Adventures in Memory

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Hilde østby. Adventures in Memory

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CONTENTS

Foreword

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In other words, each memory consists of different bits and pieces brought together in one unified wave of consciousness. Each part of the memory originates in a different part of the brain, where it first made a sensory impact. To make the whole thing feel like one experience, one unique memory, requires intricate brain interaction. William James didn’t know exactly how this worked, but thinking of memory and mind the way he did in the 1890s was remarkable. When James was alive, people thought of each memory as a unit, a copy of reality, like something that could be pulled out of a folder in a filing cabinet. That the key to understanding memory was the seahorse—slowly swaying in rhythm with the sensory areas and the emotion and awareness centers of the brain—wouldn’t be discovered for another hundred years. Just a few years before James’s armchair observations, researchers had discovered how neurons are connected to each other with a slight gap in between them called a synapse: the so-called neuron doctrine. From that discovery to today’s brain research, where we can virtually watch memories come to life in the brain, has been a long journey.

We can all benefit from making that journey and learning more about our memories. A small seahorse turned out to be the key to many of the brain’s mysteries. When Julius Caesar Arantius named it the hippocampus, it probably was not solely due to its appearance. Seahorses, like silkworms, were special and somewhat mysterious during the Italian Renaissance. When an event is special and unique, it helps the hippocampus hold on to it as a memory. We know that now, but Arantius could not have known that about the tiny part of the brain he had discovered. He just wanted his discovery to be noticed—and remembered.

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