Interlude

The Significance of Memory for the Psyche

Seven Items at Once.

It is intriguing to observe when the memory of C. auratus, commonly known as goldfish, is referenced to ridicule the lack of a person’s mnemonic capacity. Legend has it that a goldfish’s long-term memory lasts 3 seconds at most. Although the truth might lie somewhere around half a year, any split second of memory rivals the supernature of divine intervention.

Why is it such a mind-blowing realisation that any instant of memory is so remarkable in neuropsychology?

Simply speaking, any awareness of a timespan that stretches between physically temporarily distant instances is from any perspective of physical natural laws simply speaking: grand. This will become obvious by the end of this chapter, and, in a way, it is another purpose of these scripts’ drafting after all.

Damásio A suggested in his publications that the act of waking up is no trivia. Not because an all-mighty power has allowed us to be graced by a day of living. When we wake up, we hopefully and gratefully start to remember ourselves.

This Ourselves is the topic of this surprisingly labyrinthine interlude.

The Labyrinth.

According to Damásio A, when we wake up, we start with an it. Then, we move on to the this. The something that is not Us. Then, we again feel like Us, which is the object of becoming subject that physiologically starts to feel like Me.

This primal transition to the This versus Me is deeply meaningful in neuroscience. Dealing with me is an astounding matter for existentialism, theatre, art, opera, creativity and the daily messages to confidantes, or conversations with friends, to name admittedly very few.

End of the Labyrinth.

Truthfully, we are all matter and therefore Dust to Dust (therefore, matter that will return into matter, quoted from Ketuvim, Hebrew Bible, Ecclesiastes 3:20). Fortunately, ‘something undefined’ breathed a sense of immortality into us; that made Us. This became our persons, and, for the sake of perspective, we can call it, as it happened to us, Me.

Yet then, me is such a loaded pronoun. This pronoun lets us call You, something that is not us, a person that it is separated from Me. Then, how can we know that this It that you call You is not Me? The definite and final answer that philosophers, prophets, saints, and sages have submitted for ages is what we all knew. It is Your memory: “I remember that I am I. You remember that you are You.”; which is an active act, as we do not remember ourselves passively, only through the active effort of our minds. This is how identity works. Factually, any identity needs our personal memory and can be diminished by disease and may be conjured up by age in the terms of dementia (from de- [Latin], away from; mens [Latin], mind; demented [English], not possessing a mind).

The brain functions with no difference to this biological foundation. The brain is what created this conundrum of pronouns in the first place because it needs reference. I [the author] have never met a person who did not refer to him/erself other than Me. Again, this is it; namely Us.

Measurably, the holding of items in our minds is crucial to these specific memory skills and 7 is the number those studies have come around with. What does it mean if we can hold 7 items in our minds; how hard do our brains have to work to keep 7 items at once in our minds and what if we would be able to hold 8 items? 045 8356, which are 7 digits. If you try, you will only keep it in mind for a few lines and there is a good neuropsychological reason for this; yet there is no computational reason for it as far as we know.

The brain is our responsible organ for resolving mismatches in our thinking called cognitive dissonances. Neuroscience has ever been occupied with how the brain connects information which is the foundation of our mental capacity. In the social context however the separation of contradicting information to come to an operational strategy in behaviour may be individually of a most practicable value. The capacity of holding multiple thoughts at the same time has been evolutionarily of crucial importance.

When cognitive dissonances cannot be resolved by our minds, humans tend to start a self-defence reaction called retrospective justification when previous events are overwritten to justify the currently perceived situation. At the end, this process makes self-reflection and eye-witness testimonies the least reliable forms of scientific reporting.

The reason why identity is so important in our daily lives is that our social decision making is completely dependent on it. When individuals change the way that they see themselves, they always behave differently. As an unwanted consequence, adolescence is the most turbulent phase of a human’s life, mid-life crises ending second. When this shift in identity takes place, individuals often report to interpret events in their past differently. This change in interpretation results in a change of their memory and eventually in a change of behaviour.

One of the most intensively studied fields in neuroscience are the physical mechanisms around memory and learning. The more futuristic part of this is the transfer or overwriting of memories. Regarding our last consideration this quickly becomes an ethical question that has been subject to numerous science fiction stories. There have already been successful experiments of memory transfer between mice. It is only a matter of time until the way humans learn is revolutionarily changed, as learning from books, lectures and videos would be rendered completely obsolete. The overwriting of memory may also represent an exceedingly effective future treatment for trauma and anxieties.

Synaptic plasticity is considered the foundation of learning and memory. What these changes in the connection of nerve cells in our brain means has yet not been fully resolved. Our knowledge about this process however is exponentially increasing by each day. Although the strengthening of selected neuronal pathways connected to circumstantial contexts of mental activity has generally been the most widely accepted, there still exist aspects-adding theories that are plausible.

An intriguing one is currently suggested by Singer WJ who invites us to consider the deep-coding neocortical neuronal network less as a pipe system in which otherwise subcortical ‘hard-coded’ water stream-like information flows to convey its content. He rather describes neocortical neuronal activity as a still pond that resembles the waves on its surface, making our minds so much more flexible than those produced by other lesser neocortical mammals. Every time a neocortical neuron fires, it spreads its biased yet concentric signal like a single point that in a larger scale propagates along its matured network like a distinguished ripple in all directions. As such, each momentary conscious status of our human brain is physically speaking composed of how all neocortical neuronally propagating ripples interfere at the each mentally experienced moment. This leaves our brain in a unique assembly of electrobiochemical hills and valleys occurring in our human neocortex at every other millisecond.

To take this one step further, this certain experience-dependent bias towards certain states of hills and valleys of neocortical activity ultimately results in what we try to establish as our own momentary conscious identity.