5. Fettuccine 2025

     How does one determine an earliest memory? For me, I feel like everything before the age of four is just a jumble of different experiences without a clear timeline. I do not remember learning how to crawl, walk, or even run. But there is one memory of my early childhood that sticks out to me sharply, even today. I remember key details: where it was, the time of day, and who was with me. I remember feeling the wind gushing in my face, and the sting in my knees after I fell.      It was a cool evening in the summer and I was riding my trike. My dad was walking with me outside, and I had gotten ahead of him. In my community I had a favorite downhill slope, and this time I had decided to go full speed down the slope at the humble age of four. Right ahead of the slope was a sharp left turn, and if I couldn’t make that turn I would full off a little four inch curb. At the time making that turn at such “high speeds” with the risk of falling off such a “huge ...

I was having a conversation with my friend about the significance of music in my life, and that's when an idea for today's blog post came to me. I was talking about the feeling I get when a certain song comes on, serving as a reminder of who I was and what I was experiencing at some point in time. Every song evokes some kind of memory or feeling for me, so I thought it would be a good topic to write about for my blog post. On the contrary, my friend expressed her own personal detachment from music as an emotional outlet, explaining how its importance in her life is minimal.  The nostalgia that a memory brings can be amplified through the expressiveness of music. Whenever I listen to a song I find myself drawing a parallel between its significance at a specific moment in my life, and its entrancing rhythm that brings me right back to a distant memory. Music possesses the power to enliven the events in my life that feel like they happened lifetimes ago. Hearing the song "Tim...

I don’t remember the first noise I made. I don’t remember speaking my first words, saying “mama” or “papa” for the first time, or even learning my own name. But I’m fluent in multiple languages. Another fact is that I would struggle to learn a new language at the age that I am at. But how do these have to do with memory and the biology of the brain? In my AP Psychology class, I recently learned how we have critical periods of physical development . Under the age of seven, we have the critical period for the language area of our brain, also known as the Broca’s area. When we are born, we have the most amount of neural connections that we will ever have for the entirety of our lives. As we grow, our brain participates in a process called pruning in which unused neural connections are trimmed and discarded. If we try learning a language past the age of around seven, enough neurons are trimmed to make it difficult to become fluent at a language.  Memory works in a strange way. Before w...

The nature of memory has always been something that has fascinated me in how our human minds may remember an event or occurrence in a certain way that may or may not line up with what actually happened. A  book we finished reading recently in our English class is Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng. This book explored themes of miscommunication and family dynamics, with one of the factors affecting the relationship between the characters being each person’s memories and experiences. There was one scene I found very profound, in which Nath pushes Lydia into the lake by their house to vent his frustration and jealousy over Lydia being their parents’ center of attention. Years later, when this event is recalled by Nath, he only remembers having been so blinded by his emotions that he decided to try to hurt his sister. On the other hand, when Lydia recalls it, she does not remember it as a moment where Nath deliberately tried to harm her, but as a touching memory where Nath hel...

  On the weekend last week, I was visiting my uncle's house to celebrate my cousin's birthday party and during the afternoon when everyone was lazing around my cousin pulled out a photobook. The book was full of pictures from my aunt’s family who are descendants of holocaust survivors. After looking through some pictures we started discussing how incredible and lucky her ancestors were to have survived the holocaust. When I told my aunt and uncle about how we are reading the book “Beloved” by Toni Morrison, we started talking about how events and occurrences in human history like the holocaust and slavery are still relevant in the modern day and we arrived at the topic of generational trauma. Generational trauma is the passing down of traumatic experiences and their effects to the next generation.  There are multiple ways in which generational trauma affects the generations after the one that experienced the trauma. One of these ways is through genetic changes that occur in th...

Memory is a powerful catalyst; it builds our identity, shapes our experiences, and weaves the fabric of our life's tale. Yet, with life sometimes feeling overwhelming in our world today, the temptation to escape into a different reality is strong. For centuries, lucid dreaming has fascinated people as it provides the ability to recognize and possibly control dreams. Yet with the new concept known as “shifting” gaining ground with impressive speed on social media and most notably with the app TikTok, the stage is now set where questions far outnumber answers. The experience of switching essentially involves the belief that people possess the potential to switch their consciousness from their existing life into a world of their choice. Clinical psychologist Dr. Eli Somer defines it as "the feeling of ability to transcend one's physical limits and move between other, typically imaginative, universes." The belief is obviously one of fantasy. The temptation of such a conc...

Learning about things that are constantly changing can be very complicated. I remember my chemistry teacher, Mrs. Liu, telling our class about some old formulas or concepts that were on the old AP Chemistry tests many years ago that were updated as they were not entirely accurate. The concept of discovering new things that completely change the basics of an entire subject is mind-blowing as it shows that we are not really sure of anything entirely, and that what we do know now are just theories. Take evolution for example; There were many theories about why chimpanzees and humans look so similar and it was taken as common knowledge that we were just better than them because God made us like that, until Charles Darwin set out on a voyage and uncovered another theory unintentionally. He took careful observations of his surroundings for nearly twenty years and some of his theories were still incorrect. With modern science everything seems so sure but I can’t help but wonder what else cou...