A few weeks ago, I was with B. for dinner at Moksa and as we walked to our next destination, we passed a sign similar to the above advert for a play at the Central Square Theatre. B. mentioned she and another friend of ours really wanted to go -- and although B. wasn't able to make it tonight, a serious contingency was. The play was about the life of H.M., probably the most famous patient in the field of neuropsychology, and probably the reason we know half as much as we do about how memory works in the brain -- and in general. It was told in a series of snippets, much like the snippets of consciousness the man who could no longer form short-term memories might have experienced, mostly snippets happening in a hospital setting with doctors and researchers but also some flashbacks to events or stages of his life he might have had access to in long-term memory. Overall I was blown away by the performance (nearly all the actors were stellar) and the production, but I was left feeling that had I not spent a serious portion of my life studying the psychology of memory, I would have been left unfulfilled and wanting to know much more--as E. put it, it was a "great teaser trailer."
After the performance, which ended early, some of us wound up dancing down the street at Middlesex for a friend's birthday, and by the end of the night I had convinced a smaller contingency to meet up at Zuzu down the road (for some *real* dancing, if you ask me). The night ended with Hi-Fi (as all great Central Square nights tend to) and random mingling with people met while dancing. Why am I leaving this place, again? Oh right. See first paragraph.
