Papers

Readable primers on the ideas this work is built on: how a memory is written, gated, and re-opened; the dynamical-systems vocabulary behind memory in motion; and the measurement of memory distortion. Each stands alone; the first three frame the rest.

1. 01 The labile window: how a remembered thing becomes changeable again A whitepaper on memory reconsolidation, its boundary conditions, and why the interval after recall is the lever this work is built on.
2. 02 The limit of prediction: chaos, sensitive dependence, and memory in motion A whitepaper on deterministic chaos, why a fully determined system can still be unpredictable, and what a trajectory reshaped by a small nudge has to do with a memory reshaped in its labile window.
3. 03 Arousal and the false memory: how a salient moment reshapes what you remember A whitepaper on arousal-biased encoding, the New Look tradition in perception, and how the same machinery that makes emotional memories vivid also manufactures confident errors.
4. 04 Prediction error and the boundary conditions of reconsolidation A whitepaper on why recalling a memory is not enough to make it changeable, and on the strict conditions · mismatch, memory age and strength, reactivation duration, and the extinction boundary · that decide whether the labile window opens at all.
5. 05 The amygdala gain knob: noradrenaline and the basolateral amygdala A whitepaper on the Roozendaal and McGaugh rule: how noradrenaline in the basolateral amygdala sets the strength of consolidation for arousing events, without storing those memories itself.
6. 06 Propranolol and the clinic: the contested translation A whitepaper on the attempt to carry reconsolidation from the rat amygdala to human PTSD by using a beta-blocker to weaken the emotional charge of a reactivated memory, and on why that translation remains genuinely unsettled.
7. 07 Extinction versus reconsolidation: two routes to changing a fear A whitepaper on the two distinct ways a fear memory can be changed, why extinction leaves the original trace intact while reconsolidation rewrites it, and why that difference decides whether fear stays gone.
8. 08 Stress, cortisol, and the shape of emotional memory A whitepaper on the stress-hormone axis and how cortisol, working alongside noradrenaline, strengthens the laying-down of memory while impairing its retrieval, with an inverted-U dose-response and sharp timing effects that matter for traumatic memory.
9. 09 Sleep and consolidation: the offline replay A whitepaper on how sleep stabilizes and reorganizes memory: hippocampal replay, slow-wave sleep and systems consolidation, REM and emotional memory, targeted memory reactivation, and how all of this relates to and differs from reconsolidation.
10. 10 Intrusive memory and PTSD: why the labile window matters clinically A whitepaper on intrusive traumatic memories, the reconsolidation and reactivation ideas that promise to blunt them, the Tetris line of work on preventing intrusions after trauma, and the honest limits of all of it.
11. 11 Memory as reconstruction: Bartlett, schema, and gist A whitepaper on the foundational cognitive view that remembering is an act of reconstruction rather than playback, and why that view is what makes memory malleable enough for reconsolidation to matter.
12. 12 The misinformation effect: editing the past after the fact A whitepaper on how information encountered after an event can rewrite the memory of that event, the work on implanting whole false memories, why these errors happen, what they mean for eyewitness testimony, and how reconsolidation offers a candidate mechanism.
13. 13 Designing distortion experiments: measuring what people cannot fake A methodology primer on within-subject designs, counterbalancing, cover tasks, and loading your measurement onto errors, using the trigger-encoding experiment as the worked example.
14. 14 Strange attractors and fractal dimension A whitepaper on the geometry that chaotic motion settles into: why some attractors are called strange, how stretching and folding builds them, what non-integer dimension means, and how they differ from points, loops, and tori.
15. 15 The route to chaos: bifurcations and period-doubling A whitepaper on how a system slides from orderly behavior into chaos as one parameter is turned, why that slide has a universal fingerprint, and what the other known routes look like.
16. 16 Hamiltonian chaos and KAM theory A whitepaper on conservative chaos: energy-preserving systems with no attractor, a mixed phase space of orderly islands and a chaotic sea, and the KAM theory that decides which orderly motions survive and which dissolve.
17. 17 Synchronization: coupled oscillators and the Kuramoto model A whitepaper on how a crowd of independent rhythmic units falls into step, the Kuramoto model of that transition, examples from fireflies to neural oscillations, chimera states, and the carefully hedged case for why synchrony might matter to brain rhythms and memory.