Amazing talk-A journey to the center of your mind

Oh,my wife ?.Sorry I don't recognise your face

Forgetting your loved ones or unable to recognise them can be due to a delusional misidentification syndrome.People with this syndrome have a delusional belief that a person/persons close to them as imposters.Mistaken for insanity,this syndrome is called Capgras syndrome.

The Capgras' patient identifies his or her spouse as being an imposter - identical in every possible way, but an identical replica. The patient will accept living with these imposters but will secretly "know" that they are not the people they claim to be.

The official portal of Capgras syndrome is here

The bizarre misperception of body doubles is named after French psychiatrist Jean Marie Joseph Capgras, who in 1923 with colleague Jean Reboul-Lachaux described the case of a Madame M,claimed to have had eighty husbands.

"Invasion of the Body Snatchers " and "I married a monster from outer space " are the two science fiction films based on Capgras syndrome.

The case has been well portrayed by Dr.V.S Ramachandran in his popular book"Phantoms in the Brain"He reported that connections from the face processing areas in the temporal lobes to the limbic system(involved in emotions) have been damaged in these patients. The online format of the 1997 paper by Dr.Ramacandran on neural mechanism behind capgras is available here.

A novel on The Echo maker based on this fascinating syndrome by Richard Powers makes a good summer reading

Maintaining brain health through learning

Learning finetunes our brain.It is biological. We can change our brain just by learning .

Remarkable.Is itn't ?

Learning increases the following in the brain :

Synaptic connections.( Information passes via neurons through a gap between them called synapse)

tiny blood vessels (called capillaries)

glial cells (support cells for myelin)

Myelination ( a lipid sheath that surrounds the axons of neurons)

Birth of new neurons

New proteins

“The adult brain, and even the adult aging brain, is fine-tuned by experience in both its performance and its abilities, essentially organizing itself in accord with its experience to prepare for the future,”says William T. Greenough, Ph.D., a Dana Alliance member and
neurobiologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

This capacity of the brain to structurally adjust itself to reflect our life experience—which scientists called plasticity—is what enables us to earn and to change the brain by learning.

What you do today and every day for the rest of your life can make a real difference in keeping the engine of learning tuned up and running smoothly throughout all of your tomorrows. By minding your brain, you can reap the rewards of learning throughout life.

Dana foundation on Learning throughout life gives more details.There are tips to enhance memory too by asking us to

Pay attention to what we do

Stay focussed

Repeat it

Write it down

Visualise it

Make associations

Stay organised

plan and prioritise.

True. Knowledge comes,wisdom lingers.