Sorting truth from false memories

While president, Ronald Reagan famously told a story about how he had been at a German concentration camp shortly after the Nazi defeat in World War II, and had helped to make films of the liberation of that camp. He told this story in depth, and more than once. The truth was, however, that although Reagan made training films for the armed forces, he spent the entire war in the United States.

So was Reagan telling a bold-faced lie? Was it an early sign of dementia? Or was he simply telling the truth as he remembered it?

Author Salman Rushdie recalled his own experience of reinventing his past during a recent public conversation at Emory, where he is a writer-in-residence.

“Ever since I was writing ‘Midnight’s Children,’ I’ve gotten very interested in the divergence between memory and the record,” Rushdie said.

As he was writing the novel, which drew from biographical details of his childhood in Bombay, he thought of the panicked atmosphere created by a border dispute between India and China. Rushdie vividly recalled hearing his parents discuss their fears of a Chinese empire replacing the British one as Chinese troops advanced over the Himalayas.

When Rushdie told his mother about it, she replied, “Don’t be stupid, you weren’t here. You were in boarding school in England.”

He checked the dates and realized that his mother was right. “All of this was a memory that I had constructed out of what people had told me,” Rushdie said. “My memory had just put me into the scene, even though the facts insisted that I was actually in England. Even today, knowing that I wasn’t there, my memory tells me that I was. I became very interested in that, in the way that memory rebuilds our lives for us in such a way that even when we are shown categorically that the memory is false, we actually believe the memory more than we believe the facts.”

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Academia's female brain drain

By Marlene Goldman, for the Center for Women at Emory

Today, neuroscience is a profession with a steep drop-off in female representation between graduate student and faculty member. Women increasingly are going into the neurosciences, and more than 75 percent of the neuroscience graduate students at Emory are women. Yet less than 25 percent of the faculty is female. That disparity is echoed nationwide.

Meera Modi, a neurosciences graduate student at Emory, wants to help women advance. She and fellow graduate students Rebecca Roffman and Vasiliki Michopoulos launched Emory Women in Neuroscience (E-WIN), a network for PhD students, postdoc candidates and faculty members. When some 40 graduate students showed up for the first meeting last year, it became clear that they weren’t alone in their struggle to survive in a male-dominated field.

“Academia as a whole, particularly the sciences, consists of a rigid scheme of events necessary to move up the career ladder,” Modi says. “Getting academic positions and grants to fund research is highly competitive, a process that’s not very forgiving to those who want to take alternate routes or take time off to start a family or take care of aging parents. Female PhDs aspiring to an academic career in the neurosciences often drop out, sometimes because existing policies don’t support the demands women often face.”

Modi says E-WIN hopes eventually to create a program of faculty mentors for graduate students, but there are not enough women faculty at Emory to match with almost 100 female graduate students and postdocs.

E-WIN recently sponsored the event “Families and Academia” and is planning several mini-symposiums, one of which will focus on types of academic jobs that are available. Another symposium will address bargaining for salaries and how to make your voice heard in a male-dominated department.

Read the whole article.

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And here's an excerpt from a New York Times article "Gains, and Drawbacks, for Female Professors," explaining how MIT's model for gender equality has backfired in some ways:

"Now women say they are uneasy with the frequent invitations to appear on campus panels to discuss their work-life balance. In interviews for the study, they expressed frustration that parenthood remained a women’s issue, rather than a family one.

"As Professor Sive said, 'Men are not expected to discuss how much sleep they get or what they give their kids for breakfast.'

"Administrators say some men use family leave to do outside work, instead of to be their children’s primary care giver — creating more professional inequity."

Chemistry of print bathing: A Harlot's Progress

“It’s scary to put a valuable work of art into a bath of water,” says Eveleigh Wagner, an Emory senior majoring in art history, who recently completed a restoration internship at the Michael C. Carlos Museum.

Wagner worked with Courtney Von Stein, a senior majoring in art history and chemistry, to remove stains and discolorations from a series of 18th-century prints called “A Harlot’s Progress.” Their work in the art conservation lab was part of a Carlos Museum program to give students hands-on experience at the junction of science and art.

“I couldn’t believe we were allowed to handle these old documents, while being surrounded by Egyptian sculpture,” says Wagner, who plans to go to medical school.

Renee Stein, conservator at the Carlos, provided technical guidance for the students, along with Elizabeth Schulte, a contract paper conservator for the museum. Chemistry lecturer Tracy Morkin asked the students to develop an acid-based chemistry lesson around their restoration project, and create a multi-media demonstration that Morkin can use in her classroom (see above).
In this detail from one of the engravings, innocent country girl Molly arrives in London where she is immediately procured by a madame. The madame shows signs of syphilis in the lesions on her face, a fate that will befall Molly in the final scenes of the series of prints. (Source: Wikipedia Commons.)

“A Harlot’s Progress” began as a series of six paintings by British artist William Hogarth, featuring “Molly,” a young woman who comes to London from the country to better her lot in life, but falls into prostitution. The morality tale of the paintings proved popular, and Hogarth turned them into limited edition prints. (The original paintings were destroyed in a fire in 1755.)

The set of prints owned by the Carlos had once been bound in a book, and had small rips and acid-based stains. Wagner and Von Stein researched the properties of the paper and ink, before working up a solution to clean the discolorations. “Every step of the process had a chemical component to it,” Wagner says.

They used the print bathing procedure to illustrate fundamental chemistry concepts such as pH, diffusion and Le Chatelier’s Principle.

The restored prints will soon be on display at the museum.

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Sparking a love of chemistry in teens

“Somebody once asked me why I became a chemist. It’s because I get paid to blow things up,” said Doug Mulford, an Emory chemistry lecturer, as he set a flame to a hydrogen balloon. The explosion greeted more than 200 DeKalb County high school students who visited Emory recently to celebrate the International Year of Chemistry.

The teens were split into groups labeled “hydrogen,” “bromine” and “cobalt,” and treated to demonstrations by Emory chemistry students of how to make fake snow, turn a bouncy ball into glass and use a banana as a hammer.

“A lot of people tend to think that chemistry has nothing to do with their everyday lives, which is really interesting, because essentially you are a really big beaker of chemicals,” Mulford said.

The event was hosted by the Center for Chemical Evolution, a research and educational outreach program based at Emory and Georgia Tech, funded by the NSF and NASA.

“I love chemistry, and I think that it gets a really bad reputation,” said Meisa Salaita, education coordinator for the center. “To expose students to how fun chemistry can be is really important and sort of my life’s mission.”

Andre Smith, a junior at Redan High School, said he especially liked joining a theatrical performance of how molecules form more complex structures. “It’s fun how you can just put two things together and something amazing comes out.”

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Escaping mental prisons

A handful of U.S. prisons have opened their doors to an ancient form of meditation from India known as Vipassana, which means “to see things as they really are.”

Some of the prisoners who practice the technique for 10 to 13 hours a day “finally come to terms with some of the things that they have done,” says Ron Cavanaugh, director of treatment for the Alabama Department of Corrections.

Meditating prisoners at the Donaldson Correction Facility in Bessemer, Alabama, have become more social, says Kathryn Allen, the prison psychologist. “They’re more honest, more open, more genuine, and they want to serve others,” she says, by volunteering in the prison hospice and teaching fellow inmates who are illiterate how to read and write.

Cavanaugh and Allen recently visited Emory, where several research projects are underway on the physical and mental effects of meditation, to discuss the prison programs with Emory faculty and students. Their visited was hosted by Emory religion professor Tara Doyle, who specializes in socially engaged Buddhism, and Elizabeth Bounds, professor of Christian ethics at the Candler School of Theology.

Inmate meditation at a prison near Seattle "really changed the whole facility," says Ben Turner of the Vipassana Prison Trust. “Even officers who were earlier skeptical became really supportive because they saw such behavior changes in the inmates that it made it a more pleasant place for them to work.”

The Vipassana meditation technique is based on the teachings of the Buddha, but is purely secular and designed to relieve suffering through self-awareness, Turner says.

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The compassionate mind
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