Tag Archives: memory

Did I Do That? Distinguishing Real from Imagined Actions

April 7, 2014 By in Brains, Mental Illness, Minds, Science Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

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If you’re like most people, you spend a great deal of your time remembering past events and planning or imagining events that may happen in the future. While these activities have their uses, they also make it terribly hard to keep track of what you have and haven’t actually seen, heard, or done. Distinguishing between memories of real experiences and memories of imagined or dreamt experiences is called reality monitoring and it’s something we do (or struggle to do) all of the time.

Why is reality monitoring a challenge? To illustrate, let’s say you’re at the Louvre standing before the Mona Lisa. As you look at the painting, visual areas of your brain are busy representing the image with specific patterns of activity. So far, so good. But problems emerge if we rewind to a time before you saw the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. Let’s say you were about to head over to the museum and you imagined the special moment when you would gaze upon Da Vinci’s masterwork. When you imagined seeing the picture, you were activating the same visual areas of the brain in a similar pattern to when you would look at the masterpiece itself.*

When you finally return home from Paris and try to remember that magical moment at the Louvre, how will you be able to distinguish your memories of seeing the Mona Lisa from imagining her? Reality monitoring studies have asked this very question (minus the Mona Lisa). Their findings suggest that you’ll probably use additional details associated with the memory to ferret out the mnemonic wheat from the chaff. You might use memory of perceptual details, like how the lights reflected off the brushstrokes, or you might use details of what you thought or felt, like your surprise at the painting’s actual size. Studies find that people activate both visual areas (like the fusiform gyrus) and self-monitoring regions of the brain (like the medial prefrontal cortex) when they are deciding whether they saw or just imagined seeing a picture.

It’s important to know what you did and didn’t see, but another crucial and arguably more important facet of reality monitoring involves determining what you did and didn’t do. How do you distinguish memories of things you’ve actually done from those you’ve planned to do or imagined doing? You have to do this every day and it isn’t a trivial task. Perhaps you’ve left the house and headed to work, only to wonder en route if you’d locked the door. Even if you thought you did, it can be hard to tell whether you remember actually doing it or just thinking about doing it. The distinction has consequences. Going home and checking could make you late for work, but leaving your door unlocked all day could mean losing your possessions. So how do we tell the possibilities apart?

Valerie Brandt, Jon Simons, and colleagues at the University of Cambridge looked into this question and published their findings last month in the journal Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience. For the first part of the experiment (the study phase), they sat healthy adult participants down in front of two giant boxes – one red and one blue – that each contained 80 ordinary objects. The experimenter would draw each object out of one of the two boxes, place it in front of the participant, and tell him or her to either perform or to imagine performing a logical action with the object. For example, when the object was a book, participants were told to either open or imagine opening it.

After the study phase, the experiment moved to a scanner for fMRI. During these scans, participants were shown photographs of all 160 of the studied objects and, for each item, were asked to indicate either 1) whether they had performed or merely imagined performing an action on that object, or 2) which box the object had been drawn from.** When the scans were over, the participants saw the pictures of the objects again and were asked to rate how much specific detail they’d recalled about encountering each object and how hard it had been to bring that particular memory to mind.

The scientists compared fMRI measures of brain activation during the reality-monitoring task (Did I use or imagine using that object?) with activation during the location task (Which box did this object come from?). One of the areas they found to be more active during reality monitoring was the supplementary motor area, a region involved in planning and executing movements of the body. Just as visual areas are activated for reality monitoring of visual memories, motor areas are activated when people evaluate their action memories. In other words, when you ask yourself whether you locked the door or just imagined it, you may be using details of motor aspects of the memory (e.g., pronating your wrist to turn the key in the lock) to make your decision.

The study’s authors also found greater activation in the anterior medial prefrontal cortex when they compared reality monitoring for actions participants performed with those they only imagined performing. The medial prefrontal cortex encompasses a respectable swath of the brain with a variety of functions that appear to include making self-referential judgments, or evaluating how you feel or think about experiences, sensations, and the like. Other experiments have implicated a role for this or nearby areas in reality monitoring of visual memories. The study by Brandt and Simons also found that activation of this medial prefrontal region during reality-monitoring trials correlated with the number of internal details the participants said they’d recalled in those trials. In other words, the more details participants remembered about their thoughts and feelings during the past actions, the busier this area appeared to be. So when faced with uncertainty about a past action, the medial prefrontal cortex may be piping up about the internal details of the memory. I must have locked the door because I remember simultaneously wondering when my package would arrive from Amazon, or, because I was also feeling sad about leaving my dog alone at home.

As I read these results, I found myself thinking about the topic of my prior post on OCD. Pathological checking is a common and often disruptive symptom of the illness. Although it may seem like a failure of reality monitoring, several behavioral studies have shown that people with OCD have normal reality monitoring for past actions. The difference is that people with checking symptoms of OCD have much lower confidence in the quality of their memories than others. It seems to be this distrust of their own memories, along with relentless anxiety, that drives them to double-check over and over again.

So the next time you find yourself wondering whether you actually locked the door, cut yourself some slack. Reality monitoring ain’t easy. All you can do is trust your brain not to lead you astray. Make a call and stick with it. You’re better off being wrong than being anxious about it – that is, unless you have really nice stuff.

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Photo credit: Liz (documentarist on Flickr), used via Creative Commons license

* Of course, the mental image you conjure of the painting is actually based on the memory of having seen it in ads, books, or posters before. In fact, a growing area of neuroscience research focuses on how imagining the future relies on the same brain areas involved in remembering the past. Imagination seems to be, in large part, a collage of old memories cut and pasted together to make something new.

**The study also had a baseline condition, used additional contrasts, and found additional activations that I didn’t mention for the sake of brevity. Check out the original article for full details.

Brandt, V., Bergström, Z., Buda, M., Henson, R., & Simons, J. (2014). Did I turn off the gas? Reality monitoring of everyday actions Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 14 (1), 209-219 DOI: 10.3758/s13415-013-0189-z

How People Tawk Affects How Well You Listen

February 7, 2014 By in Minds Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

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People from different places speak differently – that we all know. Some dialects and accents are considered glamorous or authoritative, while others carry a definite social stigma. Speakers with a New York City dialect have even been known to enroll in speech therapy to lessen their ‘accent’ and avoid prejudice. Recent research indicates that they have good reason to be worried. It now appears that the prestige of people’s dialects can fundamentally affect how you process and remember what they say.

Meghan Sumner is a psycholinguist (not to be confused with a psycho linguist) at Stanford who studies the interaction between talker variation and speech perception. Together with Reiko Kataoka, she recently published a fascinating if troubling paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. The team conducted two separate experiments with undergraduates who speak standard American English (what you hear from anchors on the national nightly news). They had the undergraduates listen to words spoken by female speakers of 1) standard American English, 2) standard British English, or 3) the New York City dialect. Standard American English is a rhotic dialect, which means that its speakers pronounce the final –r in words like finger. Both speakers of British English and the New York City dialect drop that final –r sound, but one is a standard dialect that’s considered prestigious and the other is not. I bet you can guess which is which.

In their first experiment, Sumner and Kataoka tested how the dialect of spoken words affected semantic priming, an indication of how deeply the undergraduate listeners processed the words. The listeners first heard a word ending in –er  (e.g., slender) pronounced by one of the three different female speakers. After a very brief pause, they saw a written word (say, thin) and had to make a judgment about the written word. If they had processed the spoken word deeply, it should have brought related words to mind and allowed them to respond to a question about a related written word faster. The results? The listeners showed semantic priming for words spoken in standard American English but not in the New York City dialect. That’s not too surprising. The listeners might have been thrown off by the dropped r or simply the fact the word was spoken in a less familiar dialect than their own. But here’s the wild part: the listeners showed as much semantic priming for standard British English as they did for standard American English. Clearly, there’s something more to this story than a missing r.

In their second experiment, a new set of undergraduates with a standard American English dialect listened to sets of related words, each read by one of the speakers of the same three dialects: standard American, British, or NYC. Each set of words (say, rest, bed, dream, etc.) excluded a key related word (in this case, sleep). The listeners were then asked to list all of the words they remembered hearing. This is a classic task that consistently generates false memories. People tend to remember hearing the related lure (sleep) even though it wasn’t in the original set. In this experiment, listeners remembered about the same number of actual words from the sets regardless of dialect, indicating that they listened and understood the words irrespective of speaker. Yet listeners falsely recalled more lures for the word sets read by the NYC speaker than by either the standard American or British speakers.

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Figure from Sumner & Kataoka (2013) showing more false recalls from lists spoken with a NYC dialect than those spoken in standard American or British dialects.

The authors offer an explanation for the two findings. On some level, the listeners are paying less attention to the words spoken with a NYC dialect. In fact, decreased attention has been shown to both decrease semantic priming and increase the generation of false memories in similar tasks. In another paper, Sumner and her colleague Arthur Samuel showed that people with a standard American dialect as well as those with a NYC dialect showed better later memory for –er words that they originally heard in a standard American dialect compared with words heard in a NYC dialect. These results would also fit with the idea that speakers of standard American (and even speakers with a NYC dialect) do not pay as much attention to words spoken with a NYC dialect.

In fact, Sumner and colleagues recently published a review of a comprehensive theory based on a string of their findings. They suggest that we process the social features of speech sounds at the very earliest stages of speech perception and that we rapidly and automatically determine how deeply we will process the input according to its ‘social weight’ (read: the prestige of the speaker’s dialect). They present this theory in neutral, scientific terms, but it essentially means that we access our biases and prejudices toward certain dialects as soon as we listen to speech and we use this information to at least partially ‘tune out’ people who speak in a stigmatized way.

If true, this theory could apply to other dialects that are associated with low socioeconomic status or groups that face discrimination. Here in the United States, we may automatically devalue or pay less attention to people who speak with an African American Vernacular dialect, a Boston dialect, or a Southern drawl. It’s a troubling thought for a nation founded on democracy, regional diversity, and freedom of speech. Heck, it’s just a troubling thought.

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Photo credit: Melvin Gaal, used via Creative Commons license

Sumner M, & Kataoka R (2013). Effects of phonetically-cued talker variation on semantic encoding Journal of the Acoustical Society of America DOI: 10.1121/1.4826151

Sumner M, Kim S K, King E, & McGowan K B (2014). The socially weighted encoding of spoken words: a dual-route approach to speech perception Frontiers in Psychology DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.01015

Outsourcing Memory

November 22, 2013 By in Minds Tags: , , , , 3 Comments

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Do you rely on your spouse to remember special events and travel plans? Your coworker to remember how to submit some frustrating form? Your cell phone to store every phone number you’ll ever need? Yeah, me too. You might call this time saving or delegating, but if you were a fancy psychologist you’d call it transactive memory.

Transactive memory is a wonderful concept. There’s too much information in this world to know and remember. Why not store some of it in “the cloud” that is your partner or coworker’s brain or in “the cloud” itself, whatever and wherever that is? The idea of transactive memory came from the innovative psychologist Daniel Wegner, most recently of Harvard, who passed away in July of this year. Wegner proposed the idea in the mid-80s and framed it in terms of the “intimate dyad” – spouses or other close couples who know each other very well over a long period of time.

Transactive memory between partners can be a straightforward case of cognitive outsourcing. I remember monthly expenses and you remember family birthdays. But it can also be a subtler and more interactive process. For example, one spouse remembers why you chose to honeymoon at Waikiki and the other remembers which hotel you stayed in. If the partners try to recall their honeymoon together, they can produce a far richer description of the experience than if they were to try separately.

Here’s an example from a recent conversation with my husband. It began when my husband mentioned that a Red Sox player once asked me out.

“Never happened,” I told him. And it hadn’t. But he insisted.

“You know, years ago. You went out on a date or something?”

“Nope.” But clearly he was thinking of something specific.

I thought really hard until a shred of a recollection came to me. “I’ve never met a Red Sox player, but I once met a guy who was called up from the farm team.”

My husband nodded. “That guy.”

But what interaction did we have? I met the guy nine years ago, not long before I met my husband. What were the circumstances? Finally, I began to remember. It wasn’t actually a date. We’d gone bowling with mutual friends and formed teams. The guy – a pitcher – was intensely competitive and I was the worst bowler there. He was annoyed that I was ruining our team score and I was annoyed that he was taking it all so seriously. I’d even come away from the experience with a lesson: never play games with competitive athletes.

Apparently, I’d told the anecdote to my husband after we met and he remembered a nugget of the story. Even though all of the key details from that night were buried somewhere in my brain, I’m quite sure that I would never have remembered them again if not for my husband’s prompts. This is a facet of transactive memory, one that Wegner called interactive cueing.

In a sense, transactive memory is a major benefit of having long-term relationships. Sharing memory, whether with a partner, parent, or friend, allows you to index or back up some of that memory. This fact also underscores just how much you lose when a loved one passes away. When you lose a spouse, a parent, a sibling, you are also losing part of yourself and the shared memory you have with that person. After I lost my father, I noticed this strange additional loss. I caught myself wondering when I’d stopped writing stories on his old typewriter. I realized I’d forgotten parts of the fanciful stories he used to tell me on long drives. I wished I could ask him to fill in the blanks, but of course it was too late.

Memories can be shared with people, but they can also be shared with things. If you write in a diary, you are storing details about current experiences that you can access later in life. No spouse required. You also upload memories and information to your technological gadgets. If you store phone numbers in your cell phone and use bookmarks and autocomplete tools in your browser, you are engaging in transactive memory. You are able to do more while remembering less. It’s efficient, convenient, and downright necessary in today’s world of proliferating numbers, websites, and passwords.

In 2011, a Science paper described how people create transactive memory with online search engines. The study, authored by Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Wegner, received plenty of attention at the time, including here and here.

In one experiment, they asked participants either hard or easy questions and then had them do a modified Stroop task that involved reporting the physical color of a written word rather than naming the word. This was a measure of priming, essentially whether a participant has been thinking about that word or similar concepts recently. Sometimes the participants were tested with the names of online search engines (Google, Yahoo) and at others they were tested with other name brands (Nike, Target). After hard questions, the participants took much longer to do the Stroop task with Google and Yahoo than with the other brand names, suggesting that hard questions made them automatically think about searching the Internet for the answer.

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The other experiments described in the paper showed that people are less likely to remember trivia if they believe they will be able to look it up later. When participants thought that items of trivia were saved somewhere on a computer, they were also more likely to remember where the items were saved than they were to remember the actual trivia items themselves. Together, the study’s findings suggest that people actively outsource memory to their computers and to the Internet. This will come as no surprise to those of us who can’t remember a single phone number offhand, don’t know how to get around without the GPS, and hop on our smartphones to answer the simplest of questions.

Search engines, computer atlases, and online databases are remarkable things. In a sense, we’d be crazy not to make use of them. But here’s the rub: the Internet is jam-packed with misinformation or near-miss information. Anti-vaxxers, creationists, global warming deniers: you can find them all on the web. And when people want the definitive answer, they almost always find themselves at Wikipedia. While Wikipedia has valuable information, it is not written and curated by experts. It is not always the God’s-honest-truth and it is not a safe replacement for learning and knowing information ourselves. Of course, the memories of our loved ones aren’t foolproof either, but at least they don’t carry the aura of authority that comes with a list of citations.

Speaking of which. There is now a Wikipedia page for “The Google Effect” that is based on the 2011 Science article. A banner across the top shows an open book featuring a large question mark and the following warning: “This article relies largely or entirely upon a single source. . . . Please help improve this article by introducing citations to additional sources.” The citation for the first section is a dead link. The last section has two placeholders for citations, but in lieu of numbers they say, According to whom?

Folks, if that ain’t a reminder to be wary of the outsourcing your brain to Google and Wikipedia, I don’t know what is.

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Photo credits:

1. Photo by Mike Baird on Flickr, used via Creative Commons license

2. Figure from “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips” by Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel M. Wegner.

Sparrow B, Liu J, & Wegner DM (2011). Google effects on memory: cognitive consequences of having information at our fingertips. Science (New York, N.Y.), 333 (6043), 776-8 PMID: 21764755

Another Time, Another Place

November 4, 2013 By in Brains, Science Tags: , 4 Comments

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Whenever I visit my childhood home outside of Chicago I try to make it to the local pancake house. The buttery pancakes would be reason enough, but they’re not the only reason I stop by. A stroll through that pancake house is truly a stroll down memory lane. Each table I pass triggers a memory of a meal shared with different people in different decades of my life. One moment I’m eating German pancakes with my college boyfriend. The next, I am passing menus to my new husband’s family.  The next, I am celebrating my eighth grade graduation with my parents and older brother.

Memories return you to a specific time and place. Consider so-called flashbulb memories, or vivid memories of  dramatic moments that caught you off-guard. I remember exactly where I was when I heard that a plane had struck one of the Twin Towers and, later, when I learned that my father had died. I remember that I was sitting on the living room rug in my Somerville apartment when I watched Columbia transform from a space shuttle into a streak of fire across the sky. Is it helpful to remember where I was sitting? Not in the slightest. But in the murky, mysterious realm of memory, when and what are inextricably linked with where.

Mention the word “memory” to neuroscientists and you’re sure to get them thinking of the hippocampus, a sliver of tissue nestled deep inside each hemisphere of the brain. The hippocampus has been synonymous with memory since the late 1950s, when William Scoville and Brenda Milner described a patient who was incapable of forming new memories after both of his hippocampi were removed. Since then, throngs of neuroscientists have devoted their careers to studying the hippocampus. Among other revelations, they’ve discovered a class of neurons called place cells that represent (you guessed it) information about place.

How do cells represent place? To illustrate, let’s say you’re in your favorite coffee shop. Some of the place cells in your hippocampus will fire like crazy when you walk through the entrance. Others save their enthusiasm until you are waiting in line to order your latte, stopping at the counter for milk and sugar, or settling in at your favorite table. When you physically occupy their place-of-interest, they go nuts – like a neural alarm signaling your location. At this moment, you are here!

The same principle applies to my experience at the pancake house. Different place cells fire at different tables. In essence, these sets of cells provide a unique neural code for each space I can occupy in the restaurant. And this code has been with me for a while. When I sat in the corner booth after my graduation from middle school, I formed a memory of that celebration that included the code for that particular spot. Decades later, sitting in that booth or even walking past it can trigger a similar code in my brain, one that elicits the rest of that dusty old memory.

While eternally cool, place cells have become old news in hippocampal research. The new hippocampal hotness is studying “time cells”. These recently discovered neurons prefer to fire at different intervals after an event (say, ten seconds versus one minute after you step into the coffee shop). This research fad is a bit amusing, as it turns out that place cells and “time cells” are one and the same. This fact hasn’t stopped scientists from referring to “time cells,” but it has forced them to typically use the term in quotation marks.

As scientists studied the time code in the hippocampal cells of rats, a flaw in their experiments became clear. Their studies recorded the neural activity of moving rats, which means that the firing patterns observed by the scientists could reflect changes in time, changes in the rat’s location, or in its motion.

Two recent papers addressed this issue and clarified the nature of “time cells” in the hippocampus. The first of these appeared in the journal Neuron in June of this year. The paper, by Benjamin Kraus, Michael Hasselmo, and collaborators at Boston University, describes an experiment that has as much to do with your time spent sweating it out at the gym as it does with your memory of past events. The scientists recorded the activity of hippocampal cells in rats as they ran on a treadmill or moved around in a simple maze. Since the rat remained in the same location as it ran on the treadmill, the researchers could decouple the rat’s location from the passage of time and the distance the rat ran. Since the authors could vary the speed of the treadmill, they could also piece apart the related variables of time and distance.

The scientists found that “time cells” still produced a time code when location was kept constant (on the treadmill). Using some fancy modeling, they also showed that the activity of most “time cells” reflected a combination of elapsed time and distance run, but a smaller number of “time cells” seemed to care only about time or distance. They also found that these same cells behaved like normal place cells when the rat walked around a simple maze. In short, place cells (a.k.a. “time cells”) can convey information about place, time, and distance travelled to varying degrees that also change under different conditions.

A second paper on the subject came out in a September issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. The authors, Christopher MacDonald, Howard Eichenbaum*, and colleagues (also from Boston University) eliminated the variable of location by physically restraining the rats from moving with a special headpiece that attached to the rats’ heads. This headpiece locked into the testing apparatus so that the rats couldn’t move their heads during testing. Unlike the fitness buff rats in the prior study, these rats were given a memory task. They got a whiff of an odor and then another whiff of an odor a few seconds later. If the second odor was the same as the first, the rat licked its waterspout and got a reward (a drop of water). If the two odors were different, the rat was not supposed to lick.

Even though the rats were completely immobile, the rats’ “time cells” showed a strong time code. Different cells fired at different times during the delay. These cells also seemed to represent what information (in this case, the odors presented for the task). The scientists found that the overall pattern of “time cell” firing was more similar when the rats remembered the same odor than when they remembered different odors across trials.

In short, place/time cells can represent what, when, and where in a variety of ways, depending on a variety of factors. This representation is flexible – just as memory must be in order for you to remember the date of your anniversary, the feel of your first kiss, and the items on your next shopping list. The remarkable thing about memory is that it is both flexible and robust, meaning that it is resistant to degradation or being swamped out by noise. It can return us to times, places, and experiences that are far away and decades past. For that, we can thank the hippocampus, neural codes, and a set of remarkable cells with an identity crisis.

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Photo credit: Stu Rapley on Flickr, used via Creative Commons License

*Howard Eichenbaum was also a middle author on the Neuron paper. Much of the recent work on “time cells” has come from his lab and affiliated labs at Boston University.

Kraus BJ, Robinson RJ 2nd, White JA, Eichenbaum H, & Hasselmo ME (2013). Hippocampal “time cells”: time versus path integration. Neuron, 78 (6), 1090-1101 PMID: 23707613

MacDonald CJ, Carrow S, Place R, & Eichenbaum H (2013). Distinct hippocampal time cell sequences represent odor memories in immobilized rats. The Journal of Neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 33 (36), 14607-14616 PMID: 24005311

Memory: Up in Smoke?

June 14, 2013 By in Life, Minds Tags: , , 5 Comments

002578cd_scan199_0199I recently joined a memory lab at Wayne State University. The timing seems fitting, as I’ve been doing a little memory experiment of my own of late. My father died ten years ago today and I’ve found myself wondering how my memory of him has fared over the decade. Which parts of him do I remember and which have I lost? They say we live on after we die, if nowhere else than in the memories of those we leave behind. Is it true, or does my father die a little each day as my brain cells age and adjust the strengths of their tiny connections?

I do, at least, remember how my father looked. Certain small details stick out in my memory – the wart beside his nose, his dulled gold wedding band beside a broad, flat knuckle, the remarkable definition of his calf muscles (thanks to his marathon bike rides). I can still see how he brushed his hair back from his face and how he crossed his legs – ankle to knee – and mopped up his sweat with a paper towel after a long ride. But are those the memories that matter? Do I remember how it felt to hug him? Do I remember all of the stories from his youth or any particular instance (of the many) when he said that he loved me? Not really. Not well enough to save him from oblivion.

I imagine I’m not the first person to experience the guilt of forgetting.

Unfortunately, memory loss picks up speed with the passage of time and the brain changes associated with old age. We will only ever have more to feel guilty about. But sometimes, on rare and bittersweet occasions, a chance encounter can trigger a memory we didn’t know we had. It is the psychological equivalent to finding coins wedged between the cushions of the couch and it happened to me a couple years back.

I was walking home from work when I smelled something. It was an odor I couldn’t identify, one that didn’t seem familiar, and yet it filled me with a sense of well-being. I stopped walking and inhaled deeply through my nose. What on earth was this compound? I spotted a man walking half a block ahead of me. He was a professor type with long white hair, a briefcase, and a trail of smoke fanning out behind him. The smell had to be coming from him, yet it was nothing like cigarette smoke.

I started walking again and then picked up the pace to get closer to the man. I’m not proud to say it, but I started to follow him, inhaling as I went. When he turned a corner I caught him in profile and saw that he was smoking a pipe. The intriguing smell was that of pipe smoke. For a moment I was confused. I didn’t recall having ever smelled someone smoking a pipe before and I find both cigar and cigarette smoke aversive.

Then I remembered hearing stories about my dad’s pipe. A professor type himself, my father smoked a pipe for many years and only gave up the habit after a triple bypass surgery. I was three years old at the time. Thanks to childhood amnesia, I don’t remember seeing or smelling my father with his pipe. Yet the memory of that smell, and the comfort I once associated it with, have been buried in my brain all these years like lost coins.

In theory, the memory isn’t a positive one. The secondhand smoke my brother and I inhaled early in life may have had something to do with the asthma we developed later in childhood. Still, my reaction to that stranger’s pipe smoke feels positive.  Precious, even. I’d like to think it reflects how I felt in those early years when I sat in my father’s lap or wrapped my fingers around those broad, flat knuckles. Contented and safe. And as a mother, I’d like to think that I’m planting the same warm feelings in my young daughter. Maybe someday after I’m gone an association will unearth them and she can revisit that innocent comfort all over again.

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Even after I solved the mystery of the scent I followed the smoking stranger for a couple more blocks, inhaling and even closing my eyes as I experienced something of my father that I never knew I knew. It was hard to turn back for home. I didn’t want to lose him quite yet. I wasn’t ready. But then again no one ever is.

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Photo credits: Sally Frye Schwarzlose

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