5. Spaghetti 2025

A phenomenon regarding memory in psychology that I have personally always found to be interesting is the Mandela Effect . The Mandela Effect — named after Nelson Mandela — is essentially when a large number of people misremember the same details, thus creating a false narrative. Its name stems from when many people falsely recalled that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s, when he was actually released in the 1990s and died in 2013.  The Mandela Effect is caused by memory distortion, as it proves how our brains can recall vivid and seemingly real inaccurate memories for events that are not well structured. Shared cultural experiences also heavily contribute to the widespread of misinformation or false memories.  Here are some familiar examples of the Mandela Effect:  Star Wars: Many people recall Darth Vader saying “Luke, I am your father” when in reality the line was “No, I am your father.”  Pokemon: Many people recall the character Pikachu having a black-t...

The fresh scent of the salty, sandy beach paired with the rhythmic sound of the waves as they clash one by one under a cloudy sky will always be my comfort destination. Maybe it's the nostalgic memories of sitting by the beach with my friends in the summer or maybe it's the weekend trips with my family as a kid that makes the beach so comforting.  Junior year has served as one of the hardest times in academics for me personally and maybe you as well. From the tests that sometimes feel back to back plotted, to the major projects in challenging subjects that make our brain feel as though it is about to explode. These feelings encapsulate our academic experiences and lead us to forget about our own sanity. So much so that I believe we forget to care for ourselves and take time to find activities past its merit that bring us bliss.   That’s why when the time comes around and I am especially drained I like to take a trip down memory lane (literally). San Francisco's Ocean Beac...

You're in mid-conversation, and suddenly, you know exactly what the next words will be. Or you are doing something and feel like you have stood in that same spot, in that exact way, at some forgotten point in time. That hazy memory flickers, familiar yet impossible, and then just as quickly, it is gone. That's Déjà vu, the strange glitch in memory that leaves us confused as though we have lived this life or moment before.  Psychologists have tried to explain the science behind déjà vu, a French term meaning "already seen", coined by French philosopher Émile Boirac, linking the phenomenon to a theory that our brain recognizes situations, another part of our brain tries to find "familiarity against [our] recall of past experiences."Akira Robert O'Connor, a psychologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, claims that "[w]hen no actual matches are found, the result is a discomfiting sense of having seen it all before." In other words, our...

Kaden Khau 13 - The Beauty of Nostalgia 19 March 2025 Sometimes, I hear an old song and felt like I was suddenly in that specific time and place where I originally heard it. I also sometimes catch a whiff of someone's perfume that strolled past me and get instantly reminded of a person that I haven't thought of in years. I recognized that as nostalgia, a way in which the past sneaks up on me. I found out that nostalgia isn't just about remembering. It's a feeling you get that makes you feel warmth inside and how you recognize it an it instantly brings you back to the place where you first found it. The moments that come to you might be blurry, but the emotions you have stay with you forever. i also found that nostalgia doesn't care about how perfect the past was. It smooths over any rough edges you might have had. Like for example, the past age of flip phones or even fashion you might not miss, but the feeling of simpler times and the excitement you get from it can ...

In the show New Amsterdam, not much was known about Dr. Helen Sharpe’s past and family life, except for her estranged father who left her and her mother as a child and her strained relationship with her mother. That strained relationship was constantly on the verge of falling apart, but she knew that her mother would always be there for her, unlike her father, even though she did not always act like it. She had always assumed that this was her reality— that she had a loving mother and a terrible father who left her when she was five, leaving her mother to fend for the both of them. However, during a conversation with the hospital’s head of psychology, Dr. Iggy Frome, he questions her about the memory of her father leaving, which was the one thing she truly believed in if not anything else, and hacks away at factual inaccuracies in the scene she described.  The key part that caused Helen to believe her father was horrible was that young Helen was holding a necklace when he was leav...

You know that feeling when you meet someone for the first time, ask for their name, then promptly forget it? Then you meet them the next day and for some reason, since the universe seems to be against you, they call you out by your name and you are somehow forced to recollect theirs? I’ve been in that type of situation way too many times for my liking. It happens every single time I meet somebody new. I hear their name and proceed to forget it before they even take a breath to say their next word.  As a result, I have started repeating their names, parroting it back to them as though I am checking for pronunciation, just hoping that I will actually remember it this time. The technique, suffice to say, has yet to work. And in order to not be in that embarrassing situation of asking for their name yet again when they so clearly remember yours, I wait patiently, a couple of minutes, a couple of days (we don’t talk about that one time it took a month) for someone else to call them by t...

 So, I often watch cubing videos on YouTube and just yesterday stumbled across a video of someone solving a Rubik's cube blindfolded. In blindfolded you memorize the cube at first, then put on the blindfold and solve it based on your memory. I went to the comments on the video and was astonished by the confident ignorance that was being displayed. One of the comments said it was the u2 method (there's no such thing as the u2 method, it was 3-style), another comment said the person used a bunch of J-perms (J-perm is a completely unrelated cubing strategy from normal solving and irrelevant to memory categories). Some people just plain said it's fake, which makes me really mad as a blindfold solver myself. So, here's how it really works. First of all, every 3bld (abbreviation of 3x3 blindfolded) uses a lettering scheme. I use white-top green-front and Speffz, which is the most common lettering scheme as shown in the picture. taken from blindfold database  You may notice t...

  It was a Saturday morning, and I stood on my balcony on the fifth floor as the warm wind blew into my face. I peered over the tall railing, sloshing my water to the gun to ensure it’s ready to go. As soon as I noticed a person walking past, my soft, high-pitched voice yelled, “ Bura na mano, Holi hai! ” as they got drenched with a stream of water landing directly on the top of their head. That expression translated to “don’t take offense, it’s Holi ,” also known as the festival of colors in India. Often around the beginning of summer, which is around March in India, this day is filled with both children and adults splashing each other with water and applying color to their faces as a motif of spreading love and combating evil. However, this version of playfulness remains over five years in the past.  A representation of how Holi is celebrated When I moved to the US, this day—which everyone looked forward to for the entire year—was vastly different from how I had experienced ...