Venice is recognised as being one of the most romantic cities in the world with its captivating labyrinth of winding canals, gondolas, and narrow streets for losing yourselves together. It is difficult to argue with this description with a feel as though people have been transported to a land they where can live out their fantasies, where everything is wonderful and filled with romance.
The Basilica di San Marco is a major tourist attraction in Venice. One of the oldest churches in the city, this basilica contains a high altar that is rumoured to hold some of the remains of St. Mark. This church is an incredible structure, with intricate designs and carvings, all covered in gold. It also features Venice’s symbol, the golden winged lion.
The Piazza San Marco has been a rendezvous for Venetians and tourists since it was first constructed. The square is dominated by the Basilica, a clock tower, impressive buildings, fancy restaurants and shops. This is the perfect place to relax with a coffee and watch the world go by.
The Doge’s Palace dates back to the Renaissance period when it was used as a residence of the rulers of Venice. This really is a sight to behold, with its pink and white marble and beautiful arches. Today, it contains, a collection of the world’s greatest artworks by Bellini and many other famous artists.
This unique city is a truly amazing place to see and wander around on foot. However, before boarding their flights from Venice, all tourists should take a gondola ride along the canals of Venice. This is the only way to truly experience the romance that this famous city invokes. Source: Icetrail
Many people in the UK now use apps, smartwatches or wearable devices to track their physical activity. Fitness trackers promise to help users become fitter, happier and healthier versions of themselves. For many people, they can be useful: a nudge to move more, a way to notice patterns, or a reminder that activity does not have to happen in a gym.
But self-tracking devices do more than record behaviour. Through prompts, defaults, streaks, badges and automated feedback, they also shape it. There is good evidence that tracking can help some people become more active. But there are also growing reports of anxiety, shame and disordered eating among people who track closely.
This raises questions about how common these harms are and why they happen, which is what I have spent the past decade researching. Here are five reasons tracking can become harmful.
1. The fixation on steps
The 10,000-step target comes from a marketing slogan for a 1960s Japanese pedometer, and has no firm scientific basis as a universal target. Researchers continue to debate the ideal number, with some pointing to around 7,000 as a more realistic and beneficial target for many adults. Yet 10,000 steps remains widely treated as a badge of good health.
The trouble is that a single target cannot fit everyone. It can also distort what people think activity is worth. A tracker may misread wrist movement, or fail to capture cycling, swimming or strength training properly because these do not look like stepping.
This means trackers often privilege what they can easily count. Steps are visible, while strength work, mobility, Pilates, rehabilitation and recovery can appear less important, even though they may be exactly what someone needs. This can give users a skewed sense of what counts as worthwhile movement.
2. Movement loses its joy
The hardest part of becoming active is making it a habit that lasts. Chasing a target can work against that if it turns movement into a chore rather than something enjoyable. The point becomes closing a ring instead of noticing what your body can do.
Research suggests that repeatedly failing to meet goals can lead people to abandon both the device and the habits they were trying to build. Enjoyment helps habits stick, while external metrics can erode the internal motivation to move.
So the next time you head out, try leaving the numbers alone. Take a friend, put on a podcast, or call your mum. When you feel satisfied, go home. The activity still counts, and over time it may help you reach your goals without making the numbers the only measure of success.
3. The more-is-more approach
Many devices still make “more” feel like the default measure of success. The prompts are persistent, the summaries often feel like gentle reproaches, and the clearest currency is usually steps.
What this often misses is ability, skill and context. Do you know how much exercise you need? What kind of movement might cause injury? Can you interpret your own VO2 max data? These competencies are often taken for granted, but many people have never had the chance to build them.
Our research shows that people are most vulnerable to harm when they are left to manage with assumptions already made for them. They may hand their judgement over to the device and accept whatever it tells them. Yet the device may not know enough about whether you are recovering from illness, short on sleep, injured, newly active or pregnant to interpret today’s data safely.
4. The default user does not exist
Much of the design and marketing of these devices is aimed at a standard, average consumer. But research repeatedly shows that this person does not exist. We differ in our bodies, histories, goals and circumstances, so asking everyone to squeeze into the same mould is poor design.
The problem is the body imagined by the device: often able-bodied, non-pregnant, already confident with exercise and free to prioritise activity every day. Some defaults also follow narrow social norms, often built around male bodies, and amplify questionable ideas about health and beauty.
Think of BMI, which can penalise muscular bodies and treat perfectly healthy women’s bodies as problems to be solved. Similar assumptions can be baked into self-trackers when they nudge users towards weight loss by default or reinforce dated ideals about size and ability. At their worst, they can push some people towards over-exercising or under-eating, with real damage to body and mind.
5. It blames you when things go wrong
Sedentary living is a society-wide problem. Yet trackers often frame inactivity as a matter of individual willpower. That can draw attention away from the conditions that shape how much people move: safe streets, time, money, caring responsibilities, disability, local facilities and access to green space.
Many people report feeling pressure from the device. When life gets in the way of their targets, they may feel shame, failure, or give up altogether.
Research shows that people use these devices for a wide range of reasons and goals. That means support and personalisation are essential to making tracking safer. Devices should account for individual goals, experience and context rather than loading all responsibility onto the user, a familiar and unfair pattern across health and social care.
Some would call these harms unintended side effects. But they are also the predictable result of design choices that reward more, simplify health into scores and treat missed targets as personal failure.
For users, the first shift is to treat tracking as information rather than instruction. A watch can tell you what it has measured. It cannot tell you what your body needs today.
The bigger responsibility sits with developers. Trackers could place less emphasis on fixed step targets, make strength and non-step activity more visible, build in rest and recovery without guilt, and offer safer defaults for people with different bodies, abilities, health histories and goals.
None of this means abandoning the technology – it means refusing to let a made-up number decide whether movement has counted.
Children thrive when parents are warm and responsive to their needs, while also providing clear guidance and setting limits. This is known as authoritative parenting.
But most parents will tell you authoritative parenting is easier said than done, especially when children have frequent intense emotions, big behaviours, meltdowns and outright defiance.
These challenges can lead parents to wish they had a parenting coach helping them know what to do and say.
The parent and child play together in one room while the therapist observes in an adjacent room through a one-way mirror.
Using an ear-piece and microphone (or other communication device), the therapist acts as a coach to guide a parent’s responses to their child during play.
Coaching guides parents as they use positive attention skills to respond to their children’s behaviours and emotions as they occur. Within such a supportive environment, this reduces the child’s problematic behaviour and increases appropriate behaviours.
This guided, real-life practice gives parents the ability to use the techniques on their own, wherever they are, and enriches the parent-child connection.
Although the child can’t see the therapist through the mirror window, they are aware their parent can hear the therapist through the earpiece.
From the child’s perspective, the play environment is often enjoyable and they get to spend high quality one-on-one time with their parent, enhancing the relationship.
Parents learn the importance of their attention
Throughout the therapy, the parent directly experiences the importance of their own attention.
When children get their parent’s attention for disruptive or other challenging behaviour, such as yelling, this can escalate children’s disruptive behaviour over time because parental attention makes any behaviour more likely to occur.
Children will even seek this attention if it comes in the form of a parent yelling, correcting, or negotiating, especially if they get little connection or attention when behaving appropriately.
In parent-child interaction therapy, parents use attention to reinforce their child’s positive behaviour. They practise giving positive attention for appropriate behaviour, such as praising and showing enthusiasm for children’s patience, kindness, good listening, or sharing.
The therapy also encourages parents to limit attention to unwanted behaviour when it’s safe to do so. A parent may be coached to avoid acknowledging when a child uses inappropriate language or “toilet talk”, for example.
Practising these attention strategies can increase children’s positive behaviours and interrupt the cycle of worsening behaviour and negativity.
Parents practise authoritative parenting
During parent-child interaction therapy, parents practise real-time strategies for authoritative parenting that:
demonstrate warmth and responsiveness to their child’s needs
fairly and clearly state expectations for behaviour
are consistent in developmentally appropriate consequences, especially for aggressive behaviour.
Coaching focuses on responding kindly, while still setting clear boundaries and expectations for behaviour.
For example, by saying:
Thank you for following the rule of being gentle today. I really like when you do that at home with your brother, too.
Who is – and isn’t – it suitable for?
Research from Australia and abroad shows this type of therapy can be effective for behavioural and related emotion regulation problems.
Research shows additional benefits for parents. These include reduced stress, improved parenting skills and confidence and improvements in the ability to manage difficult emotions such as anger.
Parent-child interaction therapy is most often used for children with conduct disorder, oppositional defiance disorder, and trauma-related conditions, as well as conditions where behaviour concerns can be a symptom, such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder.
It’s not recommended when there are safety issues or unstable relationships in the family or home environment. In these instances, other interventions should be prioritised over treating children’s behaviour concerns.
The downsides
Parent-child interaction therapy is time consuming and resource intensive. Therapy typically lasts 14 to 16 weeks, with most sessions involving both parents and children. Research shows repeated practice can lead to more sustained improvements in children’s behaviour. So it can involve a big commitment from parents.
Parent-child interaction therapy is delivered by qualified mental health service providers such as registered psychologists and social workers. They require extensive training, ongoing professional development and program training from an approved provider, as well has months of supervised practice. They also require specialised rooms and equipment. This can limit access.
Currently in Australia, the program is offered at a few universities and in some school settings, with costs often offset by public funding. There are few private providers.
Behaviour problems are the most common reason parents seek support for children. Supporting them with evidence-based programs or therapies – whether that’s parent-child interaction therapy or others – can deliver wide-reaching benefits across their lifespan.
The central aim of any child protection system is in the name: protect children. But over the years, inquiries and media reports have shown fulfilling this goal has too often proved tragically elusive.
In response, governments across the country have poured more and more money into their child protection systems in the hope of getting better outcomes.
Our newly-published research shows total national spending has almost doubled over the decade, climbing from $5.4 billion in 2014–15 to $10.2 billion in 2023–24 (adjusted for inflation).
But we found this hasn’t been matched by changes in activity across systems, like increases in the rate of investigations for alleged maltreatment, or the number of children entering out-of-home care. Nor has it improved outcomes for children.
So if money alone isn’t the answer, what is? Here’s what the evidence shows would help.
A maze of moving parts
Protecting Australia’s children is not the job of a single system. It involves many overlapping systems – health, childcare, education, justice and policing, disability services, and other parts of the social welfare system – working together to prevent and respond to child abuse, neglect and exploitation.
In Australia, there is no national child protection system to bring these parts together. Each state and territory runs its own. They share the same guiding principles, such as acting in the best interests of the child. But how they operate in practice differs across the country.
The result is several systems made up of many moving parts that do not always work as a coordinated whole. And too often, prevention is left to the side, in favour of reacting to harm once it has already happened.
Recent inquiries in Queensland and Victoria show this fragmentation is not just inefficient, but may be causing more harm than good.
The concerns raised in the recent Queensland and Victorian inquiries about how we protect children are not new. They have been raised many times in recent history.
Queensland alone has had four inquiries in the past 30 years (1999, 2004, 2012–13 and 2025–26), while Victoria has had three (2012, 2024, and 2026).
But as the presiding commissioner for the 2025–26 Queensland inquiry, Paul Anastassiou put it:
[…] the child protection system continues to fail children and the community in serious respects.
So, what are the problems?
1. Child protection systems don’t work as a whole
Statutory child protection services hold decision-making authority over when and how to intervene in a child’s life, and ultimately, whether a child needs to be removed from their parent(s) to keep them safe.
But it doesn’t control the conditions that create harm in the first place. Those sit across other systems.
Similarly, other causes of harm such as family violence, mental illness, and substance use are addressed through justice, health, and alcohol and other drug systems.
This means responsibility for child safety is distributed across many systems. Accountability, however, is not.
Each system remains accountable for its own functions, rather than for whether children are kept safe, stable and supported. No single system is accountable for whether the child’s best interests are upheld across their life course.
This has real consequences for statutory child protection decision-making. Information about children and families sits across multiple systems, and those systems do not always communicate. So, child safety decisions are often made with incomplete, fragmented or selectively available information.
Together, this creates child protection systems where high-stakes decisions are made on shaky foundations.
2. Child protection systems act too late and can cause harm
Systems remain overwhelmingly reactive, responding only after harm has happened, rather than preventing it in the first place.
In more than 50% of cases, children and families in contact with systems have already been subject to a child protection investigation.
The Victorian inquiry revealed that once in contact with statutory child protection, children aged 15–17 years old can expect to be re-reported almost seven times.
While this is not a new problem, it is one that must be solved.
Worse still, child protection systems themselves can cause harm. Children might experience multiple placements, uprooting relational and environmental stability, as well as significant delays in receiving health and medical care.
The most recent Queensland inquiry also highlighted children placed in residential care in particular experience higher rates of trauma, unmet mental health needs, self-harm and suicide attempts.
The commission rightly recognised the state’s heavy reliance on residential care as one of its biggest failures.
3. Over-prioritising crisis responses
Both the Queensland and Victorian inquiries found most resources are spent on responding to crises rather than on early intervention.
Our research found while overall spending was increasing, out-of-home care saw most of the funding boost. Between 2014–15 and 2023–24, the proportion of all spending that was on activities associated with out-of-home care increased from 58.4% to 63.6%.
Meanwhile, investment in intensive family support reduced from 8.2% to 6.2% of the overall spend.
What needs to be done?
Together, findings from recent inquiries and our own research show child protection systems across Australia are not consistently delivering on their core aim: acting in the best interests of the child.
While state-level statutory child protection reform is welcome, addressing this will require federal leadership.
Alternatively, because child maltreatment is a significant public health issue, it could also be assigned to the Australian Centre for Disease Control: a national agency established to strengthen Australia’s prevention, preparedness and response to public health threats.
A call about suspicious activity saw a California police officer race to save a newborn’s life.
A woman was sitting between two bushes near a business in the Rancho Cordova, and Deputy Foster Tracy described the situation as “routine,” before it became anything but.
“It was zero to a hundred really fast. It was one of those calls you go to, run-of-the-mill,” Deputy Foster Tracy said. “This was definitely not something that I was prepared for at any part of the day.”
“‘Excuse me?'” Tracy remembers saying, as it didn’t really register, “‘you’re having a baby?'”
Indeed, the woman had been begging for help for “hours,” CBS News reported.
Calling for medical backup, Tracy got down on his knees and went to work as he realized there wasn’t time to waste: the baby’s head was already out.
Tracy’s partner arrived moments later and they both saw the problem as the umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck. “I was concerned the baby was deceased because it was purple and blue.”
Yet their persistence was rewarded with a healthy baby and a relieved mother, who were both taken to the hospital to recover from the ordeal.The deputies have been credited with a life-saving intervention, and were praised by the mom, the police chief, and the surprised shop owners whose call had inadvertently saved a life. Police Deputy Praised After 'Run-of-the-Mill' Call Turns into Emergency Baby Delivery
I’m quite used to receiving abuse concerning the content of this column, but in contrast my previous post (about why fans of heavy metal shouldn’t have been banned from a pub) seems to have caused some interest in what one can infer from somebody’s musical taste about their personality and lifestyle.
The most creative fans were those who liked jazz, classical music, opera, and indie, whereas lower creativity was linked to liking for easy listening and chart pop. The hardest-working fans were those who liked country and pop, whereas those who regarded themselves as relatively lazy tended to like funk and indie.
The most sociable and outgoing fans were those who liked funk, country, rap, and dance music, whereas more reserved people tended to like classical music and heavy metal. The gentlest people in my sample liked opera, easy listening, and heavy metal, whereas the most headstrong tended to prefer dance music, indie, and punk. The most nervous fans were those who liked chart pop, whereas those who were most at ease with themselves preferred blues, funk, jazz, classical music, and heavy metal.
Links between musical taste and people’s more general lifestyles are also manifold and wide-ranging. Factors concerning money, education, employment and health tended to show that those who like high art music are wealthier, better educated, and in higher status jobs. Fans of jazz, opera and classical music in particular seem to lead blessed lives with the highest income, and greater access to financial resources (e.g. several bank accounts, credits cards, and owning shares in companies).
This greater wealth means they also spend more on food than others, and prefer to drink wine. As an academic, I might also add that this wealth is probably because they were more likely to have a Masters degree or PhD; and it is interesting that they are also more likely to give something back to the community by doing voluntary work.
But income and education can’t explain all the differences between the lifestyles of fans of different styles. Fans of opera and jazz were more likely than most to vote for right-wing political parties, but this conservatism was shared with country music fans. Similarly, despite their typically right-wing voting habits, fans of classical music and opera were among the most likely to favour development of green energy sources, whereas fans of hip hop and R&B, despite their radical counter-culture stereotype, were happiest with the fossil fuel status quo.
What is also interesting about these findings is the extent of overlap between those who like musical styles that are, on the surface, very different. Country and classical music fans overlap considerably in everything but their income, in reflection of a shared conservative worldview; and opera and heavy metal fans also united on more than just their love of dramatic music, as they share similarly creative and gentle personalities.
So someone’s musical taste does tell you a lot about them, but as these examples show, many of the stereotypes of the fans are nothing more than that. Moreover, the gross differences between fans that do exist in terms of, for example, income and conservatism, express themselves in some very specific ways in everyday attitudes and behaviour.
January arrives with a familiar hangover. Too much food. Too much drink. Too much screen time. And suddenly social media is full of green juices, charcoal supplements, foot patches and seven-day “liver resets”, all promising to purge the body of mysterious toxins and return it to a purer state.
In the first episode of Strange Health, a new visualised podcast from The Conversation, hosts Katie Edwards and Dan Baumgardt put detox culture under the microscope and ask a simple question: do we actually need to detox at all?
Strange Health explores the weird, surprising and sometimes alarming things our bodies do. Each episode takes a popular health or wellness trend, viral claim or bodily mystery and examines what the evidence really says, with help from researchers who study this stuff for a living.
Katie Edwards, a health and medicine editor at The Conversation and Dan Baumgardt, a GP and lecturer in health and life sciences at the University of Bristol share a longstanding fascination with the body’s improbabilities and limits, plus a healthy scepticism for claims that sound too good to be true.
This opening episode dives straight into detoxing. From juice cleanses and detox teas to charcoal pills, foot pads and coffee enemas, Katie and Dan watch, wince and occasionally laugh their way through some of the internet’s most popular detox trends. Along the way, they ask what these products claim to remove, how they supposedly work, and why feeling worse is often reframed online as a sign that a detox is “working”.
The episode also features an interview with Trish Lalor, a liver expert from the University of Birmingham, whose message is refreshingly blunt. “Your body is really set up to do it by itself,” she explains. The liver, working alongside the kidneys and gut, already detoxifies the body around the clock. For most healthy people, Lalor says, there is no need for extreme interventions or pricey supplements.
That does not mean everything labelled “detox” is harmless. Lalor explains where certain ingredients can help, where they make little difference and where they can cause real damage if misused.
Real detoxing looks less like a sachet or a foot patch and more like hydration, fibre, rest, moderation and giving your liver time to do the job it already does remarkably well. If you’re buying detox patches and supplements then it’s probably your wallet that is about to be cleansed, not your liver.
Strange Health is hosted by Katie Edwards and Dan Baumgardt. The executive producer is Gemma Ware, with video and sound editing by Sikander Khan. Artwork by Alice Mason.
Dan and Katie talk about two social media clips in this episode, one from 30.forever on TikTok and one from velvelle_store on Instagram.
Listen to Strange Health via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. A transcript is available via the Apple Podcasts or Spotify apps.
The discovery of stylized handprints dating back at least 67,800 years in a limestone cave in Indonesia has broken the country’s own record for the world’s oldest-known example of rock art.
It provides direct evidence that humans have been crossing the sea intentionally for nearly 70,000 years, as Man traveled from the Asian continent across Australasia to the land Down Under and beyond.
Adhi Agus Oktaviana, a researcher at the BRIN Research Center for Archaeometry, revealed that the minimum age of the rock art is 16,600 years older than the previously discovered rock art from Muna Island, which GNN reported on in 2024.
This rock art is also 1,100 years older than the handprints from Spain that were previously associated with Neanderthals and had long been considered the oldest cave art in the world, and 22,200 years older than the depiction of the Sulawesi warty pig, discovered on the same island as the other two, in 2021.
In other words, in the last five years, 3 of the 4 oldest cave artworks ever found on Earth were identified on the same small island off Sulawesi, Indonesia.
Oktaviana explained that to determine the age of this rock art, the research team applied the laser-ablation uranium-series (LA-U-series) dating technique to the microscopic calcite layer covering the cave paintings and produced a date that would be the earliest possible production time of the handprints.
– credit, Maxime Aubert
As news releases that regarded the previous two discoveries stated, the artworks elevate Indonesia to one of the most important centers in the early history of symbolic art and modern human sea exploration in the world.
This discovery confirms that Wallacea, a sunken landmass that exists above sea level today as the Indo-Pacific, was not only a route to Australia, but also a major habitat for early modern humans. It also reinforces the long chronological model, which states that humans reached the Sahul landmass (Australia–Papua) at least 65,000 years ago.
“It is very likely that the creators of these paintings were part of a population that later spread further east and eventually reached Australia,” said Oktaviana. “This research provides the oldest direct evidence of modern humans on the northern migration route to Sahul, which involved sea exploration between Kalimantan (Borneo) and Papua—an area that remains relatively unexplored archaeologically.”
Meanwhile, Professor Adam Brumm from the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution (ARCHE), Griffith University, said that the handprints found in the rock art on Muna Island also have globally unique characteristics, with modifications that narrow the shape of the fingers to resemble claws, reflecting a mature symbolic expression. According to him, the symbolic meaning of this narrowing of the finger shape is still speculative.
“However, this art could symbolize the idea that humans and animals have a very close relationship. This is already evident in the earliest paintings in Sulawesi, including at least one scene that we interpret as a representation of a half-human, half-animal creature,” he explained.With the discovery of Pleistocene rock art sites in the karst region of Sulawesi, this brings a great responsibility in preserving irreplaceable cultural heritage. Therefore, researchers are calling for the protection of karst areas containing ancient rock art sites to be an integral part of spatial planning and natural resource management policies. At 67,800-years-old, These Handprints Just Discovered in Indonesia Are Oldest Example of Rock Art
You might say you have a “bad memory” because you don’t remember what cake you had at your last birthday party or the plot of a movie you watched last month. On the other hand, you might precisely recall the surface temperature of the Sun any time when asked.
So, is your memory bad, or just fine? Memory is at the very heart of who we are, but it’s surprisingly complex once we start looking at how it all fits together.
In fact, there’s more than one type of memory, and this determines how we recall certain facts about the world and ourselves.
How do we classify memory?
Cognitive psychologists distinguish between declarative memory and non-declarative memory. Non-declarative memories are expressed without conscious recollection, such as skills and habits like typing on a keyboard or riding a bike.
But memories you’re consciously aware of are declarative – you know your name, you know what year it is, and you know there is mustard in the fridge because you put it there.
However, not all of our memories are stored in the same way, nor in the same place in our brains. Declarative memory can be further broken down into semantic memory and episodic memory.
Semantic memory refers to general knowledge about the world. For example, knowing that cats are mammals.
Episodic memory refers to episodes of your life, typically with elements of “what”, “where” and “when”. For example, I remember cuddling my pet cat (what) in my home office (where) just before sitting down to write this article (when).
A sense of self-awareness is strongly involved in episodic memory. It’s the feeling of personally remembering.
For semantic memories, this sense is not as strong – you can have detached knowledge without the context of “how” and “when”. For instance, I know that Canberra is the capital city of Australia (semantic memory), yet I can’t remember specifically when and where I learnt this (episodic memory).
Lessons from amnesia
In the mid-20th century, famous case studies of amnesic patients were the early evidence of this distinction between semantic and episodic memory.
For example, Henry Molaison and Kent Cochrane both experienced brain damage that severely impacted their episodic memory abilities.
They couldn’t recall events from their lives, but knew many things about the world in general. In effect, their personal past had vanished, even though their general knowledge remained intact.
In one interview after the accident that caused his brain damage, Cochrane was able to describe how to change a flat tire in perfect detail – despite not remembering having ever done this task.
There have also been reports of cases of people whose ability to recall semantic memories is largely impaired, while their episodic memory abilities seem mostly fine. This is known as semantic dementia.
Your age affects how your memory works
Young children have both memory systems, but they develop at different rates. The capacity to form strong semantic memories comes first, while episodic memory takes longer.
In fact, true episodic memory ability may not fully develop until around the age of three or four years. This helps explain why you have scant memories of your earliest childhood. We gain greater self-awareness around the same age too.
While episodic memory ability develops more slowly in early life, it also declines more quickly in old age. On average, older adults tend to remember fewer episodic details compared to younger adults in memory recall assessments.
In older adults with more severe cognitive decline, such as dementia, the ability to recall episodic memories is typically much more affected, compared to semantic memories. For example, they might have difficulty remembering they had pasta for lunch the day before (episodic memory), while still having perfect knowledge of what pasta is (semantic memory).
Ultimately, it all works together
Brain imaging studies have actually revealed that overlapping areas of the brain are active when recalling both semantic and episodic types of memories. In a neurological sense, these two types of memory appear to have more similarities than differences.
In fact, some have suggested episodic and semantic memory might be better thought of as a continuum rather than as completely distinct memory systems. These days, researchers acknowledge memory recall in everyday life involves tight interaction between both types.
A major example of how you need both types to work together is autobiographical memory, also called personal semantics. This refers to personally relevant information about yourself.
Let’s say you call yourself “a good swimmer”. At first glance, this may appear to be a semantic memory – a fact without the how, why, or when. However, recall of such a personally relevant fact will likely also produce related recall of episodic experiences when you’ve been swimming.
All this is related to something known as semanticisation – the gradual transformation of episodic memories into semantic memories. As you can imagine, it challenges the distinction between semantic and episodic memory.
How our memories form over time. Shane Rogers/The Conversation
Ultimately, how we remember shapes how we understand ourselves. Episodic memory allows us to mentally return to experiences that feel personally lived, while semantic memory provides the stable knowledge that binds those experiences into a coherent life story.
Over time, the boundary between the two softens as specific events are condensed into broader beliefs about who we are, what we value, and what we can do. Memory is not simply a storehouse of the past. It’s an active system that continually reshapes our sense of identity.
“Completely life-changing”. “Nothing could have fully prepared me”. These are the sorts of phrases you often hear from women when they become a mother.
These descriptions can point to the complexity and depth of the experience. It can be joyous and stressful, exhausting and euphoric, profound and mundane. It’s unlike any other life transition, and – try as we might – hard to capture in words or short phrases.
It turns out, though, there is a word for this process of becoming a mother: matrescence.
It’s a simple but powerful concept that’s changing the way we think about mothering. Here’s what matrescence means and how the concept can help mothers and those supporting them to navigate and understand this time of life.
Where did the term come from?
The term matrescence was coined in a 1973 essay by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael to describe the transition to motherhood. Raphael found most cultures had rites of passage that recognised “the time of mother-becoming”. However, Western countries such as the United States and Australia tended not to.
These practices, which vary depending on the cultural setting, have something in common. They acknowledge that, like adolescence, becoming a mother is a complex experience that brings a period of learning and transformation.
Raphael also coined the term “patrescence”, which, while not the focus of her study, recognised that fathers and other parents also go through a period of transition.
It would take decades, but matrescence made it into the public consciousness in 2017 in an article and widely-viewed TED Talk by reproductive psychiatrist Alexandra Sacks. Books, podcasts and media coverage have abounded since.
What changes during matrescence?
Most public discussion of matrescence still tends to centre the challenges of mothering, for example postpartum depression and anxiety.
But there is increasing interest in the many kinds of changes experienced in matrescence, such as dramatic brain changes or the phenomenon of microchimerism, where foetal cells from pregnancy can remain in the mother’s body, and vice versa.
Research on these phenomena matter not just scientifically, but philosophically.
Other body changes include powerful hormonal changes in pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. There’s also research looking at how having children and breastfeeding can reduce the risk of breast cancer.
Much of this research is emerging, which is unsurprising given historical and ongoing medical misogyny.
More than physical changes
Mothers can also experience significant shifts in identity, including changes in personal values, new priorities, or a sense of loss for other parts of themselves.
Mothers encounter new social dynamics and peer groups, too. The new social identities of “mother” or “mum” (or the markers “working mum” or “stay-at-home mum”) introduce new expectations, norms and ideals.
Relationship dynamics with partners, friends and family can shift significantly.
Mothers can also experience an expansive new relationship with their baby, though this might be sentimentalised or downplayed by others.
Other new emotional experiences, ranging from intense love and gratitude to “mum guilt” and “mum rage”, can arise, too, sometimes leading to maternal ambivalence.
New sensory experiences such as breastfeeding and physical contact can lead mothers to feeling overstimulated or “touched out”, but can also bring joy.
Women also take on a new political and economic identity when becoming mothers. In 2025, mothers are often expected to remain ideal workers in the paid workforce, sometimes navigating a return to paid work while caring for an infant and performing the bulk of crucial unpaid reproductive household labour and care.
This all contributes to the “motherhood penalty” – the well-documented, entrenched and persistent economic injustice experienced by mothers.
Matrescence is a term that helps to capture the breadth of these experiences in all their enormity and complexity.
The oppression of ‘motherhood’
Matrescence doesn’t happen in a vacuum. As Raphael’s original essay showed, it’s shaped by many cultural, economic, and political factors. It’s not the same for every mother.
In her 1976 landmark feminist study on mothering, North American writer and poet Adrienne Rich made the useful distinction between the experience of mothering and what she described as the patriarchal institution of motherhood.
It was the institution of motherhood, Rich argued, that oppressed mothers, not mothering itself. The flipside of this argument was that a liberating motherhood was possible under different conditions.
When it comes to matrescence, the institution of motherhood in Western societies like Australia tends to sideline the experience of mothers, and the transition to motherhood is still largely experienced in isolation and silence.
Often, a focus on the baby overshadows the maternal-infant relationship or the needs of the mother, with many new mothers feeling unsupported or invisible.
New mothers are also often expected to live up to the “good mother” ideal by being totally self-sacrificing or naturally competent at mothering.
Societal norms can overlook the transitional and transformative period of matrescence, with mothers urged to “bounce back” – either by returning to a “pre-baby” body shape or by promptly getting back to paid work in the same capacity as before giving birth.
These experiences are exacerbated by a range of factors, including class, race, partnered status, sexual orientation and life stage, among others.
How does matrescence help?
While the concept of matrescence has become popular among some mothers and those working in maternal wellbeing, wider awareness of the term and the many changes new mothers experience is important.
For mothers, just knowing the concept can help by normalising what they might be experiencing. It can also help those who are pregnant or considering having a baby to prepare for motherhood.
But it can also help us to recognise that becoming a mother is not just a matter of flicking a switch, but a long and profound process of change that requires supportive conditions.
For individual mothers and families, this might mean friends and family offering to provide food or household help (rather than visiting just to hold the new baby).
Collectively, it means broader social changes, including changing cultural attitudes and better social, economic, and health policies to support mothers and families. These should recognise that when a baby is born, so is a mother.
Within the first notes of many classic Christmas songs, we’re transported directly to the festive season. Why is it that it’s these particular pieces of music that get us thinking of the holidays?
In his book Music’s Meanings, the popular music researcher Philip Tagg explores the ways in which we as listeners construe the music that we hear. Tagg applies semiotics, the study of how we interpret signs in the world around us, to music. These signs may be viewed differently by different people and may change their meaning over time.
To illustrate this concept, Tagg cites the example of the pedal guitar, originally drawn from Hawaiian musical tradition and carrying connotations of the islands. Eventually this instrument found its way into country music, so successfully that Tagg argues at this point, we are likely to immediately think of country music when hearing the instrument, without the concept of Hawaii ever crossing our minds.
As the pedal guitar may place us immediately within the realm of country music, there is one instrument that will likely do the same for Christmas – sleigh bells.
Sleigh bells
From light orchestral pieces such as Prokofiev’s Troika (1933), right through to Ariana Grande’s Santa Tell Me (2014), sleigh bells have long acted as convenient shorthand for composers to tell their listeners that this piece belongs to the Christmas canon.
The reasons for this link stem from the non-musical world. We associate Christmas with the winter season and snowy weather. Sleighs, through their use as transport in such weather, developed a direct associative link with Christmas, and as a result, so did the bells used to warn pedestrians of their approach. As with Tagg’s pedal guitar example, we’ve reached the point where we generally link sleigh bells directly with the concept of Christmas, rather than thinking of the intermediary idea of the sleigh at all.
Santa Tell Me uses sleigh bells to evoke a Christmassy sound.
There’s a link to the wider instrument family of bells too. Through the practice of churches ringing out their bells, particularly in celebration of the birth of Christ, larger bells have also developed a presence, not only in Christmas music, but in Christmas decorations and art.
There are other musical elements which help spread the Christmas cheer, from lyrical melodies to strident brass parts. Most of these elements though, have one thing in common. They aren’t modern sounds, or particularly common in modern pop music, and instead, they remind us of the past.
The nostalgia of Christmas
Christmas is a nostalgic holiday, in more ways than one. The word “nostalgia” initially referred to a type of homesickness, rather than the fond remembrance of a hazy past time that we more commonly use it to refer to now. But both senses of the word can be used to describe the feelings we associate with Christmas.
It’s a time where many of us travel home to family, taking not only a geographical trip, but a temporal one, immersing ourselves in a world of well-worn tradition and familiarity, where the pace of our day-to-day life doesn’t apply.
Artists know this, feeding our nostalgia through music, lyrics and visuals which evoke the past. This is possibly why most Christmas albums consist of interpretations of past holiday classics, rather than original material. It’s a straightforward appeal to the nostalgic and the familiar; if we already know a song, it’s easier to immediately latch on to this new recording. Some artists though, take the nostalgia trip one step further, emulating what is arguably the ultimate Christmas style of music – the easy listening crooner song.
Billie Eilish performs Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas in 2023.
Whether it’s Bing Crosby or Nat King Cole, the warmth of a crooning voice nestled among light orchestral instrumentation has become inextricably linked with Christmas. It’s a sound that, unless you have a personal affinity with the style, you’re unlikely to hear much outside of the festive season.
It’s telling that when Billie Eilish performed a version of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas on Saturday Night Live in 2023, she eschewed her usual synthesised sounds in favour of a traditional trio of piano, drums and upright bass, and delivered the vocal in a gentle, warming tone. It all conspires to make us think of some imagined, simpler past, with chestnuts by the fire and picturesque snow settling outside.
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A woman who lost all her limbs after contracting an infection and getting sepsis while on vacation in Spain eight years ago is now thrilled after receiving a new hand.
Kim Smith and her doctors were trying for a double hand transplant during the 14-hour surgery, but the right hand had to be abandoned. Despite that, she’s ‘over the moon’ and has declared herself now to be left-handed.
“I was right-handed, but now I just do everything left-handed and it came naturally,” said the 64-year-old. “I have even written with my left hand.”
“I am absolutely over the moon about my new arm, because it feels so incredible, almost as if I’ve had it my whole life.”
The woman from Buckinghamshire, England, even joked how her husband Steve was going to buy her new wedding and engagement rings because the fingers of her new hand were slightly bigger.
“I’ve gone full-on glass-half-full now—just grateful that at least one transplant worked,” Kim told SWNS news agency.
“The hand itself is perfect—and beautiful—and looks like it’s meant to be mine.”
Kim Smith after hand transplant – SWNS
Kim described how she was overjoyed when she first saw her new hand, and has been amazed how quickly she’s been able to use it.
“I honestly didn’t expect to be able to do so much so soon, even though motor skills can take a year or so to come back—four years until I get full feeling.
“I’m already picking things up and managing to clean my teeth, do my hair, and put on my makeup.
“The day after the operation, when they finally unbandaged the arm and let me very gently move my fingertips, it felt absolutely incredible because I could feel myself moving it, and from that moment it has just gone from strength to strength.”
“I was most excited to brush my teeth and feed myself again because holding a toothbrush or a fork—and actually being able to use it—felt like the loveliest little miracle after being told for so long that ‘it might never work’.
Kim Smith – SWNS
“The first time I picked up a glass of wine with no problem and then held an ice cream without dropping it, I was in disbelief at how far I’d already come.”
Kim has pretty much given up on her dream of having two hands, but is happy with her lovely new left hand.
“While I never say never about a right-hand transplant, I’m 64, now and it would mean waiting another year even to be considered.”
“I’m honestly just happy to have this one for the rest of my life because it’s already giving me so much independence.
“I don’t know who the donor was, but I’ve written to their family to say how grateful I am, knowing they’re grieving and (they) might not reply.
“Meanwhile I’m regaining strength little by little, able to hold my phone, type on it, and wear my Pandora bracelet again.”
Kim’s transplant was carried out by Professor Simon Peter Jabir Kay OBE at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, who commented on the surgery.
“Hands are so much more than mechanical parts, they play an irreplaceable role in human communication and connection, and so it is always an honor to be able to carry out such a life-changing surgery.
“Kim faced unexpected and severe complications during surgery which meant we could only successfully complete one hand transplant, not the double replacement we had hoped to carry out.”
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Kim Smith – SWNS
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