How do we know?

Recognition. That moment of awareness, of feeling familiar, surprises and comforts at the same time. From the time of infancy, we recognize even the blurry outlines of our mothers’ faces and respond with a smile that signals: Hey, I know you. You are part of my world. Our ears let in the sounds of their voices, the musical mobiles over our cribs; our tiny fingers know the soothing touch of our favorite toy or satin-bound blanket. This process goes on with smells and tastes until we are sure that our world is a fairly benevolent, predictable place, if we can believe our senses and trust our memories.

Recognition has a deep-rooted connection to memory, and is an area of brain function that fascinates me, particularly having worked with people both young and old for whom this function is impaired. Learning to read for example: the ability to recognize letters and to pair them with a sound or phoneme is so basic, yet not every child does so with equal ease. I have been reading studies that look at genetics, protein chemistry, neurophysiology, neuroanatomy, neurobiology, animal models of learning and behaviour; in vivo test systems for a very broad range of behaviour and learning phenomena. For some, it takes the magic away from memory and learning to look so closely at the science – the role of cell recognition processes in normal and dysfunctional plasticity, learning and memory with the aim of developing compounds with a beneficial effect on diseases involving cognitive impairment – but having the ability to read about this research excites my synapses and makes me want to spend time with and ask questions of the people studying this.

What makes it such a natural step for one child to recognize the letters  ‘y’, ‘a’, ‘l’ and ‘p’ and then decode the word ‘play’ based on their order of placement, while another will struggle mightily to identify the ‘a’ even after having seen it again and again? Well-intentioned parents and teachers have tried for years with our limited knowledge of learner-styles and readiness factors to help teach reading with greater and lesser degrees of success.

That same child however, who cannot recognize letters, much less decode words from a printed page may have impairments to her visual memory, while she can sing every word to every verse of many songs she has heard only once. Another can perfectly reproduce dance steps or skate with a stick deftly moving a puck to score goal after goal. Auditory and kinesthetic memory skills are not only intact, but well-developed.

The sheer amount of information available on memory, recognition, and the areas of the brain responsible for them is enormous. I am just another humble explorer who wants to know more about its mysteries.