ART & ORGANISM
ART and DEEP ETHOLOGY of MEMORY
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AS WE READ in the notes on LEARNING, MEMORY is essential:
“OF COURSE we LEARN to meet NEEDS … but we acquire new information all the time and sometime pursue it voraciously (we are INFOVORES) and can derive great pleasure therefrom. Arguably, our reservoir of knowledge will be useful in meeting needs that we have not yet confronted. (A hierarchy of needs developed to explain motivation can be adapted to clarify priorities of urgency in an evolutionary sense: read about NEEDS)”
INPUT–INTEGRATION–OUTPUT is the essential, irreducible, path information and other resources that organisms must take to preserve themselves in a dynamic environment
MEMORY: the retention of more-or-less past experience –from cells to organisms to cultures … BUT in organisms there is A surprising link between imagination and memory
But let’s return to basics for a minute:
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.”
- 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.
- PROKAYOTIC 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
- THE NATURE OF MEMORY (brief account)
- No current accounting of fundamentals of memory is better than Daniel Schacter’s: (Implicit Memory, Constructive Memory, and Imagining the Future: A Career Perspective. in Perspectives on Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691618803640)
- Memory is always reforming itself. It is recursive: “new” memories are perpetually rebuilt on scaffolds built by old memories, developing as we develop: READING on the nature of memory from Oliver Sacks’ The River of Consciousness.
- Imagination as a fundamental function of the hippocampus Alison E. Comrie et al (2022) https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0336
[i] Comrie Alison E., Frank Loren M., and Kay Kenneth (2022) Imagination as a fundamental function of the hippocampus Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B3772021033620210336 http://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0336
- CONVERGING INPUT: Past and concurrent sensory input can affect memory. For example, there is a demostrable link between smell and memories. (And see links to the NATURE OUTLOOK collection, Unpicking the link between smell and memories part of Nature Outlook: Smell)
- “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.”)
- Synecdoche and redintegration—trigger experience, the attractor of hidden dreams, infusing previous experience with new meaning and putting it in the service of coherence, validating a new realization[xii]—all things are connected—
- “not quite memory(?): tip-of-tongue—Feeling of Knowing– INTUITION Intuition presentation
- Where memory fails we FILL IN: extrapolation[xiii] and interpolation
- Excerpt on brain processes of filling in … https://neilgreenberg.com/deep-cns-filling-in/