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This video from Kurzgesagt is a great little primer on how the human brain stores memories.

Memory is one of the strangest abilities you possess. Your brain uses an incredibly complex biological system to preserve moments from your past that no longer exist, allowing you to revisit experiences from years ago. But memories are not always recordings of reality. In fact, every time a memory comes under the spotlight of your attention, it can melt and change a tiny bit.

What exactly is a memory, how is a moment in time stored inside your brain, and why does remembering something slowly rewrite the story of your life?

Tags: brains · neuroscience · science · video

In 1956, 96-year-old Samuel Seymour appeared on a game show called I’ve Got A Secret…his secret was that he saw Lincoln’s assassination when he was five years old.

Mind-blowing…the Civil War & Lincoln’s assassination directly linked to something as modern as a TV game show. Two years earlier, Seymour gave an interview about witnessing the assassination. His father, an overseer on a Maryland estate, and his boss Mr. Goldsboro needed to travel to Washington to check on “the legal status of their 150 slaves”. Seymour got to go along.

It was going on toward supper time — on Good Friday, April 14, 1865 — when we finally pulled up in front of the biggest house I ever had seen. It looked to me like a thousand farmhouses all pushed together, but my father said it was a hotel.

[…] When I finally had been rushed upstairs, shushed and scrubbed and put into fresh clothes, Mrs. Goldsboro said she had a wonderful surprise.

“Sammy, you and Sarah and I are going to a play tonight,” she explained. “A real play — and President Abraham Lincoln will be there.”

After Lincoln was shot, Seymour saw Booth fall from the balcony and run off.

[This is a vintage post originally from Aug 2011.]

Tags: Abraham Lincoln · Samuel Seymour · The Great Span · timeless posts · TV · video