Devin Sanchez Curry, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Studies In History And Philosophy Of Science Part B, 69 (2018) 72-85.
Descartes held the following view of declarative memory: to remember is to reconstruct an idea that you intellectually recognize as a reconstruction. Descartes countenanced two overarching varieties of declarative memory. To have an intellectual memory is to intellectually reconstruct a universal idea that you recognize as a reconstruction, and to have a sensory memory is to neurophysiologically reconstruct a particular idea that you recognize as a reconstruction. Sensory remembering is thus a capacity of neither ghosts nor machines, but only of human beings qua mind-body unions. This interpretation unifies Descartes’s various remarks (and conspicuous silences) about remembering, from the 1628 Rules for the Direction of the Mind through the suppressed-in-1633 Treatise of Man to the 1649 Passions of the Soul. It also rebuts a prevailing thesis in the current secondary literaturedthat Cartesian critters can remem- berdwhile incorporating the textual evidence for that thesisdDescartes’s detailed descriptions of the corporeal mechanisms that construct sensory memories.
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Sheena A Josselyn et al., Finding the engram, , 2015 pp. 1-14.
Many attempts have been made to localize the physical trace of a memory, or engram, in the brain. However, until recently, engrams have remained largely elusive. In this Review, we develop four defining criteria that enable us to critically assess the recent progress that has been made towards finding the engram. Recent ‘capture’ studies use novel approaches to tag populations of neurons that are active during memory encoding, thereby allowing these engram-associated neurons to be manipulated at later times. We propose that findings from these capture studies represent considerable progress in allowing us to observe, erase and express the engram.
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Paul Marshall and Timothy W Bredy, Cognitive neuroepigenetics: the next evolution in our understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying learning and memory?, Nature Publishing Group, 2016 pp. 1-9.
A complete understanding of the fundamental mechanisms of learning and memory continues to elude neuroscientists. Although many important discoveries have been made, the question of how memories are encoded and maintained at the molecular level remains. So far, this issue has been framed within the context of one of the most dominant concepts in molecular biology, the central dogma, and the result has been a protein-centric view of memory. Here, we discuss the evidence supporting a role for neuroepigenetic mechanisms, which constitute dynamic and reversible, state-dependent modifications at all levels of control over cellular function, and their role in learning and memory. This neuroepigenetic view suggests that DNA, RNA and protein each influence one another to produce a holistic cellular state that contributes to the formation and maintenance of memory, and
predicts a parallel and distributed system for the consolidation, storage and retrieval of the engram.
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J L McGaugh, Memory--a Century of Consolidation, Science, 287 (2000) 248-251.
The memory consolidation hypothesis proposed 100 years ago by Mu ̈ller and Pilzecker continues to guide memory research. The hypothesis that new memories consolidate slowly over time has stimulated studies revealing the hormonal and neural influences regulating memory consolidation, as well as molecular and cellular mechanisms. This review examines the progress made over the century in understanding the time- dependent processes that create our lasting memories.
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S Steinvorth et al., Ecphory of autobiographical memories: an fMRI study of recent and remote memory retrieval, Studies In History And Philosophy Of Science Part B, 2006.
Ecphory occurs when one recollects a past event cued by a trigger, such as a picture, odor, or name. It is a central component of autobiographical memory, which allows us to “travel mentally back in time” and reexperience specific events from our personal past. Using fMRI and focusing on the role of medial temporal lobe (MTL) structures, we investigated the brain bases of autobiographical memory and whether they change with the age of memories. Importantly, we used an ecphory task in which the remote character of the memories was …
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Ingmar E J de Vries et al., Oscillatory Control over Representational States in Working Memory, Trends In Cognitive Sciences, 24 (2020) 150-162.
In the visual world, attention is guided by perceptual goals activated in visual working memory (VWM). However, planning multiple-task sequences also re- quires VWM to store representations for future goals. These future goals need to be prevented from interfering with the current perceptual task. Recent findings have implicated neural oscillations as a control mechanism serving the imple- mentation and switching of different states of prioritization of VWM representa- tions. We review recent evidence that posterior alpha-band oscillations underlie the flexible activation and deactivation of VWM representations and that frontal delta-to-theta-band oscillations play a role in the executive control of this process. That is, frontal delta-to-theta appears to orchestrate posterior alpha through long-range oscillatory networks to flexibly set up and change VWM states during multitask sequences.
(web, pdf)