Sandi considers a place for cockroaches in her last supper Here is a curious thing. Actually, curious things are like proverbial buses. Find one and another pops along directly, so here are two curious things: Cockroaches have rather good memories, and If you decapitate a cockroach (and I think it would need to be a dull afternoon for it even to occur to anyone to do so), the small creature will carry on living for some time. The body will simply seal the neck up and the head will lie there until something else carries it off. Neither half perishes immediately, but both lose their ability to remember things. I suppose the main thing the body would want to recall is where it left its head, but it is curious that in order for the memory to function, the cockroach must be complete. Eventually the body will die of starvation and the head, presumably, of boredom. Now we could wander off down the path of curiosity to discover who bothered to find all this out but sadly, unlike the scientist devoted to cockroach intellectual research, we lack the time. I am, however, interested in the notion that bits of memory lie somewhere in our bodies. Memory, apart from being a hit for Elaine Page, is now one of the principal pillars of cognitive neuroscience. I take some small interest in this as I have now reached the age where I spend a lot of time in the middle of a room trying to remember what I came in for. If you were a neuroscientist, you wouldn't need to be reminded that Henry Molaison was born today in 1926. Henry suffered from epilepsy as a boy. When he was 27 he sought help from a neurosurgeon called William Scoville. William seems to have been keen on the knife for he decided to remove two-thirds of Henry's hippocampus, his parahippocampal gyrus, and amygdala. This may not mean much to you and me, but we're talking about bits of brain most people are keen to keep. From an epilepsy point of view, the surgery was a triumph. The only downside was that Henry lost the ability to commit anything new to his long-term memory, couldn't remember most things in the year before the surgery, and one or two events up to 11 years before had slipped away as well. He went on to spend his days in a home where he liked to fill in crossword puzzles, but only if they asked for information which predated his operation. Henry continued to live entirely in the present until he died in 2008, comforted by the knowledge that he had revolutionised the study of how the human brain organises memory. I have no proof, but I think a lot of memory is connected to the body and thus to food. On long journeys we sometimes play "Last Supper," where you have to name the three courses in your final meal, as well as describe the setting for the occasion. No one ever plays without being reminded of some past event associated with their dish of choice. I've only got to think about lemon curd and I feel slightly unwell recalling the time I ate an entire jar of the stuff at boarding school. Think prawn cocktail and I am out to lunch in Eastbourne at the hotel my grandparents spent every summer holiday in. I don't know who recalls it now, but the prawn cocktail was considered rather a racy innovation when the English food writer and broadcaster Fanny Cradock (born today in 1909) first brought it to the British table. I can't say it would be on my list for my final meal, but it does evoke much reminiscing. I don't know if cockroaches reminisce. I was surprised to realise they think about anything at all. Certainly they eat almost anything, including human dander such as discarded skin and bits of hair. (I don't know if they have any preferences here. If they needed any advice, though, I once read that historically, indigenous peoples of the Caribbean who had sampled various Europeans on the barbecue found the French delicious, the English rather dull and the Spaniards quite stringy, even when boiled.) I wonder if old bits of humans is what a cockroach would have for its last supper? Apparently cockroaches taste like lettuce, seaweed or Gorgonzola cheese, depending on where you bite into them. Anyway, oddly all three of those things have a place in my final fantasy meal. Curious, isn't it? This article also appeared in SEVEN magazine, free with The Sunday Telegraph.