Brett Kavanaugh Confirmed as Justice US Supreme Court

      After being subjected to political theater for 3 weeks, it seems that the country is ready for a much deserved break.  However, a vocal minority of protesters want to carry forward the charade of Democratic posturing that foretells their hope that the midterm elections will give them a Congressional majority in at least one of the two houses.  Some Senators received more press than other on the Judiciary Committee.  Some less.  The exposure may serve some better than others; time will tell.
      One must comment on what was exposed here during the confirmation hearing and what was not exposed.  I'm speaking of the science or rather the neuroscience of memory.  Neuroscience got some exposure when Mrs. Ford, the accuser and research psychologist,  stated that her memories of events from 36 years ago were lodged in her hippocampus, in her brain.  Many neuroscientists acknowledge this as fact: memories are stored in the hippocampus.   What was not stated that memories are, in fact, created here in a separate region called the dentate gyrus.  One can actually say that there is a physical substrate to memory called an engram.   Scientists can actually identify a spot in the brain and say "that is the memory".  Scientists at the Riken-M.I.T. Center for Neural Circuit Genetics at the Mass. Inst. of Technology say they have created a false memory in a mouse, providing clues to how such memories may form in human brains. Dr. Susumu Tonegawa, a Nobel laureate for his work in immunology, and founder of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory,  reported in the journal Science in July, 2013, that his team of scientists created false memories in lab mice.  It adds to evidence presented in 2012 in journal Nature that the physical trace  of a specific memory can be identified in a group of brain cells as it forms, and activated later by stimulating those same cells.
      Ddr. Tonegawa said that because the mechanisms of memory formation are almost certainly similar in mice and humans, part of the importance of the research is "to make people realize even more than before how unreliable human memory is",  particularly in criminal cases when so much is at stake.
      That unreliability, he said, prompts a question about evolution:  Why is our brain made in such a way that we form these false memories?"
    Thank you to journalist James Gorman, NY Times science reporter.  The article was published on July 25, 2013, if my memory serves me correctly.