AIDE-MOI, MEMOIRE

Remembering trips past, as I do in many posts here, reminds me how strong, deep and detailed travel memory can be. I would be happy to wax rhapsodic about recent trips, but, as I explained in an earlier post, I am the mother of a public-school student, and elective travel is very much frowned up during the school year, unless you manage to slip it in during holiday breaks or get some special dispensation. We spend those stretches visiting family. Compounding the No Child Left Behind constraints, my son plays on a travel soccer team. This limits our weekend getaway opportunities by, let me calculate, 24 weekends including winter practice.

Of course, family and corpus salutis are priorities. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’ve heard tell that there is empirical evidence suggesting that memories surrounding travel are stronger than those involving humdrum routine, life at home, life at work, or, as the French say, métro, boulot, dodo. (That’s “subway, work, sleep” to those who never succumbed to francophilia.) That makes perfect sense. Cognitive neural scientists have a term for recollected memory in general: “mental time travel.” I’d love to find an actual study that compares travel memory with general memory, or analyzes travel memory in any size, shape or form. Besides scrapbooks.

Here are several links on the subject of memory, travel and otherwise:

http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/memory/
http://web.psych.ualberta.ca/~ecornell/Memories%20of%20Travel.pdf
http://www.escop.org/summerschools.asp

REMINDER: March Sweeps Extravaganza Coming This Friday. Over a dozen contests that close at the end of the month. Out like a lamb.