The Good Place — Amanda – 5/27/2015

The Good Place

May 27, 2015

Today is my first annual 49th birthday, coming ten years after my first annual 39th. I repeat these age-vanity jokes with a smile and a wink, certain a year from now I’ll be celebrating the full half-century mark with good grace. The fact is, life so far has been pretty good. While I have my share of regrets—mistakes and missed opportunities and failures—on balance my life has gone pretty well and I still spend more time wondering what’s around the next bend than worrying about what I’ve left behind.

Still, our memories make us. They inform our present actions and drive our future reactions. Good or bad, our memories are created out of perception and emotion, which are inextricably linked. As Eric Kandel wrote in the fourth edition of his Principles of Neural Science (in the nineties, I spent a year working with Kandel…