Topical Guide 621
Mark Dorset
Memory: Selective
Where Do You Stop? Chapter 25:
EVERY AFTERNOON, as soon as she got home from work, Ariane began watching television. Nearly every afternoon I watched with her. For hours and hours I watched movies and commercials on the Lodkochnikovs’ television sets, but I can’t recall one of them, even though I have a good memory for such things and can remember quite vividly certain movies and some favorite shows, personalities, actors, and actresses that I saw on television at home. The reason for this blind spot is that the cinematic memories that must be there are entirely obscured by another memory, one so bright that it obliterates all the others as the light of the sun obliterates the feeble light of distant stars. I can’t recall the television programs because I’m blinded by the memory of Ariane.
Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi, A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination
Memory is a central component of tbe brain mechanisms that lead to consciousness. It is commonly assumed that memory involves the inscription and storage of information, but what is stored? Is it a coded message? When it is “read out” or recovered, is it unchanged? These questions point to the widespread assumption that what is stored is some kind of representation. This chapter takes the opposite viewpoint, consistent with a selectionist approach, that memory is nonrepresentational. We see memory as the ability of a dynamic system that is molded by selection and exhibits degeneracy to repeat or suppress a mental or physical act. This novel view of memory is illustrated with a geological comparison; memory is more like the melting and refreezing of a glacier than it is like an inscription on a rock.
See also:
Memory TG 57, TG 125, TG 574, TG 583; Memory, Faulty: Causes of, Results of TG 34, TG 133; Memory, Remembering, Forgetting, and the Search for Lost Time TG 22; Memory, Faulty, Causes of Distortion in TG 97; Memories: Relationships Among; Relationships to Present Perceptions TG 463
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