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Mercury retro discovers sleep’s memory role


Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”





The mechanism by which a good night's sleep improves learning and memory has been discovered by scientists. The team in China and the US used advanced microscopy to witness new connections between brain cells - synapses - forming during sleep. Their study, published in the journal Science, showed even intense training could not make up for lost sleep. Experts said it was an elegant and significant study, which uncovered the mechanisms of memory.

Prof Wen-Biao Gan, from New York University, told the BBC: "Finding out sleep promotes new connections between neurons is new, nobody knew this before.

"We thought sleep helped, but it could have been other causes, and we show it really helps to make connections and that in sleep the brain is not quiet, it is replaying what happened during the day and it seems quite important for making the connections."
 BBC; June 5





It is well known in astrology that important eclipses or ingresses that have long gone can be activated by transits.  Today, June 7, 2014, Mercury stations retrograde at 3 degrees of Cancer. Shown here is the chart for the Sun’s Ingress into sidereal Cancer on July 17, 2013 drawn for Washington DC from where the journal Science is published.  A Grand Trine in the element of water, a rare astrological event linking Jupiter in Cancer, Saturn in Scorpio and Neptune in Pisces in harmonious aspects with each other is  very significantly anchored to the Ascendant.  Today’s Mercury station falls on the Ascendant triggering the Grand Trine.

The Grand Trine in water moves us into the mysterious ways of the soul, its emotions and feelings and sensitivities and longings and desperations, and the kinds of experiences that “make” soul, if we’re willing to dive in and get wet.

Water is connected with memory and reflection, and like the soul it operates indirectly. The soul expresses itself indirectly through symbols, through metaphors and stories, music and poetry, and through artwork. Water is about imagery and imagination. When you stand in front of Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” the painting says so much. It evokes Piano Manenormous feeling, yet does so indirectly. We see “Starry Night” and pause to reflect on where it takes us. Imagination opens up. To “reflect” means to “bend back.” The reflective soul looks backward, behind the mere what-you-see-is-what-you-get arena of life.

There is a saying, that Time is a river that flows in two directions: the future and the past. While we tend to think of memory and reflection in terms of the past, science now knows that the place in the brain that remembers the past is the same place in the brain the imagines the future. This is more in tune with how ancient Greek culture viewed memory. To the Greeks, memory was a goddess named Mnemosyne, and Mnemosyne was the mother of the Muses, the protectors of the arts, history, music and dance. The musing involved with writing poetry or history is the same musing through which Van Gogh painted “Starry Night” and the same musing with which we remember our lives, with any imagination. Jungian analyst Lyn Cowan writes beautifully about Mnemosyne in her book Tracking the White Rabbit:
“Mnemosyne is like a theater, upon whose stage the Muses perform what we recall of our lives. They take a person’s or a people’s history and shape it, re-shape it, animate it, sculpt it, draw it out, set it to music, give it color, set it free through verse, release it into the air of spoken words so that it may fly ahead to become images of the future.” [1]


So it appears that the ancient Greeks already knew what our scientists are discovering now! But since retrograde Mercury takes us back to the past, at least the rediscovery of this knowledge now may help us get out of the modern arrogance of ignoring the importance of sleep. 




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