Fictional First Memories

Running head : FIRST CHILDHOOD MEMORIES 1 First Childhood Memories - Characteristics and Influences

The age of onset and the emotional valence of first childhood memories were examined in the main study. An additional sub study explored the possible influence of language, family composition and the fragmental and episodic qualities of childhood memories. Results showed the mean age to be 4.14 years, which is at the upper margin most studies have reported so far. The emotional valence particip...

Odor Memories: The First Sniff Counts

A new study which combined associative memory tests with functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain has identified a potential neural correlate of the special association that is formed when an odor is first paired with a visual object. Odor memories in humans are likely to be processed by a separate memory system with distinctive features that make odor memories different from visual o...

Fictional Women in Mathematics

This article will argue that the situation for female mathematicians in fiction has improved, but that there is still cause for concern. You may wonder why you should care about this at all since these fictional women are (by definition) not real and therefore unlikely to be dues paying members of the AWM! With this in mind, in addition to providing examples of female mathematicians in literatu...

Mirroring Fictional Others

Fictional Planet Ballardia

The Rock Cycle is a useful pedagogical device. Science-fiction novelist James G. Ballard published a colorful description of a nameless fictional world in 1957 that has an artificially closed Rock Cycle. Were such an anthropogenic cycle instigated for Earth, it would be consistent with James Hutton’s viewpoint on the Earth as a self-repairing machine without an endogenetic end to planetary Geol...