The senses can be powerful triggers for memories of our past, eliciting a range of both positive and negative emotions. The smell or taste of a long forgotten sweet can stimulate a rich emotional response connected to our childhood, or a piece of music transport us back to our adolescence. Sense memories can be linked to all the senses - sound, vision, and even touch can also trigger intense and emotional memories of our past.
In The Proust Effect, we learn about why sense memories are special, how they work in the brain, how they can enrich our daily life, and even how they can help those suffering from problems involving memory. A sense memory can be evoked by a smell, a taste, a flavor, a touch, a sound, a melody, a color or a picture, or by some other involuntary sensory stimulus. Any of these can triggers a vivid, emotional reliving of a forgotten event in the past.
Exploring the senses in thought-provoking scientific experiments and artistic projects, this fascinating book offers new insights into memory - drawn from neuroscience, the arts, and professions such as education, elderly care, health care therapy and the culinary profession.

How many vulnerable elders live in the Netherlands? Will this number increase remarkably in the years ahead? This report presents the first national description of elders in the Netherlands with multiple problems, who are consequently at risk for becoming care-dependent. It provides a description for care professionals, policymakers, researchers, and elders, who are interested in the final phase of life and how it develops. In addition, it explores how elders can be protected against vulnerability, compares characteristics of the residential setting and lifestyle of vulnerable and healthy elders, and examines what care and support vulnerable elders receive, including elders who donaEURO (TM)t receive care or support. The report concludes with policy recommendations for the future.

The uncommon sensory perceptions of synesthesia explored through accounts of synesthetes' experiences, the latest scientific research, and suggestions of synesthesia in visual art, music, and literature. What is does it mean to hear music in colors, to taste voices, to see each letter of the alphabet as a different color? These uncommon sensory experiences are examples of synesthesia, when two or more senses cooperate in perception. Once dismissed as imagination or delusion, metaphor or drug-induced hallucination, the experience of synesthesia has now been documented by scans of synesthetes' brains that show "crosstalk" between areas of the brain that do not normally communicate. In The Hidden Sense, Cretien van Campen explores synesthesia from both artistic and scientific perspectives, looking at accounts of individual experiences, examples of synesthesia in visual art, music, and literature, and recent neurological research. Van Campen reports that some studies define synesthesia as a brain impairment, a short circuit between two different areas. But synesthetes cannot imagine perceiving in any other way; many claim that synesthesia helps them in daily life. Van Campen investigates just what the function of synesthesia might be and what it might tell us about our own sensory perceptions. He examines the experiences of individual synesthetes-from Patrick, who sees music as images and finds the most beautiful ones spring from the music of Prince, to the schoolgirl Sylvia, who is surprised to learn that not everyone sees the alphabet in colors as she does. And he finds suggestions of synesthesia in the work of Scriabin, Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Nabokov, Poe, and Baudelaire. What is synesthesia? It is not, van Campen concludes, an audiovisual performance, a literary technique, an artistic trend, or a metaphor. It is, perhaps, our hidden sense-a way to think visually; a key to our own sensitivity.

The growth in the number of older people over the coming decades and the financial and economic consequences this will have, including for the affordability of state pensions and care for the elderly, are a cause of concern for policymakers. These changes are referred to collectively as "population ageing." Their importance prompted the government to set out its vision on policy on ageing and the elderly, including its plan to monitor the results of policy on the elderly. This publication is the first result of that plan. It presents a statistical picture of the trend in population ageing in the Netherlands in a number of policy domains, namely, employment, income, housing, health, and care.