Ergebnis für "The Memory of Light" in Wissenschaft & Technik

Look at the green organism across the room or through the window: the potted plant, or the grass, or a tree. Think how a life spent constantly growing yet rooted in a single spot comes with tremendous challenges. To meet them, plants have come up with some of the most creative methods for surviving of any living thing, us included. Many are so ingenious that they seem nearly impossible. There is no doubt that plants are important: plants, or their green precursors the blue-green algae and algae themselves, have produced all the oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere, allowing animals to evolve.

How is it possible to have vivid memories of something that never happened? How can siblings remember the same event from their childhoods so differently? Do the selections and distortions of memory reveal a truth about the self? Why are certain memories tied to specific places? Does your memory really get worse as you get older? A new consensus is emerging among cognitive scientists: Rather than possessing fixed, unchanging memories, we create recollections anew each time we are called upon to remember.

The child of South-Asian migrants, Kazim Ali was born in London, lived as a child in the cities and small towns of Manitoba, and made a life in the United States. As a man passing through disparate homes, he has never felt he belonged to a place. And yet, one day, he finds himself thinking of Jenpeg, a community thrown up around the building of a hydroelectric dam on the Nelson River, where he once lived for several years as a child. Does the town still exist, he wonders? Is the dam still operational?