Our speaker today was Dr. Keith Mankin, retired Pediatric Developmental Orthopedist and visiting Rotarian from the Dallas Uptown Rotary Club. Keith introduced himself as a retired physician who was educated in the Classics when he decided to “take a left turn” and apply to medical school.
He explained How Memory Works and how we encode and retrieve memories throughout our lives. He began with a disclaimer that he would not delve in to the complicated (and still poorly understood) topic of cognitive decline. He used the analogy of a memoire as a narrative vs autobiography as a catalog of facts to explain how memory works. In other words our brains arrange memories in a “piecemeal fashion” where multiple “access points” can be activated to initiate recall, rather than a rigid chronological order. This begins with "Short Term Memory", which is encoded as an electrical signal and lasts only minutes. With repetition these electrical pathways become “hard-wired” to produce "Intermediate Memory", lasting minutes to months or years. “Long Term Memory” requires a molecular process leading to structural changes in neurons which essentially become permanent.
A lively question and answer period followed where several attendees shared their experiences of how a variety of sensory experiences (smell, taste, strong emotions) enabled them to “access” (almost) forgotten memories
