Honey Bees and Landmine Detection

People and bees have a long and mutually beneficial history. Ancient cave paintings in Spain depict a woman harvesting honey. The Egyptians moved bees on barges up and down the Nile. Originating near current-day Afghanistan, one species of honey bee, Apis mellifera, now lives all over the world, with the exception of the Antarctic and far Arctic regions. In every community and country, bees are kept for the honey and wax that they produce, and for the crops that they pollinate. Honey bees have recently received considerable attention as an innovative method to detect a variety of explosives, landmines and UXO.



Passive Sampling
More than 30 years ago, we at the University of Montana (UM) began sending out bees to explore and sample environments of interest, as a way of collecting and mapping data over large areas within a two-to-four-km radius of the hive.



A honey bee’s body has branched hairs that develop a static electricity charge, making them an extremely effective collector of chemical and biological particles, including pollutants, biological warfare agents and explosives. They also inhale large quantities of air and bring back water for evaporative cooling of the hive. As such, bees sample all media (air, soil, water and vegetation) and all chemical forms (gaseous, liquid and particulate).



With proper colony placement and sampling, gradient maps of the distribution of chemical or biological materials can be produced. This approach has been described in numerous studies and publications, with statistical mapping of large areas first described in Science, 1985.

Time of year, spatial distribution of the colonies, and component of the hive to be sampled all must be considered before an appropriate sampling plan can be developed and carried out.

Given an appropriate sampling design, bees can quickly provide samples of materials in the vicinity of each hive, since the foragers from each colony will make tens to hundreds of thousands of foraging forays or flights each day, with each forager returning to its home hive by nightfall. This passive collection to determine environmental presence of chemical and biological threats can provide an initial survey of landscapes. It generally identifies regions where materials of concern can be found and, with appropriate re-location of hives and re-sampling, can help narrow down the search to areas of a few hundred meters.

Active Training and Search
For several years, researchers at the University of Montana been refining the ability to condition or train bees to go to “odors of interest.” Bees have an acute sense of smell and can be trained to find explosives, bombs and landmines, as well as other chemicals of interest, including drugs and even decomposing bodies.



Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s (DARPA’s) Controlled Biological and Biomimetic Systems Program commissioned researchers at the University of Montana to develop the methods and equipment necessary to condition bees to pass rigorous blind field trials. This research was conducted at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) collaborated, providing specific expertise in explosives and signal processing, respectively.

The researchers observed that bees behaved like a very fine-tuned, nearly ideal detector at vapor levels higher than 10 pptr (parts per trillion) from 2.4-dinitrotoulene (2.4-DNT) mixed in sand. Bees consistently detected DNT targets generating 50–80 pptr vapor. Under moist conditions, this dropped to about 30 pptr. AFRL predicted that with sufficient numbers of bees, the detection threshold could go even lower.

Bees are trained in much the same way as dogs, using traditional operant conditioning methods. The reward is food, which is associated with the odor of the chemical of interest.

Bees indicate the presence of an odor by the numbers of bees following vapor plumes toward and over the source or target. We have observed that bees detect the vapor plume several meters from the source, then navigate up the plume to the source. Numbers of bees over odor sources are integrated over time and compared to those over the rest of the area.

There is convincing evidence that bees can reliably find explosives’ vapors at levels reported to occur in landmine fields. Tests were conducted to determine whether conditioned honey bees can be used to locate buried landmines and explosives. MSU and NOAA joined in with the Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) technology in further trials.

UM’s earlier trials had demonstrated that honey bees can be trained to efficiently and accurately locate explosives signatures in the environment. However, it was difficult to track bees and determine precisely where the targets are located. Video equipment is not practical due to its limited resolution and range. In addition, it is often unsafe to set up cameras within a minefield.



LIDAR is a remote sensing technique that uses laser light in much the same way that sonar uses sound or radar uses radio waves. Laser light pulses are transmitted over the area where bees are trained to fly. Some of the laser light that strikes the bees is scattered back to a detector collocated with the laser. The time between the outgoing laser pulse and the return signal is used to measure the distance from the bees to the LIDAR. By using a narrow laser beam and scanning this beam over time, one can produce an accurate map of the location of the bees. Since LIDAR can provide both the range and the coordinates of the bees over targets, the location of buried munitions can be mapped for subsequent removal.

Bees, dust and hard objects produce a back-scatter signal that is larger than the typical atmosphere. It is possible to discriminate different objects with fluorescence LIDAR, but the bees for these tests, the density of bees over the minefield were compared to an adjacent control area. Other insects may have been detected, but their numbers were small compared to those of the bees.

SNL also conducted vapor plume and soil sampling, followed by chemical analysis for explosives, to verify bee localization of mined areas. A NOAA LIDAR system that swept the field every 26 seconds. Bee conditioning was accomplished using a new, pressurized, digitally-controlled (hands-off) bee conditioning system.

The objectives for the Ft. Leonard Wood tests were to:

1. Show that area reduction (i.e., discrimination of mined versus unmined areas) can be performed by conditioned bees
2. Show that bees can locate individual mines or at least small clusters of mines
3. Demonstrate that LIDAR can be used as an effective tool for mapping density (numbers) of conditioned bees focused on explosive vapors emitted from buried mines

Results of Ft. Leonard Wood Bee Trials

All of the data forms (LIDAR, video, visual counts) indicate that area reduction, identification, and ranking (strength of the plume source) could be determined using bees.

The following are some results of the trials:

1. LIDAR was able to detect individual bees at long ranges of hundreds of meters. Fixed and scan modes were tested and proved capable of providing bee location and range data within a few centimeters’ resolution.

2. Video and visual counts showed that bees found both individual mines and clusters of mines within the test area.

3. Preliminary chemical analyses results indicate that numbers of bees correlate with plume concentrations. Ten of 12 vapor sources identified by the initial chemical analysis have already been detected by a partial data set of bee counts (based on only four days of the data). The contour maps of the landmine field, based on the visual and partial video counts of bees and on the cumulative results of three different chemical sampling methods illustrate the degree of localization that was achieved.

4. In the designated, unmined, blank or control area, the LIDAR detected a concentration of bees over a spot in front of the minefield. When that spot was later sampled, it was found to be contaminated with TNT, 2.4-DNT and 4-amino DNT.

5. The pressurized conditioning system worked flawlessly, and Missouri bees conditioned as readily as any of the bees that we have previously worked with in Montana and Texas.

The bees also made a surprise detection of a contaminated site where none was expected. This example proves the importance of combining a high-resolution tracking system such as LIDAR with properly conditioned bees as a system for detecting explosives or residues.



Limitations and Agricultural Benefits
Bees do not fly at night, during heavy rain or wind, or when temperatures drop to near or below freezing. As such, the use of bees is seasonal in temperate climates. Bees are active year-round in tropical regions.

Bees have several advantages in addition to their keen sense of smell and wide area coverage:

1. Bees can be conditioned and put into use in one to two days.
2. Local bees and beekeepers are used.
3. Overall costs are far lower than for dog teams.
4. Bees are essential to re-vitalizing agriculture in war-torn countries.



Whether the beekeeper uses sophisticated equipment or keeps bees in a hollow log is of little consequence. It is the knowledge of the beekeeper about his or her bees and area that is important. Beekeepers can be trained to use micro-processor controlled food delivery and conditioning systems or a decidedly simpler system, using mine-contaminated soils, conditioning syrup and a squirt bottle. If necessary, binoculars or simple video cameras suspended from a boom or wire can provide short-distance (within yards) observations of bees.



A critical humanitarian demining issue is the amount of arable land that has been mined; putting agricultural fields back into production is a major objective. War often disrupts and sometimes destroys bees, beehives and beekeeping. The first step in economic development often focuses on re-establishing beekeeping, since bees are essential to the pollination of many crops and agricultural productivity. Use of honey bees for humanitarian demining addresses both issues—clearing of croplands and restoring of beekeeping and agriculture.

Acknowledgements:
Science, 1985, Issue 1
DARPA
Space and Naval Systems Center, San Diego, CA.

Special thanks to Lee Spangler, MSU; Jim Wilson, NOAA; and Larry Hall and Joe Browning, SKE

References

“Pollution Monitoring of Puget Sound with Honey Bees.” Science. 227:632–634, 1995.

“Honey Bees: Estimating the Environmental Impact of Chemicals.” Taylor and Francis, New York, 2002.

“Vehicle Bomb Detection Video.” Online video: http://beekeeper.dbs.umt.edu/bees/videos. September 2001.

“Alternatives for Landmine Detection.” MacDonald, et al. Online document: http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1608/. January 2003.

A Complex Continent

During most of the ‘90s I photographed life as it revolved around me – travels in Asia, portraits of relationships with people there, my immediate living conditions.

I lived in unusual communities to achieve a sense of direction at a time when I was fully receptive to bold exploration of Asia’s underbelly. My body of photographic work during that period of cultural ferment offers a glimpse into the chaos of this complex continent we call Asia.

I do miss it sometimes.

Changing Landscapes

In our bold move to leave New York City after more than a decade, to explore the natural and built environments in and around Santa Fe, New Mexico, has proven to be a wonderful experience thus far. In thinking about the programming at the Center for Contemporary Arts, where I've accepted a job as Executive Director, the need to seriously engage contemporary thinking about New Mexico's endangered landscapes through the creation of art is of paramount importance. New Mexico is a prime example of a territory that is rapidly losing its water resource, as well as a prime example of untapped solar energy. I envision this as a powerful context for the exploration of critical thinking, the development of new ideas and strategies, and using the creative process as a catalyst for social change and alternative energy implementation. I would like to establish CCA as a center for dialogue about environmental issues with a commitment to seeking and plowing new ground in this field of artistic / scientific expression.

Bricolage

Combining and overlaying audio and visual recordings, photographs and texts, the art of assemblage [and its relation to ethnographic practice in my work] relates to anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and the conceptualizing notion of bricolage. In verbal-visual juxtapositions, my work relies heavily on the power and possibility of mixing media. I juxtapose text and image, combining audio and super-8 film, journals, photography, and found texts. The fragments inform one another, creating a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.

Creating Mythology

Myth (Coupe 1997, Doty 2000) and ritual have been consistently used as paradigms to analyze the use of cultural storytelling. Theories of intertextuality (Kristeva 1980) and narrative identity (Ricoeur 1988) assist in the development of a more cogent theory of myth.

Elizabeth Bird is critical of “universalising” text-bound approaches to myth. She argues for an anthropological understanding of myth “more as process than text and as a joint product of storyteller and audience.” (2003). Bird argues the need for multi-site ethnographic audience studies, which would attempt to conceptualise and understand the emergence of broad intertextual “mediascapes”. However she also argues that more traditional text-based studies can play a part in this project if they pursue a “thick” description, which looks towards the place of the text in everyday life.

While Barthes’ (1972) ideological perspective on myth is an instructive counterpoint, as Coupe (1997) has pointed out, though witty and original, his essential point: that bourgeois ideology sets itself up – through a range of cultural forms – as natural rather than constructed, is impressively made but is ultimately a form of “demythologisation propounding its own myth of mythlessness” (Coupe 1997). The collapse of myth into ideology not only forecloses any sense of dynamism that the concept might hold but also forecloses on the very term itself as a viable independent analytic concept.

In his exhaustive study of different approaches to myth in fields as diverse as anthropology, theology, literary studies and cultural studies, Doty warns that “myth is a term with no singular historical usage; (2000). He argues for a “complex field definition” or a “definitional matrix” that “recognizes mythic multidimensionality in both origination and application” (2000).

Native American Church [NAC]

Many Native tribes across the Americas participate in the ceremony of communal prayer and spirit flight/consciousness expansion known as the Native American Church [NAC] ceremony. The NAC is an Indian tradition amongst tribes extending from South American to Alaska which has been practiced for centuries.
[Chip Thomas]

Within this religious healing tradition of the NAC, medicine meetings are held for patients who are suffering mentally and/or physically. Community plays a central, primary role in a process of NAC ritual, in which diagnosis is not merely a prescriptive rite that passively initiates the therapeutic, but that it can itself constitute a cure. Viewing the NAC ritual as a "talking cure" and an example of "narrativizing" illness (something it shares with Western psychotherapy) manifests against the backdrop of Navajo beliefs about thought, speech, and health, within the context of a medicine meeting, its healers, patients and church members.

Brasil's Syncretic Religions

Syncretic religions such as Candomblé have millions of followers, mainly Afro-Brazilians. They are concentrated mainly in large urban centers in the Northeast, such as Salvador (Bahia), Recife, or Rio de Janeiro in the Southeast. The capitals of São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina have a great number of followers too, but in the South of Brazil the most common African influenced Ritual is Almas e Angola, which is an Umbanda-like religion [that blends Catholicism, and Kardecist Spiritualism – 19th century mediumistic based phenomena], and Afro-Brazilian religions ritual. Nowadays in Santa Catarina's capital there are over 70 "Terreiros", which are the places where the rituals run. There's still lots of prejudice about "African cults" in Brazil's south, but there are lots of Catholics, Protestants and other kinds of Christians who also believe in the Orishas, so they use to go both to Churches and Terreiros.

Candomblé, Batuque, Xango and Tambor de Mina were originally brought by black slaves shipped from Africa to Brazil. These black slaves would summon their gods, called Orixas, Voduns or Inkices with chants and dances they had brought from Africa. These cults were persecuted throughout most of Brazilian history, largely because they were believed to be pagan or even satanic. However, the Brazilian republican government legalized all of them on the grounds of the necessary separation between the State and the Church.

In current practice, Umbanda followers leave offerings of food, candles and flowers in public places for the spirits. Candomblé terreiros are more hidden from general view, except in famous festivals such as Iyemanja Festival and the Waters of Oxala in the Northeast.

From Bahia northwards there is also different practices such as Catimbo, Jurema with heavy Indigenous elements. All over the country, but mainly in the Amazon rainforest, there are many Indians still practicing their original traditions. Many of their beliefs and use of naturally occurring plant derivatives are incorporated into African, Spiritualists and folk religion.

Entheogen - Bringing out the God within

en·theo·gen [god within; god- or spirit-facilitating] a psychoactive sacramental; a plant or chemical substance taken to occasion primary spiritual experience. Example: peyote cactus as used in the Native American Church.

Primary spiritual experience is found at the heart of all the world's wisdom traditions. My belief is that people who have had such direct perception of spirit may develop the capacity to lead lives of greater understanding, virtue, and joy as a result. This phenomena may provide a communal hope that can be beneficial to us both as individuals and to our communities.

In attending the NAC meeting next month in Arizona, I ask, how can primary spiritual experience contribute to my growth, and what beliefs, ritual, community, and continuing practice can I carry into daily life?

Sleeplessness

"If you can't sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there and worrying. It's the worry that gets you, not the loss of sleep." Dale Carnegie

As a young mother, my experience of having insufficient sleep is that I do not have enough energy to do my work in the day, and feel tired easily. There is an unbreakable relationship that becomes apparent between sleep, dreaming and health.


I feel I am vulnerable to, if not cultivating, disease caused by insufficient sleep. Sleep apnea, insomnia, nightmares and hallucinations are some of the fabric that has become part of my life.

Bird Song

City birds have begun to sing new songs. "Gone is the familiar dawn chorus, with its rich mix of enchanting melodies and calls," New Scientist writes. "In its place is a strangely depleted music – abrupt, high-pitched and sometimes ear-piercing."

Arts and Science Collaborations

On a recent trip to Stanford University, I met with composer and professor Jonathan Berger, who is collaborating with colleagues in Stanford’s School of Medicine to develop an upper limb motion instrument that will provide real-time audio feedback of upper limb activities. The Pediatric Upper Limb Motion Instrument is being developed for presentation at "Medicine and Muse" at the Stanford University School of Medicine in 2008. The instrument will augment sensory-motor feedback, producing a "melody" representing key upper limb motions to facilitate motor learning and improve upper limb function in children with neuromuscular disorders such as cerebral palsy, obstetrical palsy, congenital anomalies, and musculoskeletal injury.

This data sonification project examples the increasing integrative approaches between arts and scientific research. These convergent efforts produce enormous contributions of new data for analysis and mining, and bring together the values of both qualitative and quantitative research approaches of great complexity. Investigations into the efficacy of art and science explorations suggest that this is a vibrant and expanding interdisciplinary domain with real world applications.

The Future of Climate Change – Jamaica

Indices show that small island developing States like Jamaica are three times more susceptible than developed countries to the negative impacts of climate change.

Jamaica's economy and its social and physical infrastructure have, on numerous occasions, been impacted negatively by natural disasters, including storms of increased frequency and intensity. Furthermore, adapting to climate change and climate variability is a costly undertaking, which often goes beyond the financial capacity and resources of its government. Therefore, it is important that the various commitments from the international community become a reality.

Like many other countries in the Caribbean, Jamaica has embarked on a number of projects, with a view to building capacity to cope with the effects of climate change, though limited individual efforts can only take us so far. The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) has already pooled its efforts to establish the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre. Located in Belize, the Centre assists in "mainstreaming" climate change issues in the development planning of countries in the region. It also provides expert forecasts and analysis of the potentially hazardous impacts of climate change and promotes special programmes that create opportunities for sustainable development.

Climate Change in Southern Africa

Zimbabwe is a warmer country at the beginning of the twenty-first century than it was at the beginning of the twentieth century. The annual-mean temperature has increased by about 0.4C since 1900, and the 1990s was the warmest of the twentieth century. This warming has been greatest during the dry season. During the wet season, day-time temperatures have warmed more than evening temperatures. There has been an overall decline of nearly 5 per cent in rainfall across Zimbabwe during the century, although there have also been substantial periods - for example, the 1920s, 1950s, 1970s - that have been much wetter than average. The early 1990s witnessed probably the driest period for the century, a drought almost certainly related to the prolonged El Niño conditions that prevailed during these years in the Pacific Ocean.

Botswana is affected by the changes in global climate as evidenced by extreme temperatures, recurrent droughts, floods, severe thunderstorms and strong winds. Prolonged droughts slowed down the country's construction industry and impacted negatively on food security. As global warming pushes temperatures up and droughts become more intense, the production of maize, southern Africa's staple food, could drop by as much as 30 percent in another two decades [Stanford University].

Namibia is extremely vulnerable to climate change and faces a range of serious threats [UN Climate Change report]. The report predicts "extreme" impacts on the water sector and human development in the country. Climate change is also predicted to impact fish stocks and agriculture. Combined, these threats to food security and the economy raise the prospect of social conflict and displacement. Malaria, malnutrition, diarrhoea and acute respiratory infections are all predicted to increase in Namibia as a consequence of climate change. Namibia’s agricultural production could drop by 13 per cent because of climate change [recent study by the University of Namibia].

In Zambia, climate change is the major cause of natural disasters that has hit most parts of the country particularly in the last rainy season. Floods have left a trail of destruction that destroyed crops and infrastructure in the region.

Visual Ethnography

Knowledge of photography is just as important as that of the alphabet. The illiterate of the future will be a person ignorant of the use of the camera as well as the pen.
-- Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

Setting aside for the moment (but only for the moment) the issue about what it is that a camera records, visual ethnography suggests a whole range of methods for collecting data. In this context, the camera is analogous to a tape recorder. Film and video cameras are particularly well suited as data gathering technologies for small group interactions, ethnography, participant observation, oral history, life history, etc. The tape recorder preserves things that are not preserved in even the best researchers' field notes. Similarly, tape recordings preserve audible data not available in even the most carefully annotated transcripts: timbre, the music of a voice, inflection, intonation, grunts and groans, pace, and space convey meanings easily (mis)understood but not easily gleaned from written words alone. By opening another channel of information, visual recordings preserve still more information. The raised eyebrow, the wave of a hand, the blink of an eye might, for instance, convert the apparent meaning of words into their opposite, convey irony, sarcasm, or contradiction. So, regardless of how we analyze the data or what we do with the visual record, we can use cameras to record and preserve data.

The mainstream of the social sciences are remarkable in the way that they have privileged the written word over all else. Sociologists do little more than, in the words of Bob Dylan, "Read books, repeat quotations, draw conclusions on the wall." We take the verbal self-report as both true, and as primary source. Ethnographers pay more attention than most to verbal (as opposed to written) information. But here too the decided prejudice is in favor of self-report and words. Yet, every culture is composed of jillions of non-verbal images, a fact apparently more easily grasped anthropologists who are comfortable with studying blanket designs, pottery shapes, totems, fetishes, and graven images. (Of course Anthropology's origins as a science of "pre-literate" cultures makes problematic their theories and methods)

Here, in the early adolescence of capitalist society, we live in the most decidedly visual environment yet produced. Each one of us consumes tens of thousands, maybe millions, of images each day. Even if we don't want to see we cannot avoid it. Jean Baudrillard, the French sociologist, suggested that the image world is a "simulacrum", a media world of copies of copies of copies where there is not and has never been an original. Everything in the symbol world refers to other symbols - a world of allusion and trope, maps referring not to territories but only to other maps, news referring to other news, photographs referring to paintings and so on in an endless a game of mirrors. Visual ethnography attempts to study visual images produced as part of culture. Art, photographs, film, video, fonts, advertisements, computer icons, landscape, architecture, machines, fashion, makeup, hair style, facial expressions, tattoos, and so on are parts of the complex visual communication system produced by members of societies. Visual images are primary evidence of human productive activity, they are worked matter. Their use and understanding is governed by socially established symbolic codes. Visual images are constructed and may be deconstructed. They can be analyzed with techniques developed in diverse fields of literary criticism, art theory and criticism, semiotics, deconstructionism, or the more mundane tools of ethnography. We can count them. We can ask people about them. We can study their use and the social settings in which they are produced and consumed. So a second meaning of visual ethnography is a discipline to study the visual products of culture -- their production, consumption and meaning.

Nepal's Climate Change

Farmer Barati Khadka sits in his home, eating a typical Nepalese meal of dal-bhat and rice, in his hut in the small Nepalese village of Bhawasa, about 90 miles east of Kathmandu. During the night there is light rain but its intensity increases. Within an hour, the rain becomes so heavy that Barati cannot see more than a foot in front of him, even though it is full moon. It rains like that until midday. Then the land starts moving like a cobra.

When it stopped, Mr Khadka barely recognised his village. In just a few hours the serpent had carved a 1000 foot wide path down the valley, leaving a ten foot-deep landcape of rocks, boulders, trees and rubble in its path. Hundreds of fields and terraces had been swept away. The irrigation systems built by generations of farmers had gone and houses were demolished or were now uninhabitable. Mr Khadka’s home stood isolated on a newly formed island.

Bhawasa expects a small flood every decade or so, but the two largest have taken place in the last three years. The floods are coming more severely, more frequently. The rainfall far heavier these days and coming at different times of the year.

Nepal is on the front line of climate change and variations on Bhawasa’s experience are now being recorded in communities from the Himalayas in the freezing north to the heat of the southern lowland plains.

Crop yields are down. Barati now lives with 200 other environmental change refugees in tents in a small grove of trees by a highway. The refugees are marking their observations of a changing climate. One notes that wild pigs in the forest now have their young earlier, another that certain types of rice and cucumber will no longer grow where they used to, a third says that the days are hotter and that some trees now flower twice a year.

Scientists in Nepal are recording some of the fastest long-term increases in temperatures and rainfall anywhere in the world. At least 44 of Nepal's and neighbouring Bhutan's Himalayan lakes, which collect glacier melt-water, are said by the UN to be growing so rapidly they they could burst their banks within a decade. Any climate change in Nepal is reflected throughout the region. Nearly 400 million people in northern India and Bangladesh also depend on rainfall and rivers that rise there.

Some real world conversions in US$:
$16: Solar dryer to help preserve fruit and vegetables for the winter season
$25: Local materials to insulate a home
$55: Smoke hood to protect from indoor pollution from open fires
$75: Manufacture and installation of a smoke hood
$235: Bicycle ambulance
$1560: Gravity ropeway in mountainous regions for access to markets and schools

· The average US citizen produces 126 times more carbon dioxide than someone living in Nepal
· CO2 emissions from using an electric kettle for one year in the US are equivalent to average person's total annual CO2 emissions in Nepal

Autobiographical Memory

I have long been interested in understanding what we remember about our past and why we remember it. But the study autobiographical memory presents many problems. Many other kinds of memory are tested in the lab but that doesn’t work so well for autobiographical "episodic" memories, which are made over time and everywhere along the way.

The 19th century English psychologist Sir Francis Galton pioneered a simple method to study autobiographical memory, a modified version of which is still used today. He decided to go fishing for memories associated with a list of common everyday words. Four times he used the same cues to try and catch his recollections. One of Galton’s findings was that it was difficult to pinpoint when the events he remembered had occurred. Another was that his brain often produced the same associations over and over again. “This shows much less variety in the mental stock of ideas than I had expected,” he wrote, “and makes us feel that the roadways of our minds are worn into very deep ruts.”

There is no universally agreed definition of autobiographical memory, but it can be conceptualized as a mental state resulting from the interplay of a set of psychological capacities—self-reflection, self-agency, self-ownership and personal temporality—that transforma memorial representation into an autobiographical personal experience.

Theorists pursuing the ontology of self immediately find themselves immersed in a host of issues about mind and body, subject and object, object and process, free will and self-awareness. Mapping our knowledge of self is very much tied up with the “story” of how what we have experienced has made us who we are, and how who we are has led us to do what we have done.

Augmented Memory

There are things in this life worse than dying...
But there is nothing better than living....

Autobiographical memory (AM) is the “memory for the events in one’s life”. Often it is assumed that in order to remember all those events, you just need to record everything and when you replay these recordings you will remember those events. You can compare this with a library metaphor that has been used to explain AM according to the record-keeping approach. However, after many years of AM-research it was concluded that AM is stored in a different manner, which often is initiated by memory cues.