Memory, Consciousness and the Brain

The Tallinn Conference

Endel Tulving

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415763561
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134949137
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

Memory and consciousness have been objects of fascination to psychologists and other brain scientists for over one hundred years. Because of the complexity of the two topics, however, and despite great efforts spent on their study, the progress in their understanding over most of this time has been rather slow. Recently, thanks to new techniques and to changing pre-theoretical orientations, the study of the role of the brain in memory and consciousness has received an immense boost, and has become a central focus of research activity by thousands of researchers worldwide. The volume reviews recent progress on our understanding of memory, consciousness and the brain and identifies a number of acute outstanding problems. The purpose of the volume, based on a conference in Tallinn, is to look to the future, and not simply to share knowledge from ongoing research. In this sense, the volume does not contain a comprehensive overview of the field, but rather showcases a selection of exciting ideas in cognitive neuroscience. Contributors include some of the world's best-known cognitive brain scientists who have greatly contributed to our understanding of memory as a relation between the brain and the mind, as well as a number of highly promising younger researchers in the field. Memory, Consciousness and the Brain will be essential reading for anyone interested in the latest cutting-edge thinking at the interface of these topics, and in the future directions in which it may take us.

Part

I

Memory

1

Chapter

Jaan Puhvel

Memory, Shmemory, Lest We Forget Mnemosyne: The Vocabulary of Memory and Mindfulness in Antiquity

The one-time leader of the State of Israel, Ben-Gurion, had a low opinion of the United Nations, which was forever passing resolutions critical of his actions. As a result, instead of referring to it by the modern Hebrew equivalent Umot Me’uxadot, he simply called it “Um-Šmum.” In so doing, he imitated in Semitic a Yiddish device of word-initial pejoration by iterational rhyming with a prefixed sibilant or sibilant-nasal element. Yiddish being an Indo-European language (a form of Germanic), this phenomenon comes under a wider heading of lexical reduplication in Germanic languages, not unfamiliar to anglophones conversant with “hoity-toity,” “willy-nilly,” “teeny-weeny,” or “helter-skelter.” But the repetition with a sibilant is further a recrudescence of an old Indo-European phenomenon known as s-movable or s-mobile, so that a given word may appear with or without an initial sibilant before another consonant. Relics of this phenomenon are found in English (“smelt” beside “melt”) or Greek (stégos beside tégos [“roof”] or smikrós beside mikros [“small”]. Mostly, of course, such clusters are firm, and they give Germanic its phonesthetic flavor, unlike Greek or Latin, which generally do not tolerate them. What would English be without expressive words like smack, smarm, smart, smash, smear, smirch, smirk, smooch, smother, smudge, smug, smut, slam, slander, slap, slash, slaver, sleaze, sleek, slick, slime, slink, slither, slob, slog, slop, slosh, slouch, sludge, slug, slum, slurp, slush, slut, snag, snap, snarl, sneer, snicker, snide, sniff, snipe, snitch, snivel, snoop, snoot, snooze, snore, snort, snot, snub, snuff, or snug? The classical cognates are few, and, having dropped the s-, have also forgone their phonesthetic clout: “smile” is Greek meidân, “snow” is Latin nives and “snout” is cognate with Greek noûs (“sense, intellect”; literally, a “nose” for getting wise to things—in Gothic, snutrs actually means “wise”). As opposed to such toothless phonetics, Indo-Iranian languages side with Germanic in retaining robust word-initials, so that “smile” is Sanskrit smáyati, “snow” is Avestan snaēźa, and “sleep” is Sanskrit svápiti, vs. Greek húpnos.

Why do I mention all this? My aim is to get at the key word of this volume, memory. This is a rank latinism, one of the countless ones in the hybrid idiom we call English. This language, awash in foreignisms, has largely lost its atavisitic footing in both lexicon and grammar. Other Germanic languages have either kept the old derivative of the Indo-European root for thought processes (*men-, as in Swedish minne) or struggle manfully for new metaphors (like German erinnern “recall”, literally, “internalize”). Russian has a prefixed pómnit, Greek and Latin show reduplicated mimnḗskō and memini, and even French attempts to create novelty like se souvenir or se rappeler; but the best English can do is use latinisms like memory and remember. Latin memor(ia) is of the “toothless” phonetic variety; the Sanskrit cognate is smárati, and in Gaulish Celtic, there was a goddess Rosmerta, the one who recalls ahead: “Promemoria” as it were— one of the Fates. So the proto-form of the reduplicated memor should be *s(m)esmor; if the s- is declared movable, there would have been the choice of memoria or smesmoria, in either case a far cry from the Greek equivalents mnḗmōn and mnēmosúnē.

The reduplication of memor and memini, as well as Greek mémnēmai, is that of a resultative or stative perfect verb stem meaning “to be in a state of recall,” to be mindful as a result of recall. The Romans ominously personified this remembering as the fate goddess Morta, while the Greeks preferred to make Mnemosyne the mother of the Muses, whose own name incidentally comes from the same word stem *men-. Mnemosyne as the deified Memory was the polar opposite of Lethe, Oblivion personified; according to Orphic eschatology, Hades had two springs of these very names: the departed devotee was to shun Lethe and drink of Mnemosyne, in order to attain a higher state of consciousness.

Having thus manhandled “memory,” let me turn to the second shibboleth of this occasion, “consciousness.” The ponderous ungainliness of the word itself bespeaks laborious derivation. Here is an abstract concept that took some doing to formulate. Latin conscius means ‘co-knowing’, sharing knowledge, probably a calque on Greek suneidṓ s. Sharing with whom? Apparently with one’s self, communing with one’s soul. But the derived nouns for the procedure, suneídesis and conscientia, do not mean ‘consiousness’ but rather ‘conscience’, preferably of the guilty kind. Here the Germanics had to struggle once again: when the gothic bishop Wulfila translated the Bible in the 4th century, he rendered Paul’s Epistle to Titus (1:15) as follows: autôn kaì ho noûs kaì hē suneídēsis, “even their mind and conscience,” ize jah aha jah miwissei. Later on, the Swedish preferred samvete for “conscience” and coined a new term, medvetande, “consciousness.” German has Gewissen for “conscience” and has invented Bewusstsein for “consciousness.” English has the same root in both wit and wisdom, but has of course once again thrown in the towel and turned to latinism.

So it looks like ancient cultures lacked a specific word for “consciousness.” But surely they were aware of what it meant to be conscious. This can be gauged by various procedures that range from metaphoric to etymological to literary. We already saw that self-awareness and inner thought were routinely expressed as “speaking to one’s soul.” A standard Homeric formula expresses this by the hexametric sequence taûth’ hṓrmaine katà phréna kaì katà thūmón, “he batted these matters about his phrḗn and his thūmós. What do these last words really mean?

It was common in ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures to locate thought and feeling in the central organs of the body: the heart, lung, liver, spleen, those that were centered around the midriff (Greek phragmós or diáphragma “barrier”) and were most often exposed in animals on occasions of sacrifice or divination. The word phrḗn, which denotes thought processes, was also taken to mean “midriff,” apparently as a routine designation of the “thought region,” as were prapídes (a further term for “midriff”) and stêthos (“chest”). Historically, however, phrḗn may well have been distinct from phragmós, although ultimately derived from the same root (phrak-< *bhṛgh-, “raise a barrier, bar, enclose”). Galen applied diáphragma both to the midriff and to the septum lucidum of the brain (Galen, 2:719), and the word ‘diaphragm’ has had further modern fortunes. For phrḗn I propose the following: Even as e.g. splḗn (“spleen”) reflects *splēghn- besides splánkhna (“entrails”) and Avestan spṛzan (“spleen”), phrḗn goes back to *bhrēghn-, of which an Indo-European cognate formation *bhroghno- is present in Proto-Germanic *bragna-, Old English braegen, and English brain. The literal meaning is “having a barrier.” It thus seems that phrḗn originally refers to the brain, although its locus had slipped under the impact of popular culture, even as our own idiom tends to overlook common sense when we “learn by heart,” distinguish “stout-hearted” from “lilly-livered,” or “get something off our chest.” Indeed modern phrenology has, perhaps instinctively, focused the meaning back on the skull. This is the more likely as Greek vocabulary is otherwise practically “brainless,” having only the late-origin nominalized hypostatic adjective enképhalos, meaning literally “inside the head”; Latin cerebrum and German him for “brain” are at least ancient collateral derivatives from the word root meaning “head.”

It thus looks like the common ancestors of the Greeks and Germanics—in other words, the Indo-Europeans—once knew the brain as the locus of consciousness. But what about the process of consciousness? Here, the other term, thūmós, joined formulaically to phrḗn in Homer, may be of some help. It is usually rendered as “soul, spirit,” but conceived as something dynamic, tied to physiological processes; death effectively snuffs it out. This is in stark contrast to the other word for spirit, psukhē, which does not disappear at death and lingers in Hades as a latent ghostly likeness, as eídōlon, in a suspended state. It can be temporarily reanimated, recalled to consciousness by necromantic ritual and the partaking of sacrificial blood, as during Odysseus’ Hades-journey in the Book of the Dead (Odyssey, Book Eleven). It thus seems that thūmós is the conscious part of psukhḗ in other words, consciousness. Consciousness required both brain (phrḗn) and blood, and indeed, the etymology of thūmós is Latin fūmus, which meant ‘smoke’ but also described reeking warm blood, so still in French, as when Racine in Phèdre has the heroine decribe the exploits of her husband Theseus: la Crète fumant du sang de Minotaure, “Crete is reeking with the blood of the Minaotaur.” The underlying verb thúō in Greek itself describes the ground awash in blood (dápedon haímati thúōn). The Greeks may not have been aware of the blood-brain barrier, but they certainly knew what it takes to sustain consciousness, even though uncharacteristically they did not have a word for it. English, on the other hand, redeems itself from rampant latinism by having kept in straight line an old Anglo-Saxon, Proto-Germanic, and Indo-European term for a functioning brain.

2

Chapter

Jüri Allik

Available and Accessible Information in Memory and Vision

The Key Process is Retrieval

Roddy Roediger made my task incomparably easier when he titled his talk on the conference in a form of a question: “Why is retrieval the key process in understanding memory?” This query is, of course, a rephrase of a well-known Endel Tulving’s dictum: “The key process of memory is retrieval. The storage or engram alone, in the absence of retrieval, is no better than no storage and no engram at all. If you know something, or if you have stored information about an event from the distant past, and never use that information, never think of it, your brain is functionally equivalent to that of an otherwise identical brain that does not contain that information” (Tulving, 1997).

In this paper, I am going to demonstrate that this dictum can and must be extended beyond memory. By demonstrating that the concept of retrieval is equally applicable to vision and not only to memory, it is possible to generalize this notion to perhaps all mental representations. In other words, I perceived my task in broadening the question by asking “why is retrieval the key process in understanding consciousness?”

There are, of course, a myriad of trivial and irrelevant common attributes between perception and memory, as between any two more or less arbitrarily chosen objects. The question is: Does the comparison between vision and memory make any sense beside obvious and uninteresting details? All studies of visual perception are based on an implicit assumption that there is an internal representation of a stimulus impinging on our sense organs. Analogously, memory research can hardly avoid a most natural assumption that after termination of an event, a trace engram of that past event has been left somewhere in the brain. However, although the assumption of the internal representation, be it a sensory or memory one, seems to be unavoidable, Gianfranco Dalla Barba questioned its necessity during a discussion initiated during this conference. In this regard, it will be both entertaining and educational to review a ponderous attack against what at that time was a very popular concept of iconic storage launched by Ralph Norman Haber more than a decade ago (Haber, 1983). In his spirited assault, Haber declared that the concept of icon, which, by the way, was in a great extent developed by his own very influential studies, was a 20-year mistake that can be eliminated from the science without any loss. His main argument was that an iconic storage is useless for normal perception. He claimed that no one would ever have found an icon, or even thought to invent one, if visual perception had been studied only with the kinds of continuously available displays one has when reading a text or looking at a scene and not by artifacts created by tachisto-scopes. He also asserted that there is no need to store visual inputs when these inputs are permanently available as they usually are. Indeed, it is possible that some perceptual tasks can be accomplished without accumulation of information over time (e.g., Horowitz & Wolfe, 1998), which, however, does not at all exclude the need to have a perceptual representation of the stimulus. As a general rule, the visual system handles information in a temporally distributed manner. The appeal to become free from internal representation is most often caused by an error that can be labeled the Fallacy of Localization (Hilbert, 1987): the assumption that the information that specifies an event perceived at the moment also needs to be temporally restrained to that moment. In the visual system, it is most common that any perceived stimulus value, at every moment of time, is influenced by what has happened during some period before the present moment. This reason alone speaks for the necessity of having a representation that lasts at least a minimal amount of time during the processing of the input information. In fact, psychophysical analysis is based on Thurstone’s basic idea that is, as it was nicely formulated by Robert Duncan Luce, the “essence of simplicity”: each time a signal is presented, it is transduced in the nervous system into an internal process representating the external signal. All decisions about the signal are assumed to be based entirely upon this representation because there is no other way that the signal can be explicated to the subject. As it was characterized by Luce, “this conception of internal representation of signals is so simple and so intuitively compelling that no one ever really manages to escape from it. No matter how one thinks about psychophysical phenomena, one seems to come back to it” (Luce, 1977). I am afraid that one can do nothing but agree with it.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Prologue: Memory and Consciousness in Tallinn
• Part I: Memory
• Part II: Consciousness
• Part III: The Brain
• Epilogue: Human Intelligence: A Case Study of How More and More Research Can Lead Us To Know Less and Less About a Psychological Phenomenon, Until Finally We Know Less Than We Did Before We Started Doing Research
• Author Index
• Subject Index