A topic that has held my fascination for the past few years is memory. It's just one of those

things I can't read enough about, think enough about, hear enough about people in health care,

and tons of people not in health care interact with people who are having disease processes

that result in memory loss, such as dementia's,

traumatic brain injuries, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and various strokes, to name a few.

And it saddens us and forces reflection about who we are as human beings. It is somewhat ironic.

We try to live our lives with the hope we will do things

worthy of being remembered for, and yet many diseases of aging rob our memories. One of the reasons

memory loss scares me so much is that I believe if I developed severe memory loss or the inability to form new

memories, I don't think my life would have much meaning. Memory puts what you are experiencing

right now and what you will experience in the future into context. And yet, the more one learns

about memory, the more one realizes that memory is mostly imaginative reconstructions of our lives.

Memories are really illusions of things that happened in much different ways than how we recall them.

Digital cameras have recorded fixed memory storage. Our brains are nothing

like that. Our memory and thinking are at the mercy of diverse influences. Therefore, understanding

memory or lack of it leads to a deeper conversation of who we are and who we aren't. We as individuals

have dispositions referred to by psychologists as nature. We also are comprised of the some of

our experiences pertaining to what some call our nurture. How we recall nurture is never totally accurate. Let's ponder that illusion in more detail.

Illusion does not indicate there is no reality. Rather, the word illusion refers to something

that is not what it seems. An illusion is something that deceives by producing a false or misleading impression of reality.

In a sense, a recall correlates to a mirage.

We have all seen hot roads on a summer day make it appear like water is present,

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