A&O – COGNITIVE – MEMORY

ART & ORGANISM

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MEMORY

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MEMORY is the essence of COGNITION:  (“Memory, needless to  say,  is  critical  to  cognition.  Without memory, present circumstances have no context; the detection of change is impossible. Without the ability to detect change, the decision to alter behavior can only be random, haphazard. Without  memory,  learning  of  any  kind  is  impossible.  While cognitive scientists now accept that discoveries concerning the molecular basis of memory in the marine invertebrate Aplysia are relevant to the study of human memory (Kandel, 2006), they (to say nothing of microbiologists) have yet to connect the dots with memory processes in prokaryotes.” (Lyon 2015)[i]

• THE NATURE OF MEMORY (brief account) 
• FUNDAMENTALS.  No current accounting of fundamentals of memory is better than Daniel Schacter’s:  essay, Implicit Memory, Constructive Memory, and Imagining the Future: A Career Perspective.

• DISINTEGARTION AND RENEWAL. Memory is always reforming itself.  It is recursive: “new” memories are perpetually rebuilt on scaffolds built by old memories, developing as we develop: READ NOW Oliver Sacks’ eloquent essay , “The River of Consciousness.”

• MEMORY and IMAGINATION:    CNS: A Surprising Connection Between Memory and Imagination.  see “The Future of Memory: Remembering, Imagining, and the Brain,” by Daniel L. Schacter et al.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2012.11.001  

• PROKARYOTIC MEMORY:  READ “The cognitive cell: bacterial behavior reconsidered,”by Pamela Lyon.  The mechanism used by single cells that challenge the traditional idea that memory resides in changes in multi-neuronal patterns of synaptic strength or connectivity between neurons:  quick overview reported by Catherine Offord (2021)in The Scientist 

• INTELLIGENCE (but can you have memory (or be intelligent) without a brain?). MEMORY is an essential corollary of LEARNING which may occur in single celled organisms:  Might Myxobacteria be a candidate? (Look at Dale Kaiser’s (2013) “Are myxobacteria intelligent?”)  Paramecium? Stentor? A few researchers think so. Read article: https://www.the-scientist.com/features/can-single-cells-learn-68694.     
• • “USELESS ATTRACTOR” is a nickname for a focus which in itself has no particular meaning and with no previously obvious connections that suddenly triggers a redintegrative cascade of otherwise apparently unconnected and otherwise useless snips of knowledge. The cascade (and we can here apply the metaphor “angle of repose“–particularly as it applies to an avalanche) may have had a coherent outcome suddenly glimpsed or intuited. 
    • (Attractor [xv] is a convenient but not precise metaphor).  The coherence may only be apparent OR TOT (“tip of the tongue phenomenon”) OR FOK (“feeling of knowing phenomenon”). I often feel that a very important solution to a problem is (as Franz Wright put it once, a “Radiantly obvious thing I need to say, though quite what that might be escapes me at the moment, as it always has, and always will.”)

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PROVOCATIVE ISSUE:  How mich of recollection involves FILLING-IN (of particular interest in secondary processing, as  for dreams)

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• • Its storage enables the manipulation and integration of information from multiple sources…
  • Subsequent actions on the internal or external environments are the traits upon which natural selection works.
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