The Memory Man by Lisa Appignanesi Page B

little seahorse called ‘the hippocampus’ and probably lots of other bits as well, including electric currents generated by them. She knew that biochemical cascades resulted in structural modifications of synapses and dendrites, and that this was the microscopic trace of learning or laying down memories.
    She had also learned that over the ages various metaphors had been used for explaining memory, all of them attempts to understand how the mind worked. There were seals leaving traces on soft wax; vast storehouses with many chambers and ranks of pigeonholes, some secret; elaborate palaces with thousands of rooms each named. There were metaphors from photography in which memory acted like a chemical, leaving ghostly images behind; and from archaeology with its shards and relics, all needing sifting and reassembly. Meanwhile, from the digital world came hard and soft discs and neural nets. There were also homunculi and mystic writing pads in which scratchy traces or scars were left on a hard plate that was continually being overwritten. A little like the more recent long- and short-term memory model really – which was a model and not a metaphor, because there had been experiments to test and prove it in a lab.
    In all this nobody had told her whether automatic memory was linked to unconscious memory, in the sense that her mother was on automatic pilot when she was remembering something but utterly unaware of what was going on around her. But maybe that wasn’t interesting to the scientists.
    On the other hand, she had learned a little about pre- and postsynaptic potentials in cells and the strengthening of links between them – the links being the chemical equivalents of memory. She had also learned about the conditioning of giant slugs, called ‘aplysia’, who had giant neurons easily visible if you knew how to get at them through the goo. And about target receptors, Morris mazes, fearful rats, not to mention various proteins and peptides that played a part in making memories.
    And maybe that was quite enough to try and digest. Which only left attending the session Tarski was chairing. And, of course, seeing him on his own for a while – the train home would be perfect for that. He seemed to be rather a good sort, and not all her hopes were quashed, but nor had she let them rage. She would just have to bide her time and put discreet questions to him when the moments came right. Maybe, just maybe…
    But for now, what she wanted was a drink, a chance to be on her own for a while and to do some sightseeing. She might never have the opportunity of visiting Vienna again.
    She thought of hopping onto a tram that seemed to be going in the right direction but remembered what she had been told about the city’s radial structure and crossed over instead, past the overly impressive Burgtheater into the inner city, where she chose a small unobtrusive café to pop into and down a glass of the cold white wine they called
Heurige.
She wondered why she had refused wine at lunch only to relish it now. She was becoming a secret drinker. Like some aging Edwardian spinster who hoarded her sherry. Maybe it was that she preferred the secrecy to the drink. She rolled the thought round her tongue for a while and decided it was bollocks. The bigger secret, the one she couldn’t bear to divulge until she knew more about it herself, was what drove her to the little one, the drink, which at least had an element of pleasure attached to it. And pleasures were few and far enough between these days.
    When she had rung home and spoken to Hela this morning, the friend who had kindly agreed to look after her mother for a few days, Hela’s voice had been full of awe. ‘It’s so mysterious, Irena, and so scary. When I greeted her today, she asked me who I was and my age and where I lived and how my mother was, all in tones of the greatest formal politeness, and as if I were a young girl; then a minute later when I brought breakfast, she asked me