The Object Of Memory

There was a village in Palestine called Ein Houd, whose people traced their ancestry back to one of Saladin's generals who was granted the territory as a reward for his prowess in battle. By the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, all the inhabitants of Ein Houd had been dispersed or exiled or had gone into hiding, although their old stone homes were not destroyed. In 1953 the Israeli government established an artists' cooperative community in the houses of the village, now renamed Ein Hod. In the meantime, the Arab inhabitants of Ein Houd moved two kilometers up a neighboring mountain and illegally built a new village. They could not afford to build in stone, and the mountainous terrain prevented them from using the layout of traditional Palestinian villages. That seemed unimportant at the time, because the Palestinians considered it to be only temporary, a place to live until they could go home. The Palestinians have not gone home. The two villages—Jewish Ein Hod and the new Arab Ein Houd—continue to exist in complex and dynamic opposition. The Object of Memory explores the ways in which the people of Ein Houd and Ein Hod remember and reconstruct their past in light of their present—and their present in light of their past. Honorable Mention, 1999 Perkins Book Prize, Society for the Study of Narrative

Finalist for the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor. On an unnamed island, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses. . . . Most of the inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few able to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. When a young writer discovers that her editor is in danger, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her f loorboards, and together they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past. Powerful and provocative, The Memory Police is a stunning novel about the trauma of loss. ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR THE NEW YORK TIMES * THE WASHINGTON POST * TIME * CHICAGO TRIBUNE * THE GUARDIAN * ESQUIRE * THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS * FINANCIAL TIMES * LIBRARY JOURNAL * THE A.V. CLUB * KIRKUS REVIEWS * LITERARY HUB American Book Award winner

An exploration of life at the margins of history from one of Russia’s most exciting contemporary writers Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize Winner of the MLA Lois Roth Translation Award With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents—Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.

Animals show a natural tendency to explore novel, as opposed to familiar, stimuli, suggesting an underlying memory process in regard to previously encoded information. Dependent on this tendency, spontaneous object exploration paradigms have been developed in animals to measure memory processes regarding what an object is, where an object is located, when an object is present, the association of an object and its location, in which context an object is shown and an episodic context of the combined “what-where-when” components. These paradigms feature in the absence of extensive training and reward or aversive incentives, analogous to incidental encoding of daily memory. The application of these object exploration tests is broad and covers many fields, such as behavioral neuroscience, psychopharmacology and the neurobiology of recognition memory across species. The medial prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex and medial temporal lobe (the hippocampus, entorhinal cortex, perirhinal cortex and parahippocampal cortex) are the main neuroanatomical structures that are considered to underlie recognition memory. However, the retrosplenial cortex, insular cortex, anterior thalamus, nucleus reuniens of thalamus, striatum and amygdala are also considered to play a part. As well, recent findings also indicate that the lateral hypothalamus, interpeduncular nucleus and cerebellum contribute to recognition memory under certain conditions. Neurotransmitter systems actively mediate and orchestrate the neuronal communication between these structures during the processing of learning and memory. An entire picture of the neuroanatomy and neurobiology of recognition memory will, however, require multidisciplinary approaches of imaging, lesion, pharmacology, optogenetics, chemogenetics and behavioral studies. Recognition memory deficits are also major symptoms in multiple neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders, such as schizophrenia, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, autism spectrum disorder, Parkinson’s disease, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Although the etiology of the shared memory deficits is not fully understood, it may be associated with environmental, pharmacological and genetic factors that are commonly exposed to these disorders. Spontaneous object exploration paradigms with minimal involvement of emotional valences are appropriate in the study of neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders as these disorders may sensitize one to emotional stimuli, leading to a deficit in recognition memory. Given the impact of these disorders and their memory deficits on our society there is a strong need to understand the underlying mechanisms and development of innovative pharmaceuticals and gene therapeutics.

Handbook of Object Novelty Recognition, Volume 26, synthesizes the empirical and theoretical advances in the field of object recognition and memory that have occurred since the development of the spontaneous object recognition task. The book is divided into four sections, covering vision and perception of object features and attributions, definitions of concepts that are associated with object recognition, the influence of brain lesions and drugs on various memory functions and processes, and models of neuropsychiatric disorders based on spontaneous object recognition tasks. A final section covers genetic and developmental studies and gender and hormone studies. Details the brain structures and the neural circuits that underlie memory of objects, including vision and olfaction Provides a thorough description of the object novelty recognition task, variations on the basic task, and methods and techniques to help researchers avoid common pitfalls Assists researchers in understanding all aspects of object memory, conducting object novelty recognition tests, and producing reliable, reproducible results

This book is an easy, concise but fairly complete introduction to ISO/ANSI C++ with special emphasis on object-oriented numeric computation. A user-defined numeric linear algebra library accompanies the book and can be downloaded from the web.

This intriguing and compact book investigates whether or not philosophy can have a use in the face of ‘capitalist realism’ today. Can philosophy study everyday objects like computers and mobile phones? Can it think of advertising, the population, electricity, buildings and even dreams as ‘objects’ in their own right, which convey particular and novel qualities when analysed? Johns’ book starts from an immanent phenomenological study of objects, arguing that such objects disclose larger systems of anthropological meaning and control. The author moves away from the Husserlian ‘essence’ of the object and embeds his objects in a series of ‘uses’ (or ‘equipment’ as Heidegger called it). However, Johns makes a speculative move by positing the very existence of such ‘uses’ distinct from the human and first person phenomenological consciousness. This is when the annals of phenomenology meet contemporary strands of realism such as Speculative and Object Oriented models. For Johns, the world is in a constant state of being utilised, not merely through humans but through objects and their relations, and not only on a macro scale but on a micro scale (described by the theories of quantum physics). The object then becomes a locus of use, yet, importantly, one that can never be reduced to relations alone. This is because the author believes that certain aspects of a relation withholds itself in its act of relating. The mutual dynamics of relation and property are thus rearticulated in a new light. This novel description of relation places Johns squarely between relational ontologies (such as Deleuze, Latour and Garcia) and non-relational ontologies (Harman). This work is invaluable to researchers and any reader of contemporary philosophy in the age of advanced technology and capitalism.