My latest 3QD essay is about the mystery of human memory, and why it is not at all like computer memory. I discuss the quirks of human memory formation and recall, and the concept of “content-addressable memory”.
3quarksdaily: Why human memory is not a bit like a computer’s
Here is an excerpt:
Decades of experience with electronics has led many people to think of memory as a matter of placing digital files in memory slots. It then seems natural to wonder about storage and deletion, capacity in bytes, and whether we can download information into the brain ‘directly’, as in the Matrix movies.
The computer metaphor may seem cutting edge, but its essence may be as old as civilization it is the latest iteration of the “inscription metaphor”. Plato, for example, described memory in terms of impressions on wax-tablets — the hard drives of the era. According to the inscription metaphor, when we remember something, we etch a representation of it in a physical medium — like carvings on rock or ink on paper. Each memory is then understood as a discrete entity with a specific location in space. In the case of human beings, this space is between the ears. Some memory researchers even use the term “engram” to refer to the neural counterpart of a specific memory, further reifying the engraving metaphor.
Before getting to the problems with the inscription metaphor, I should say that at a sufficiently fuzzy level of abstraction, it is not entirely useless. There is plenty of neuroscientific evidence that memories are tied to particular brain regions; damage to these regions can weaken or eliminate specific memories. So the general concepts of physical storage and localizability are the least controversial aspect of the inscription metaphor (at least at first glance).
The issue with the inscription metaphor is that it leaves out the aspects of human memory that are arguably the most interesting and mysterious — how we acquire memories and how we evoke them. When we look more closely at how humans form and recall memories, we may even find that the storage and localizability ideas need to be revised.
Read the whole piece here:
3quarksdaily: Why human memory is not a bit like a computer’s
