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Where does memory reside? It is a question that fascinates us
all. We hear a melody that lasts a few seconds, and we carry it with us for a
lifetime. Experience somehow leaves its mark on the brain. But how can something
as fleeting as a song take on substance and become part of the brain, part of
the body? How do we carry around the past inside our heads? Images
of faces, the plots of a thousand novels and movies, the way hamburgers taste
and coffee smells -- all this information is somehow stored in the tangles of
neurons that live inside us. Piece by piece, the stuff of experience is snapped
together to build the grand structures, the palaces of memory, that serve as our
representations of the world. Armed with a new set of
tools and theories, biologists, psychologists, physicists, and philosophers are
knocking down the walls that have traditionally divided their fields and joining
in the search for the secrets of memory. This book focuses on three of the most
important people in the quest: Gary Lynch, a brilliant, hyperactive biologist,
is investigating how memory causes new circuits to form in the brain. Leon Cooper,
a physicist who shared a Nobel Prize for the theory of superconductivity, has
turned his sights on one of the most difficult questions of psychology: how the
memories of a lifetime are recorded and arranged inside the head. And Patricia
Churchland -- a philosopher who, weary of the arid abstractions of her field,
went to medical school so she could study real human brains -- is now helping
to form bridges between biology and philosophy. For years
biologists, psychologists, and philosophers felt they had almost nothing in common:
Why should a philosopher study the intricacies of synapses? Why should a biologist
care about Kant? But a theory of memory must account for both the behavior of
neurons and the behavior of people. In the last few years,
theorists like Lynch, Cooper, and Churchland have started talking to one another,
discovering that they each have things to teach and learn. By visiting these explorers
of the inner realm and describing their latest discoveries about memory, the author
captures the spirit of a great new venture, an intellectual alliance that may
finally lead to a solid understanding of the brain and mind. George
Johnson is an editor of "The Week in Review" section of The New
York Times and the author of Machinery of the Mind: Inside the New Science
of Artificial Intelligence. His work has appeared in The New York Times
Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and The Sciences. He
lives in New York City. |
