Memory: The Key to Consciousness | Date: 21 April 2011, 03:57
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Univ. of Southern California, Los Angeles. Presents a primer on the current scientific understanding on the mechanics of memory and learning. Topics covered include false memory, amnesia, mechanisms of memory, and language. Also discusses the early development of memory, emotional learning, and the future of memory.
Summary: Excellent book by important neuroscientist
Rating: 5
This is a fine book on recent research in memory by a noted neuroscientist and researcher. Since I am familiar with Thompson's work on learning and memory, and one of my own doctoral professors worked under Thompson, whose name was Dave Lavond, who is a fine neuroscientist himself (and a great person as well who I was lucky to have as my professor), I thought I'd post a comment here about it.
As with many other areas of brain research, work on memory has expanded and accelerated in recent years, benefitting from new approaches such as sensitive MRI scans and other ways of getting more detailed information about the brain. Thompson's book presents many facets of these recent findings in a readable and enjoyable way. The field certainly has progressed since I was studying it as a graduate student over 20 years ago, and I learned a lot from this book.
BTW, just as sort of a blast from the past, I thought I'd post something on that here, in the form of a brief summary on what was known about memory back when I was in my Ph.D. program. This will show you how much further the field has gone since I studied it. But it is nevertheless a good point at which to start. Here is what I knew from my own studies as of the early 1980s:
There are many different types of memory. Highly developed language, which is so important for humans, and is perhaps the one thing that distinquishes us from the other great apes, has its own specific set of memory mechanisms, which I'll discuss shortly. However, not all memory is verbal, in fact, probably most isn't since there are many different types of memory. Spatial memory, which is also extremely important for creatures as visual as humans, is mediated by a number of brain centers, from the occipital visuo-cortical areas to the spatial areas of the right hemisphere to the hippocampus, a limbic system structure, and also the mammilary bodies in the posterior hypothalamic area.
Bilateral damage to the mammilary bodies can cause complete anterograde amnesia, or the inability to remember new information (as opposed to retrograde amnesia, made famous by various movies, in which the victim may not even remember who they are or where they came from). Damage to the dorsomedial thalamic nucleus, and also medial temporal lobe damage, including the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the connections to the surrounding entorhinal and temporal cortex, also cause various amnesias.
Causes of amnesias or serious memory loss include:
1. Korsakoff's syndrome (alcoholic damage, including "wet brain")
2. Head injuries
3. Hysterical amnesia
4. Dementia
5. Transient global amnesia
6. Encephalitis
7. Recurring epilepto-tetanoidal or tonoclonic seizures
8. Electroconvulsive shock therapy (ECT)
9. Temporal lobe removals
10. Alcoholic blackout
11. Stroke and bilateral stroke damage
12. Severe sleep deprivation
13. Benign and malignant brain tumors
14. Hydrostatic pressure clonuses
(As you can see, the list of things that affect memory is quite broad. In fact, memory is a very sensitive and delicate brain function and almost anything can affect it. It can be shown that there is a slight affect on memory from almost anything you do :-)).
Auditory and musical memory occurs in the auditory cortex and parts of the parietal cortex, memory for taste and smell in the frontal lobes and possibly the cingulate gyrus of the limbic system, with which the frontal lobes are connected. Fine motor movements are controlled by the pyramidal cortex in conjunction with a number of other brain centers, including the cerebellum and the basal ganglia or telencephalic nuclei.
Verbal memory occurs in several areas of the temporal lobes, and motor control for speech lies along the lateral fissure of Sylvius. Damage to the arcuate fasciculus, a major fiber bundle in the cerebral cortex, can cause very specific memory deficits including the inability to remember the names of objects, and the definitions of nouns in general. Very specialized multi-modality sensory neurons and circuits are located on the occipital-parietal cortical border.
Antonio R. Damasio has reported on an extremely bizarre case of memory loss related to sensory agnosia, or loss of perception. One patient had apparently lost the functioning of the part of his brain that stored the awareness of one entire side of the patient's body, to the point where the patient had no awareness or perception of that half at all, and even denied that he even had a problem with it. Hence, Damasio's research (reported in his book, Descartes's Error), shows that we even have a somatosensory representation of the entire map of the body and that it can be destroyed by a focal stroke. (Note, this is a more recent finding from only about 10 years ago).
And finally, limbic system specialist Robert Isaacson has shown that several parts of the limbic system are important in the forgetting and inhibition of memories, but only in a very specific and subtle way, known as the selective inhibition of retroactive interference, a very specialized and complex memory function that relates to the temporal order of memories.
Well, I apologize for my nerdy, "blast from the past" post, but if you know that much you'll have a basic understanding of the functional neuroanatomy of memory as of when I was last studying it, before the current explosion of knowledge occurred. Then if you read this book you can get up to date on the more recent research.
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