Our brain works in very strange ways. Everyone has been sick many times throughout their lives ranging from the common cold to throwing up with the flu. If you get sick after eating a certain food, you may form a taste aversion to the specific food. Even if that specific food was not responsible for getting you sick, you still usually tend to stay away from that food. Taste aversion is evolutionarily beneficial because we try to stay healthy but if we get sick we naturally associate it with the last thing we ate and then we stay away from that food in order to prevent the sickness from happening again. Taste aversion was used to control predators. Wolves used to prey on sheep however, the farmers put poison on the sheep which would make the wolves sick. Therefore the wolves would stay away from the sheep in order to not get sick.

I have seen lots of my friends experience taste aversion. Sometimes the aversion has lasted many years while others have only lasted a couple weeks. One of my friends experienced a taste aversion to hot dogs that were sold at the vendors in New York City. One time she went into the city and got a hot dog from a street vendor and later that day got sick. To this day, she cannot eat hot dogs from the City. Another one of my friends experienced a taste aversion to a certain type of alcohol. Until that one specific night she had no problem drinking that type of alcohol however that one night she got really drunk and ended up throwing up after drinking that type of alcohol. For the next couple of weeks when she went out to party she wasn’t able to drink or even smell that alcohol without feeling like she was going to get sick again. Taste aversion is a way that our bodies try to keep us healthy by avoiding foods/drinks that have previously gotten us sick or was associated with us getting sick.

When you think about it, memories are such a strange thing. You have these pictures in your mind, sometimes very vivid, from when you were a young child and you always assume that that’s what you have previously experienced in the past. However, during class we learned that perhaps these images and ideas in our heads are in fact just images and ideas created by us from stories we have been told. Due to infantile memory, it is thought that the earliest age of conscious memory is around three and a half years old. I believe this is correct because my first real memory, or so I think, is when I was three years and three months old; this is when my little sister was born. However, for some strange reason I cannot remember anything about the actual birth of my sister even though I have been told many times that I was right next to my mom the entire time. The part of that day that I remember is that my aunt and my cousins picked me up and were driving me to the birthing center. The only thing that I remember from the day is being in the car on the way to see my sister being born.

Another strange thing that occurs with memories is the idea that other people are able to implant memories and you eventually end up actually believe them to be true. The idea of implanting memories can be shown through a story about my sister. Before my sister was born my parents and I lived in a different town than we currently live. When my mom found out she was pregnant my parents decided to move in order to have more room for another child. Therefore, my sister has never been inside the old house that my parents and I used to live in. However, every once in a while my family reminisces and talks about funny stories and my sister very confidently believes that she has been in the old house. She even talks about colors of the walls and how her room looked. Obviously this is an implanted memory in my sister because she has never even stepped foot into that house. Memories are a very curious thing because we never know where our memories actually came from.