritise those that have been rehearsed repeatedly in the short-term memory, or those with a strong emotional component. The hippocampus is selective because it is very busy.

Finding a home for your memories

Coding a memory is all well and good, but it is useless if it has nowhere to go. Finding a storage place is the next step.

Newer memories, once consolidated, appear to reside in the hippocampus for a while. But as more memories are formed, the neurons that represent a specific memory migrate further into the cortex. As a result, memories are stored throughout the brain. It's a bit like the internet, which is made of information spread all across the planet and accessed via countless connections.

Similar memories tend to clump together - spoken memories near the language centres, visual memories near the visual cortex - and there's a lot of redundancy too; you can have several memories for the same thing. Every time they are activated they are strengthened. Human memories aren't stored like books in a library; they're constantly being updated and tweaked.

Recalling memories you've forgotten you forgot

So how do you go about getting the bits you need out of this weird, ever-shifting library of information? It might seem as though lots of the so-called long-term memories have actually turned to dust because there are plenty of things you've forgotten: old addresses, passwords, deadlines for articles about the memory system that you promised to write.

The problem here is not that it has disappeared, but rather that you can't recall it. It's a bit like losing a glove - you still own a glove, it's in your home somewhere, but you can't use it.

Recall is a very impressive but slightly mysterious process. When we want to access a memory from the dark recesses of our brain, signals from our frontal cortex link to that memory via uncertain means, and the memory is reconstructed from the information available. The more often you use the memory, the easier it is to find.

Revising and remembering is a crucial part of the learning process. And there are things you can do to make it easier - some stranger than others. Being in the presence of some of the elements from the original memory helps retrieval. For example, if you learned something while in a swimming pool, you'll remember it better while in a swimming pool at a later date ( they've actually shown this).

Is there such a thing as too many memories? Maybe. Ever tried to learn a new phone number and then found it impossible to remember the old one, even though you had it for years? Constantly updating memories can supposedly "supplant" existing ones, so you end up remembering things differently. This is known as "interference" and can lead to forgetting. As far as I can recall.
This blog is the first of a new series exploring the psychology and neuroscience of learning. Get involved with the Use your head series by joining the discussion on #useyourhead or pitching your ideas to natalie.gil.casual@theguardian.com Keep up with the latest on Guardian Students: follow us on Twitter at @GdnStudents - and become a member to receive exclusive benefits and our weekly newsletter. Topics

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What happens in your brain when you make a memory?

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We all have memories, as far as I can remember. But where do these memories come from and how do they get made? People often compare the brain to a computer, but the brain doesn't have USB slots that allow you to pick up new information by jamming a flash drive in your ear.

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Richard Lacy / Sarah Elizabeth Lacy Click

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10 Reasons Not to Trust Your Memory You might think you know your own mind, but your memory can play some confusing tricks on you. Find out about false memories and the google effect with 10 Reasons Not to Trust Your Memory Music= Never Never Never 2 by Richard Lacy / Sarah Elizabeth Lacy Click to Subscribe..

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How does your memory work? | Head Squeeze

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A story of how memory can be improved

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Consideration points

1.   What do the quotes suggest about the role memory plays in our acquisition of knowledge?

2.   Are the quotes consistent, or do they clash about the role it plays as a way of knowing, and its relationship with others WOKs and AOKs?

3.   Can you think of other ways of knowing and areas of knowledge that these quotes relate to?

4.   How many of these thinkers are you familiar with? Research the ones you haven’t come across before – and, indeed, the ones you think you already know. Click on the names to take you to the corresponding Wikipedia article, although this should only be used as a starting point for your research.

1. The nature of memory

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.
Aeschylus

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.
Marcus Tullius Cicero

Life may unfold chronologically for the body and for bureaucracies that keep track of such things as births, marriages, deaths, visas, tax returns, expulsions, and identity cards, but memory does not play this game in quite the same way, always manages to confound the desire for tidiness.
Ariel Dorfman

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today’s events.
Albert Einstein

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.
William Gibson

Memory narrativises itself.
Aleksandar Hemon

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
Barbara Kingsolver

It’s surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
Barbara Kingsolver

No memory is ever alone; it’s at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations.
Louis L’Amour

Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.
Primo Levi

Memory is man’s greatest friend and worst enemy.
Gilbert Parker

Memory is the personal journalism of the soul.
Richard Schickel

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.
Tennessee Williams

2. Memory and emotion

Memory, in widow’s weeds, with naked feet stands on a tombstone.
Aubrey de Vere

Gratitude is when memory is stored in the heart and not in the mind.
Lionel Hampton

Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.
Albert Schweitzer

3. Memory and imagination

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.
John Banville

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
Emil M. Cioran

It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one’s memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.
Edgar Degas

Intelligence is the wife, imagination is the mistress, memory is the servant.
Victor Hugo

We can invent only with memory.
Alphonse Karr

Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory; nothing can come of nothing.
Joshua Reynolds

Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.
Ned Rorem

4. Memory and language

Language is memory and metaphor.
Storm Jameson

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There are a number of ways that memory can be described. Below are some common examples:

1.       The faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information:

I’ve a great memory for faces, the brain regions responsible for memory, the mind regarded as a store of things remembered: he searched his memory frantically for an answer;

2.       Something remembered from the past:

One of my earliest memories is of sitting on his knee, the mind can bury all memory of traumatic abuse, the remembering or commemoration of a dead person: clubs devoted to the memory of Sherlock Holmes, the length of time over which a person or event continues to be remembered: the worst slump in recent memory;

3. The part of a computer in which data or program instructions can be stored for retrieval, a computer’s capacity for storing information: the module provides 16Mb of memory

However, when one thinks about it a little more, we’re not on quite such solid ground. First, memory isn’t a ‘primary’ way of knowing. Instead, we use the other ways of knowing to provide us with our initial knowledge, and only afterwards employ memory to modify and enhance that knowledge. Second, memory is notoriously unreliable: how one person remembers something will be radically different to how another person recalls it, meaning that it must be treated with care if one is to build up objective knowledge about a thing.

Knowledge questions that emerge with memory include:  (Add your own to the list!)

To what extent do we shape memory with our own personal paradigms?

Which way of knowing provides us with the most reliable memory?

To what extent should memory be trusted when one studies history (ie primary sources)?