Help! I am losing my memory!

Prince, n'enquerez de sepmaine

Ou elles sont, ne de cest an,

Qu'a ce reffrain ne vous remaine:

Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan ? François Villon [1]

“Dos o tres veces había reconstruido un día entero; no había dudado nunca, pero cada reconstrucción había requerido un día entero. Me dijo: ‘Más recuerdos tengo yo solo que los que habrán tenido todos los hombres desde que el mundo es mundo’.” Y también, hacia el alba: ‘Mi memoria, señor, es como vaciadero de basuras’." [2] Borges, “Funes el memorioso”

"Except time all things are created. Time is the creator; and Time has no limit, neither top nor bottom. It has always been and shall be for evermore. No sensible person will say whence time has come. In spite of all the grandeur that surrounded it, there was no one to call it creator; for it had not brought forth creation. Then it created fire and water; and when it had brought them together, Ohrmazd came into existence, and simultaneously Time became Creator and Lord with regard to the creation it had brought forth."

 

Zoroaster

I have a friend who keeps complaining that he is losing his memory. Once I asked him how he knew. After mulling the question over for a while, he gave me this surprising reason: “Well, I can’t remember the pre-Socratics.” I told him that if he couldn’t remember the pre-Socratics, he obviously wasn’t losing his memory, because he remembered that there were pre-Socratics, so he had also to know that there was a Socrates and a Plato, to what he obviously assented. And furthermore if he couldn’t remember the pre-Socratics, this meant that he was remembering that he once remembered the pre-Socratics, for after all every bit of information in a brain once acquired became part of memory, which implied that in forgetting something that he once knew and had in his memory he was remembering a hell of a lot. However, if he thought that his father was a pre-Socratic, which was not the case, then his memory was really befuddled. So in adducing something that he remembered as evidence of forgetfulness, then his memory was understandably not infallible but still quite functional. Memory has this property of making you go around in circles but in his case, circularity, which usually leads nowhere, led to the reliable conclusion that he wasn’t losing his memory. I do not remember how long this conversation went on, nor whether he was convinced by my arguments at the end of it, but I am certainly not taking this lapse in my own memory as evidence of memory loss, and certainly not any lack of inferential power, for there was no way for me to get into his brain to determine in what state it was in after our talk assuming that it was in another before. One thing I was sure of was that you can make many valid statements about your mind without knowing what is going in your brain.

 

            Memory is the cognitive process that with logic underpins all other cognitive processes. It is constituted by the functions of storage and recall. It sustains perception and it makes possible instant-to-instant continuities. It can be argued that, physiology aside, it is possible to give a sufficient account of recognition invoking memory and logic without reference to whatever processes make perception possible. If I see a face in a crowd which I remember I know but do not immediately recognize, I can, from the recall of having just seen it, search my memory ignoring the concept of face itself and, through a method not unlike that of a victim or a witness going through a catalogue of mug shots, hit on the representation of the face I just saw with a name on it plus a host of other properties. In functioning, memory is constantly recurring to “intuitive logic” and this means it is always using logical axioms or principles and operators and derivations in storage. Every act of recognition is both logical and long-term, so much so that if perception is recognition, then perception has to be always in touch with memory and logic. Memory is a pervasive, non-specific function of mind. Memory is so totally interactive with other functions and properties of mind that it is difficult to separate it from them. If perception cannot function without memory, how can we say which aspect of perception is specifically memory? And if we cannot isolate memory in perception, how can we distinguish between the two? Memory is not exactly perception and certainly not logic, but neither logic nor perception could function without memory. It is this being indispensable for all mental processes that makes memory totally interactive with them. And just as it is interactive, so memory is unitary in the sense of not being reducible to categories within itself or different from the basic concept of memory. Since memory is always there supporting all our mental faculties, it could be argued that it entirely embraces the subconscious, where all cognitive processes occur. But the subconscious is the “functional space” not only for memory but for all mental functions that are not identical to memory. The subconscious must be different from memory and probably contains functions above the basic cognitive trio of memory, logic, and perception. Since memory supports logic and perception, which have their own “rules and principles”, then conceivably the “rules of the subconscious” are what permit and organize the interaction between cognitive processes crucially supported by memory.

 

            Insensitive or lifeless matter preceded life, but for life to survive, there had to be memory and logic. Since there cannot be logic without storage space, memory precedes everything else. If things are to develop in a nomic way, there must always be room for laws and principles. But even though there had to be space for logic before logic could function, memory without logic is empty space, and there is no space without objects, just as you cannot have objects without time. Memory is a necessary result of the temporality of sentience. Assuming here a heck of a lot, the first living being must have had mobility and DNA and either had already made the evolutionary leap to memory storage or developed it through genetic trial-and-error. All of this requires existence in time, which goes for all existents of course, but one can imagine a stone existing unchanged through eons, but not life without memory. Supposing this first living organism divided through mitosis, it would not require memory to reproduce itself, but eventually a profusion of cells would be bumping into each other and maybe one swallowed another. It would therefore require memory for the cells to remember to avoid each other or maybe to go where they could feed on other cells. Time and life are so inextricably interlinked that it would be as inconceivable to separate them as to break the time-space conjunction.

 

            Memory functions continually. If it ceased functioning, the individual would be as if dead for all intents and purposes: he would stand still, he would not be able to utter a sound, he probably might not even be able to stand up, and so on. In the case of logic memory "contains" all the principles of reason or intuitive logic. In theory, our ability to reason might not seem to be equivalent to memory, but in practice logic and memory should be co-extensive, for there is not one operation in either “realm” that doesn’t require the other “realm”. When we do logical operations we have to have memory. When we recall we do so in accordance with logical rules. Even memory storage, although this in un-provable and even dense to speculation, could be related to the way logic works, as for instance when cognition hierarchizes propositions, which obviously is not done in a haphazard way. Memory supports logic and logic depends on memory. Memory therefore is the necessary basis without which intuitive logic could not function. In the case of perception, memory makes possible the application to sensations of the process of recognition. But before recognition occurs, logic must be present to prevent us from confusing a tint for another or a meter for a kilometer. Memory stores the “composite tokens” of perception and with logic provides the basis upon which perception derives the types which make recognition possible. As in the case of logic, perception has a specific function, which is recognition. Memory and logic make possible the specific function of perception. But perception in turn “feeds” memory and is constantly “stimulating” logic.

 

            Recall, like any basic cognitive process, must be rule-bound. Proposition-x can recall such and such propositions. Proposition-x will recall such and such propositions. It will not recall any other propositions. It will recall such and such propositions if such and such other propositions are also involved in the recall process. Since inference is derivation according to rules, recall is also inferential. Recall involves association. I see a street where I witnessed a crime. Whenever I see the same street, I recall the crime. There is no equivalence between “a street” and “crime”, yet the memory of the crime is an inference. We perceive a “bundle” of sensations. According to the rules of perception, such a combination of sensations is an object that we will always recognize as such. Why do I infer that a combination of sensations is a recognizable object? There is no reason why I should other than the process of perception. I see a street. I recognize the street. I remember the crime I saw being committed in that street. What is involved here is: (1) I can recall certain propositions; (2) I will recall certain propositions under certain circumstances; (3) the memory of a crime fits the circumstances under which I will recall certain propositions; (4) I will recall certain propositions. If recognition necessarily involves a rule-bound process, then the logical form can be clearly established. Let us say that from these cases: a à seeing a street; b à recognition; c à recall; d à crime; we obtain the syllogism: a = b; b = c; c = d; therefore, a = d. Seeing the street “logically” leads to recalling the crime. However, even though the “logical form” is intact, recalling the crime is not an apodictic inference. “Street” and “crime” have different meanings. I could go past the same street and not necessarily recall the crime for any  number of reasons.

 

            Memory is functioning continually in a manner consistent with logic. But reason could not function without memory. Basic cognitive functions interact. Memory and intuitive logic designate different but reciprocal functions. Association applies to memory just as intuitive logic does. Association itself must conform to the principles of intuitive logic. From association as applied to memory we can make logical inferences. Reason is the application of logical forms to reality. Hence, memory is rational.  Reason and intuitive logic differ from formal logic in the epistemic qualification of their yields. All inferences in formal logic are apodictic. This is not the case of intuitive logic, even though it is from intuitive logic that formal-logic systems are derived. Memory supports logic and logic depends on memory. Memory therefore is the necessary basis without which intuitive logic could not function. In the case of perception, memory stores the composite tokens of perception and provides the basis on which perception derives the types which make recognition possible. As in the case of logic, perception has a specific function, which is recognition, and memory makes possible the specific function of perception. The circularities here are various but inevitable.

 

            The processes of memory must be such that they cannot modify the principles of logic and perception. But since memory is the support for all mental processes, then the rules of memory must have to do with the way that it supports and makes possible perception and reason. It is feasible, then, that it is memory or some memory-like super-faculty that is the agency for the previously hypothesized “rules of the subconscious”. Given that it is always a specific self that reasons and perceives, the rules of memory must be intimately related to the specific self. It could be, then, that memory is ultimately what keeps the specific self together and that its “rules” are those that determine how our specific selves are structured. Since the “cognitive system” contains instructions for recall, we must assume that such instructions involve continuity. An instruction such as this one: "sensations can be recalled", implies an instruction such as this one: "sensations are recalled to somewhere"; and if sensations are recalled to somewhere, then recalled sensations themselves go to somewhere specific. The system, or rather, every mental symbol and every operation of the system, involves a central "somewhere" to which the symbols of the mental language whether actual or stored go when they function as sensation or as memory, and this "somewhere" has to be the specific self. The specificity of memory/self is the tacit condition for “ascription”—some ideas I know, or believe, are mine, but others are not—and “conforms the space” where propositions are stored and hierarchized and even defended should the need arise. There is no inferable difference between the specific self and its specific subconscious.

 

            Concept is the name on the "label" for the propositions that constitute inferences from perception. When we recall, we are recalling a “label”, and this means that we are recalling a bundle of propositions. A concept is also the mental-language equivalent of a noun. “Symbolic equivalence” implies that a concept is a proposition. In the case of the recognition of a tree, there is straightforward recall. Although many propositions may be involved, the recall can be said to be thorough. Recognizing a tree means recalling all the basic propositions that conform the concept of tree (though not necessarily botanical, unless I were a botanist). In recalling a concept it is hardly ever the case, even for objects of perception, that we recall every proposition under the concept's "label". We may just recall the minimum of propositions needed for recognition. But we can also, depending on the time and the interest we give to a scene before us, recall many other propositions, and even in such cases it is not likely that we ever exhaust all the propositions that come under the label of whatever it is that we are perceiving. Analogically, our general perception of a view of a city is never such that it converts every detail into inferences, unless we concentrate on parts of what we are viewing. Our recall of such a view will never be such that it can evoke all the possible aspects or angles that it offered to perception, although it is possible to recall salient details in the panorama that we have stored in memory, such as that a specific building stood out over all the others or estimates of the length and width of the area our visual perception embraced.

 

            If we switch from perception to the grasp of interpretative propositions, e.g., of concepts such as justice, society, et al, the process of recall will be doubly or trebly or immeasurably complicated by all the countless possibilities of interpretation, which are in turn made more numerous and complex in direct proportion to the degree of uncertainty involved in such propositions. Recall is, except perhaps for the simplest, most elementary forms of recognition, an unutterably complex process in which one or many propositions will bring to mind many other propositions, and in the case of interpretations, an unending chain of related, and often only tenuously related, propositions. This can be said of the view of a city with equal validity, but for that when we perceive we are dealing with factual propositions and, though we may overlook details or make incorrect inferences about, say, the real dimensions involved, we have the possibility rectification and opinions as such cannot be matched to “external correlates”. In the case of an object we know, perception takes in the bundle of sensations and in the act of taking in the bundle, it refers it to memory and memory then finds the equivalence to the impression and in the act of finding this equivalence it converts sensations into recognition. Although “in the act” processes, perception and memory can be distinguished as being different cognitive acts. But also in being “in the act” processes we are justified in saying that perception, even as it requires memory for recognition, is itself recognition. The interaction and speed of our cognitive abilities is such that it is possible but not easy to distinguish between “in the act” processes. Perception is recognition concomitant with memory, so that, even though perception and memory are different, it is their interaction that yields recognition. The same mnemonic process is active in sensation. Memory is already in the newborn and it interacts from the start with sensations and later of course with perception.

 

            This brief “holistic” view of the mind presupposes that the brain is so tightly meshed that it is wholly employed for every cognitive operation and its results. It is a somewhat abstract presentation. When we see something, we can do so because memory and logic are involved and not as adjuncts or as supports but as integral to perception and recognition. Memory and logic are always all over mind not just in the sense of allowing or permitting something but so necessary to everything that mind does that it is nearly impossible to tell them apart: when we perceive we are remembering and reasoning and when we remember, for one thing, we need not exclude the memory/perception fusing, and for another, we could not think at all without memory. Some of these propositions are inescapable, unless we ascribed some sort automatism to any of them permitting their independent operation, but this is conceivable only if we recognize objects of which we have no memory or remembered in a higgledy-piggledy manner or if we inhabited a cartoon-like universe in which oak trees walked and objects changed shape on whim, like a bunny coming out of a hat in the form of a two-fanged, red-eyed, ravenous monster.

 

            The quality of “abstraction” of the previous model consist principally in that it considers the brain as an integrated whole. But nowadays neuroscience has a different view. From either serendipitous or “sought-for” results in neurological practice and experiments, there has emerged a picture in which the brain is “specialized” in the sense that certain of its areas have specific functions, like “laying down” memories or experiencing joy or anxiety, as far as neuroscientists can at present tell, independently of each other. Thus, from this perspective love can be localized and memory is not unitary but fragmented. The brain is so specialized that a part of it can be engaged in an activity while another part is doing something else. Since we have argued for the constant and inescapable subconsciousness of cognition, a holistic view is not necessarily incompatible with the simultaneous functioning of different neurological processes, but holism cannot back away from the contention that no function involving the mind/brain can be specialized in the sense of separating logic from perception or memory from logic. Mind/brain functions stand or fall together.

 

            In the entertaining work Phantoms in the brain, Dr. V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee have compiled a veritable encyclopedia of what is known about the “dedicated areas” of the brain. [3] Ramachandra/Blakeslee do not tackle logic but they do make categorical affirmations about perception and memory. They offer interpretations of abnormal psychic phenomena, which is the meat and bones of brain specialization. In general, they hew to what other researchers believe they have achieved, much of which has become standard stuff in psychoneurology. On holism as opposed to brain specialization the authors have this to say:  “At one end of the spectrum are modularists who believe that different parts of the brain are highly specialized for mental capacities…At the other end of the spectrum we have ‘holism’, a theoretical approach that overlaps with what these days is called ‘connectionism’. This school of thought argues that the brain functions as a whole and that any part is as good as any other part. The holistic view is defended by the fact that many areas, especially cortical regions, can be recruited for multiple tasks…As it now stands, a wealth of empirical evidence supports the idea that there are indeed specialized parts or modules of the brain for various mental capacities.” Strictly speaking, philosophical holism makes no such claim because it does not possess the wherewithal to do so. But from the application of logic to broad, “verifiable” phenomena, such as memory, which even behaviorists have to assume for their theories to work, it cannot accept unqualifiedly that the brain is basically specialized.

 

            Curiously, Ramachandran/Blakeslee implicitly sanction the “propositional theory mind”, which is the cornerstone of the holistic view of the brain. Thus they write: “So the first step in understanding perception is to get rid of the idea of images in the brain and to begin thinking about symbolic descriptions of objects and events in the external world. A good example of a symbolic description is a written paragraph like the ones in this page. If you had to convey to a friend in China what your apartment looks like, you wouldn’t have to teletransport it to China. All you’d have to do would be to write a letter describing your apartment. Yet the actual squiggles of ink—the words and paragraphs in the letter—bear no physical resemblance to your bedroom. The letter is a symbolic description of your bedroom.” If this is the case, then the “squiggles” in your letter must correspond to “squiggles” in your brain. There are of course no “squiggles” in your brain, except perhaps as analogies for neurons, but the description in the letter is an extremely rough transcription of what you are perceiving and you cannot perceive without memory and logic. If mind is “propositional”, then it is very hard if not impossible to compartmentalize brain functions. Propositions can convey the same thought in different ways, as in using for an action, say, house painting, the active or the passive mode, but they all have meaning in common. If the mind is propositional, then the brain must be the “instrument of meaning” and for this it must act through the coordination of all its parts. The brain, like mind, must be “propositional” and the squiggles of writing being in the same category, then neurons too must have more in common than the specializations that their location in the different parts of the brain suggests.  

 

            The idea of brain specialization is broadly based on the anatomical observation that most of the brain is divided into two hemispheres externally exactly alike. One feature on which neuroscience seems to be in consensual agreement is that the left hemisphere has to do with speech. As there is no case where an entire lobe has been removed—not anyway that any one has survived—and looking at neurons themselves does not reveal specialization, there is no way to prove this contention conclusively, although observable events such as amputations, speech slurring, memory loss, etc. do provide means to link the brain to functions. Ramachandran/Blakeslee argue for “relative” specialization from “phantom-limb sensations”—the illusory experience that an amputated limb is still attached to the body transmitting signals to awareness and obeying mental commands—which was first reported of Civil War veterans by the American physician Silas Weir Mitchell in 1872. Phantom-limb reports contradict the thesis that perception, memory, and logic act together. As there are no "receptors" transmitting signals from an inexistent source, it was assumed that some mechanism in the brain was responsible for phantom limbs and that this mechanism operated in the area of the brain formerly "linked" to the lost organ. Further research has apparently shown that phantom- limb sensations are also activated through the stimulation of parts of the body unrelated to the missing limb. In one case cited by Ramachandran, touching the lips of an amputee set off "signals" from a "phantom arm". These experiments—all of which, incidentally, depend on the strictly subjective reports of patients—have led to speculation that the links between specific areas of the brain and specific parts of the body are not hard and fast and that signals from the body connect not to a specific brain area but also to adjacent areas between which linkages and transferences are possible. The "modular" neurological explanation to which Ramachandra inclines implies extreme specialization. The process involves limited inter-connectedness and specific memory storage. It is subconscious and surfaces to awareness without the intervention of the entire cognitive system. Memory appears not to function. Now, this poses a problem for “squiggles theory” because if intuitive logic and memory are involved in the cognitive processing of phantom-limb sensations, then such reports should not arise at all.

 

            Let us begin with the phantom limb itself and specifically with the distinction between sensation and perception. What do reports of phantom limbs refer to? Let us assume that sensation is a pre-perceptual stage through which the newborn passes before the recognition of things. The awareness of sensations consists, first, in their typing as seeing, hearing, feeling, and so on; and, then, in their subtypification as specific colors, sounds, etc. This stage is of short duration. Perception involves typification and specification of objects. When the body is stroked by some object, cognition perceives that it is skin, cloth, cotton, whatever the type-source may be. Perception also distinguishes, for instance, between stroking with a dry or a soaked piece of cotton. Both in the pre-perceptual phase and in perception memory and logic are involved. It is “squiggles” and the entire cognitive system that are active in having sensations and in perceiving. Beyond the pre-perceptual stage, cognition cannot have "pure" sensations. Sensations are recognized either through the “deliberate” cognitive “disassembly” of perception or, dubiously, in what are called “raw percepts”, which are really perceptions which do not evoke immediate recognition. Reports of phantom limbs appear to refer "mainly" to what is called kinesthesia, which is the vague feeling that we have of the “presence” of the body to awareness (“muscle sense”). This can be explained cognitively in many possible ways none of which affect the interactive property of squiggles/neurons. However, phantom-limb reports seem to indicate sensation from a specific part of the body which no longer exists. Phantom limbs constitute a kind of reversion to the pre-perceptual stage.

 

            There is an opening for phantom-limb reports in “memory imprints”. When pressure is applied continuously for a “long time” to a certain part of the body, the impression on memory is greater than, for example, that of a handshake, although a handshake can be painful as when some one is trying to be self-assertive. When the prolonged pressure eases off, the memory imprint remains and it could momentarily provoke the impression that the pressure is still there. Losing a limb, to be sure, is not just pressing flesh but the memory imprint concept is applicable. The thigh on one side could be more sensitive, for perhaps a rheumatic or some other cause, than the other thigh. One could experience a tendency for a leg to claudicate and have the sensation even when not walking. As limbs are massively connected through their part of the nervous system to the brain, their memory imprints have to be deep, intense, too numerous to count. The loss of a limb does not erase memory imprints and if these can give false signals from superficial causes, it is more than likely that phantom-limb sensations have their origins in memory as a “generalized function” of the nervous system. The involvement of only portions of the brain would hardly justify the persistence and the intensity of phantom-limbs reports. Their explanation must involve not just the storage of the countless of propositions about the experience of a specific limb, but also the totality of the cognitive system making derivations from basic processes such as storing and recalling propositions, subjecting all propositions to the examination of intuitive logic, everything occurring without cessation—even in our dreams we can have the experience of bodily motion—and without any restrictions on the properties of cognition and in particular its unhindered inter-activeness. The breadth and depth of experience required for phantom-limb reports cannot be accounted for if we circumscribed the experience of having any organ to only certain presumed portions or modules of the brain with only limited or function-specific cognitive properties. For modularity and neurological research based on its premises to work, we would have to assume "portions" of memory and "portions" of logic restricted to sections of brain tissue.

 

            It is not only duration that is the cause of strong memory imprints. Specialized neurological mechanisms, assuming they exist, also require the constantly interactiveness of cognitive functions. Ramachandra cites a "swinging arms mechanism or module" in the brain separate from memory and logic, or as if it were endowed with specific memory and logic functions. “This is not as mysterious as it sounds. The brain region responsible for smoother, coordinated swinging of the arms when we walk is quite different from the one that controls gesturing. Perhaps the neural circuitry for arm swinging cannot survive very long without continuous nurturing feedback from the limbs. It simply drops out or fails to develop when the arms are missing. But the neural circuitry for gesticulation—activated during spoken language—might be specified by genes during development.” But swinging one's arms is never accomplished without the concourse of our ability to recall, to perceive, to determine whether if swinging our arms will result in bumping against a hard surface or whether doing so should be done when we are standing still or walking. An automatized, "zombie" type behaviour simply will not do. Nor does it seem likely that a module functions separately from the memory function in its entirety, as when, for instance, we know from past experience that swinging our arms when walking on a narrow surface will not only not help us in keeping our balance but might be detrimental to that end. The function of a limb is so complex and involves so many neural connections that it is rather a case of disproving its interconnectedness with the entire cognitive system than of proving that it is connected to specific parts of the brain.

 

            Let us consider this possibility. The memory involved in repeating certain physical movements would seem to be different from the memory function in doing formal-logic operations. When Kurt Gödel, for instance, was working on his famous theorem “proving” that every number entailed its negation—hence, that number theory was inconsistent—his mind must also obviously have been directing the movement of his hands and his arms and possibly, assuming he was working on a blackboard, even his legs. Now, after he had finished his day's work and had started walking back to his home, "zombie modularity" would have us believe that the cognitive system Gödel had been utilizing was suddenly either reduced to or substituted by the swinging-arms "operation" and restricted to a barest fraction of its cognitive power which before must have been at a peak of wholeness not to say alertness. This might be overdoing an argument, so let us assume that Gödel on his way home was not only swinging his arms as any human would but he was still thinking of some particular step in the equations he had been working on before. In other words, memory, not to mention logic, were still very much active in his mind or in his brain (either way is valid). In the "zombie" theory, Gödel's mind or brain would be literally split: one part corresponding to the swinging arms module and its memory and the other part corresponding to the "intellectual" memory of what he was doing before and to the vast storehouse of his knowledge of formal logic and number theory. Gödel would have been a kind of "normal schizophrenic", or perhaps more accurately, a "normal" person suffering from a "multiple-function disorder", for in heading back to his home he not only would be swinging his arms but also treading his ways through halls, opening doors, orienting himself outside of his working area, maybe deciding to take a stroll in the park or going to church to ask for further enlightenment on how he could confound mathematicians or win a coveted prize for showing up the incompleteness and inconsistency of formal systems, and so on.

 

            But now let us assume the implications of holism in this case. While Gödel was working his entire cognitive system—memory, perception, intuitive logic, its basic trinity—were operating interactively making inferences not only about specific steps in his intellectual task but about his physical movements and about anything that he might have been experiencing whether or not related to his work. He might, for instance, have noticed that a moth had alighted on the blackboard—itself a perceptual inference—and after considering certain premises he might have decided either to squash it or shoo it away, another inference, or perhaps the inference was that if he ignored this insignificant distraction it would of its own go away or drop dead. At one point, Gödel would have inferred that it was about time to put an end to his labours for the day. So, inferentially, he would have shifted his attention to that end and he would have begun returning to his quarters. As he proceeded to do so, his subconscious cognitive processes would certainly not have suddenly become compartmentalized or partitioned or in any way restricted or limited but would have gone operating in full except of course that the necessity of undertaking different cognitive operations and their "translation" to physical movements would have "adapted" the cognitive system in its entirety to other processes "generating" the respective successive, alternating instantaneous contents of awareness. As his cognitive system was fully operational, Gödel would not only have been accomplishing his intention of returning home but his cognitive system would continue operating, processing countless propositions in the same manner in which it previously had been accomplishing the processes of his specifically "intellectual" work. The cognitive trinity would be as active before as after his work as logician and mathematician. Gödel the ordinary swinging-arms person would still be Gödel the theoretical genius at work. His brain would be as wholly, rather than partially, active in one situation as in the other.

 

            Ramachandra/Blakeslee cite cases of the neurologically perplexing phenomenon involving recognition despite impaired vision, concretely what has come to be known as "blindsight". Certain subjects who have suffered damage to, say, the right visual cortex— the part of the brain that receives signals from the left eye resulting in left-side blindness—demonstrate the ability to "see" on the left side of the visual field. This would of course also be the case of the left visual cortex which processes input from the right eye. Reports of blindsight include "seeing" the position of a stick or being able to grasp a hand extended towards the blind left side. The question is: how can there be recognition of an object or of movement that is not being perceived? To explain this, neurologists have adduced two pathways from the retinas to the brain: one to the cortexes on the two hemispheres of the brain and the other to a single area known as the superior colliculus at the base of the brain. Although physically there is no observable connection between these two parts of the brain's anatomy, Ramachandra/Blakeslee speculate that, despite the injury to the right cortex, the second pathway still functions and transmits "visual" information on the left, invisible side of the visual field. Since persons who evince blindsight are not actually aware of seeing anything in their left field of vision yet their cognitive systems functions as if they were, what exactly is it that is going on? Presumably the superior colliculus is doing the work of normal vision but without recognition, suggesting again a reversion to a pre-perceptual stage. The implications of this neurological account are again highly problematical. How can there be sensation without perception or awareness? Assuming that it were possible, then obviously two separate cognitive processes would be involved and these would imply again the "fragmentation" of the cognitive system entailing specific memory and specific logical functions—the sensations reported in “blindsight” not being self-contradictory, it is obvious that the principle of identity is not being dispensed with—different from the cognitive properties of recall-and-storage and of intuitive logic which "suffuse" the subconscious cognitive processes underlying awareness. A person endowed with “blindsight” would be exhibiting two distinct and mutually independent cognitive mechanisms. Such a person would be an extreme example of our imagined logico-mathematical genius who in a strictly "constructionist" neurological account could not do math and swing his arms at the same time. Furthermore, our “blindsighted” individual would have two innate logical systems, one, fully developed in perception and awareness, and another, so backward it can not relate the sensations on his left visual field to what is going on in the external world. A propositional theory of cognition is perfectly compatible with the localization of perception in the visual cortex. Assuming this to be an established neurological fact, nothing that is speculated about mental functions can be inconsistent with it. It cannot be argued, for instance, that because perceiving is propositional, the loss of vision in one eye will not affect in any way the description of the process of perceiving with two eyes. Or that, for instance, a person who loses his ability to see, even if only momentarily (as a result, say, of a diabetic coma), is "seeing" an object which that person touches and can "imagine" in all its visual details because memory and logic were not affected by the blindness.

 

            Perception could not operate without memory and logic. Visual recognition is inconceivable without the processes of typification and specification involved in memory and logic. The information that vision processes would be meaningless without a mental type corresponding to that information. The recognition of a known specific object requires its identification as a type of object and as a token of that type. Both nearly instantaneous processes occur in propositions which represent them in accordance with the processes that they also represent and apply in a constantly interactive manner. In these processes intuitive logic would prevent memory from "forwarding" the recognition of a door when sensations were being bound into the type of a table. Or confusing the specific table that is being perceived with another table that was perceived in a restaurant the night before. Conversely, perception can affect memory, as when two nearly identical objects are distinguished by a detail that emerges upon closer inspection. Or a more through analysis of a situation might lead cognition to invoke a complex sorites rather than an immediate inference, as is often seen in movies when a person is holding a smoking gun but turns out to be innocent of the crime committed. Perception is impossible without memory and logic, both of which "suffuse" all cognitive processes. The interaction of cognitive processes is based on memory and must function logically. From these premises, then, the explanation of the phenomenon of “blindsight” must lie not in a neurological explanation related to the impairment of a basic cognitive process but mainly in the continued unimpaired operation of the rest of the cognitive system, concretely memory and logic. In “blindsight”, when an extended hand is "sensed" but not perceived, this cognitive process must be inferential and the product of the combined operations of partial vision, memory, and logic. Unless it were possible to divide the external world in an exact replication of theoretical half-vision—so that not only would a person see half a world but there would in fact only be half a world—it is possible from inferential processes involving memory and logic and with only partial visual awareness to reconstruct the missing part not only of the visual field but of the world itself. But this does not affect the issue of “blindsight” itself  as observed by neurologists.

 

            There is a specific problem with blindsight experiments. One of these consists in asking the blindsighted person whether a stick is in a horizontal or in a vertical position. Let’s assume the subject answers, as he should, that he does not know. The neurologist then would have to prompt him in a neutral way, like saying: “Take a guess.” Now, seeing and guessing are two different things. Seeing is a cognitive process. Guessing is also a cognitive process to the extent that you cannot guess without some memory of what you are going to guess about. But guessing, by definition, is not bound by facts. It is bound by logic in that you cannot guess contrary things at the same time. In one guess the patient could say “horizontal” and in another “vertical” but in none could the answer be “both horizontal and vertical”. Yet for all intents and purposes what the researchers are asking him to do is to be illogical. So the subject, in a deliberate effort to remain within logic, will answer one or the other and not both positions. The condition of blindsightedness is that the subject guessed right every time he was prompted to guess. If the score is not 100%, then there is no “blindsight” but simply “good guessing”. But “good guessing” is as cognitive as seeing, so we are back to the argument that “blindsight” must in some manner be an inferential process. Ramachandra’s explanation is as good as another but not if he pretends to exclude logic and memory from recognition. (Although the real paradox here, which he skirts, is that the eye, even when it is impaired, can still “see”, whatever neural pathways are adduced.) As guessing, “blindsight” is reminiscent of “der kluge Hans”, a horse that apparently performed arithmetic calculations until in 1907 the psychologist Oskar Pfungst showed that the clever horse was not reasoning on his own but interpreting unwitting cues from his trainer, which, when you think about it, makes Hans seem pretty darn intelligent.

 

            In a general sense, the neurological "fragmentation" or "partition" of cognitive functions contradicts the concept of the interactiveness of cognition. One particularly fraught neurological assumption made by Ramachandra is that logic resides in the left hemisphere of the brain. "By contrast", metaphor, allegory, and ambiguity originate on the other side of the brain. Since metaphor and allegory (an extended, elaborate metaphor, such as Dante's soteriological depiction of the universe) cannot but be based on analogies and other partial connections between concepts, and these necessarily involve logical linkages, it is unthinkable that such a division can be made workable, except in propositional descriptions in which consistency is thrown to the winds. "Ambiguity" is one way of referring to the intensionality of mind, intimately connected to its meaningfulness and specifically to the ability of cognition to find meaning in the inherently arbitrary sounds and signs of language. It would be difficult to place this crowning achievement of innate cognitive processes in any one area of the brain as even the hypothesis of a "language-learning module", which would also imply brain-localization, can be superseded with arguments which license the inference that grammar is explicable as a result of the application of reason to the "raw" representation and expression of concepts, as in saying “mountain”, “man”, “climb” and deriving “man climb mountain” and not “mountain climb man”. The partition of cognitive functions, however, goes much further than even this wildly improbable premise. If deductions from particular cases of sufferers from grand mal epileptic seizures were valid—concretely, patients who manifest the "symptom" of being obsessed with God—then neurological research on mind could easily lead to the conclusion that Moses and Jesus were epileptics, not to speak of Paul and Mohammed. From cases of savants, especially those who show the uncanny ability to accomplish in an instant astoundingly complex mathematical calculations, Ramachandra/Blakeslee conclude that the source of "genius" is located in a convolution of the brain called the angular gyrus, a claim which is founded on two preposterous assumptions: that genius is essentially mathematical and that somehow the vast repository of memory and logic required for such prowesses must be found in one restricted part of the brain and is independent of the memory and the logic that apply in the swinging-arms module. "Face and object recognition" is localized in the "temporal lobes". Aside from the tacit assumption here that awareness is a function of those areas of the brain, where would the recognition of words and numbers reside? And if, as seems justified, recognition and awareness are virtually synonymous, would this not exclude mathematical calculations and the use of language from awareness? Not to mention the by now familiar objection that the "brain-localization hypothesis" suggests two sets of logic: one for face/object recognition and another for word/number identification?

 

            With the concept of “squiggles/neurons” we pretend to give a consistent, coherent account of cognition, but this does not mean that holism can explain everything about mind or that the concept can ignore neurological research. Many of the insights that neurology claims to have achieved on the relation between the brain and specific cognitive functions are based on statements made by patients' patently suffering from different forms of dementia, which is a terrain cognitive theory would tread at its peril. But this does not exclude the possibility of making some very basic critical observations. There are two forms of dementia: dementia praecox, which is the general name for alienation in whatever form, and senile dementia, which is generally diagnosed in the process of aging, and is now called the Alzheimer's syndrome or disease. In these two categories, holism must assume a degeneration of cognitive processes, perhaps involving, for instance, the noticeable reduction of the store-and-recall property which affects people suffering from Alzheimer's. But even in such a dark territory, it is feasible to speculate that if memory falters then logic and perception falter concurrently. Similarly, in the absence of a substantive propositional account of any form of dementia, any propositional theory of cognition must fall back on the general understanding that all forms of alienation are related to a disease of or a catastrophic injury to the brain, including possibly its regulatory role over the biochemical mechanisms of human physiology. This role can be inferred from the feedback effect between cognition and bio-chemically induced insomnia. Mental propositions could conceivably have an effect on "recalcitrant synaptic connections", but the ultima ratio of biochemistry, which is often indicated in various forms of dementia praecox, is beyond propositional accounts of cognition in general.

 

            Ramachandra/Blaskeslee appear to be positing a third category of dementia involving partial brain damage. They cite a case of a patient who spills water over herself and says that it was due to carelessness. Though only superficially comparable in terms of violence and degree of alienation, the case is intrinsically not different from that of the very competent lexicologist who severed his penis because of his feelings of guilt over having wet dreams. [4] Self-evidently in both cases partial alienation co-exists with operative, even flawless, cognitive functions. Through the convoluted reasoning that led to the conclusion that logic is a right-hemisphere function, Ramachandra further concludes that his obviously partially deranged patient's left hemisphere, where metaphors and allegories supposedly originate, was responsible for what is called anosognosia, or the denial of physical symptoms. A description of this condition would be that one part of the patient's cognitive system had the upper hand over another part of the same cognitive system, which implies that memory and logic, in some as yet neurologically unexplained manner—but not in propositional speculations no different from those elaborated from the philosophical holistic hypothesis—were at war with themselves, or what is even more cryptic, that there are two independent sets of propositions about memory and logic and that these two sets are not only inconsistent but also at odds with each other. Holism cannot give an account of dementia and must remit itself to neurological or biochemical research. But this does not mean that it must accept hypothetical neurological explanations which conflict with its own coherent account of the propositional interactiveness of all cognitive processes. The fundamental neurological implication of a propositional account of cognition is that neurons are linked directly or indirectly throughout the nervous system. Much evidence from neurological research on mind and its functions seems to point in that direction. Such research at this point in history is at the nursery level and to draw general or categorical conclusions, or even tentative conclusions, from the paucity of confirmed physical events related to propositional processes is premature.

 

            Holistic cognitive theory assumes that propositional descriptions of cognitive processes are related to the nervous system and in particular that propositions can affect physical facts, behaviour in general but as well specific physical manifestations such as anxiety, "nervousness", sweaty palms, etc. It can relate mental propositions to those physical events. It cannot even begin explaining how connections between propositions and the body are actually made. False pregnancies, called pseudocyesis in neurological jargon, can only be described speculatively by neurologists and the only "intervention" in the neurological field that propositional theory can allow itself is that such occurrences must involve the entire nervous system, that they should not be localized in some part of the brain, and that research should be oriented holistically and not in the fragmentary or modular manner which is so tempting to neurologists engaged in the cognitive field, or, conversely, to “philosophical cognitivists” who have some grounding in neurological experiments. We have picked on Dr. Ramachandra’s book because of his systemic, relentless commitment to brain-specialization through the consideration of abnormal phenomena, for these are the most challenging to a commonsensical, propositional account of cognition. But neuroscience nowadays is constantly coming up with physiological hypotheses about normal but complex events and processes. Most specialists in the field of neuroscience do it the other way around compared to Ramachandra’s approach. Whereas Ramachandra builds up his thesis for brain-specialization from the observation of abnormal or unusual cases, which means he looks for the function in the brain, his colleagues often start from the assumption that there exists brain-specialization and then seek to fit the function to the brain. Two examples of this method are love and orgasm. 

 

            A pair of researchers had a work published in The Journal of Neurophysiology asserting that romantic passion was associated to an area of the brain called the caudate nucleus “awash” with dopamine, a substance that increases with the pleasure of reward and thus stimulates reward-seeking activity. This was based on the blood-flow in fMRI cerebral scans of young people when shown a picture of the person with whom they were in love. [5] Even assuming that the experiments were flawless and the conclusions irresistible, since the caudate nucleus has not been linked by neuroscientists to memory, nor to any of the mind’s traits that would lead one person to fall in love with another, then all that can be said of this research is that it shows a slight anomaly in the way blood flows in the brain, which could have causes other than “love” and which does not substitute for a subtle propositional exploration of why one individual is attracted to another. There is no mention in the reports of the research of a relation between the caudate nucleus and the libido, and especially of the complex functioning of desire. It is based on static images of a part of the brain and love is anything but static. It doesn’t take into account, for instance, the misgivings that accompany passion and can provoke fits of jealousy or slight variations in the intensity of love from many propositional inputs. Most damning is that it assumes a self-assured, reciprocal attraction and therefore it could be as much a reflection of an individual’s self-love as of love for another individual. Love or passion are seldom unalloyed and no quantity of fMRI scans will show all the other activities in the brain that affect them.

 

            Researchers in the Netherlands have “found” that they can distinguish between a real orgasm and its simulation. For that they made brain scans in which it appears that certain areas are progressively “de-activated” as the woman approaches climax. Does this mean that the brain becomes invulnerable to fear and anxiety during the sexual act? What happens to the uninhibited female brain when there is coitus interruptus or even the fear of coitus interruptus? Would this immediately “activate” all the “de-activated” areas noticed in the scans? Assuming there is climax before coitus interruptus, would then the woman’s brain revert to a normal appearance in fractions of a second? And if there is no orgasm before coitus interruptus, would the “de-activated” brain areas instantaneously revert to activation with a vengeance? This implies that even as the female brain approaches orgasm it is as subject to the inhibitions in a “normal brain” as it is in a state of non-arousal. The Dutch experiments entail that a woman in the throes of sexual passion is partially brain dead, or that if orgasm were prolonged interminably she could actually die. Besides, wouldn’t the uncertainty principle—the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t characteristic of quantum mechanics—be a more realistic approach to sexual arousal in a woman under laboratory conditions such as those employed by the researchers? A woman who is being scanned while having sex cannot have lost all awareness, which could be subconsciously feeding propositions to her mind, hence affecting the process of stimulation and culmination in intercourse.

            Visual perception is another phenomenon that has been minutely analyzed by neuroscience. According to a theoretical version (much simplified here), an object impinges on the retina, which is composed of rods and cones: the former are sensitive to all features and the latter to color. Through the optic nerves, the impressions from the object travel to the lateral geniculate bodies, where two networks of cells transmit them to the visual cortex, in turn divided into many parts. Some parts analyze both color and orientation. Other parts specialize in movement and others in color. All these parts working together assemble the mental image of the object. This model has been constructed from PETscans, fMRI results, and microscopes. A PET scan measures concentrations of radioactive glucose. What is wrong with this schema? Mainly that it is mostly guesswork. In perception we instantly recognize objects and their surroundings. Now, it is self-evident that perception can be de-composed into features such as light, brightness, movement, space, and so on. One conclusive proof of this is that we can deliberately abstract sensation from perception, as painters do when they look at their subjects or when they use colors to achieve abstractions that have nothing to do with the world as we experience it. But perception is extremely complex and the start of the process with rods and cones is extremely unexplanatory. It will require much more scientific progress before the atomic structure of these components of the retina yield any real understanding of sight. So neuroscientists leap forward in the process to areas in the brain where a macro-view is at least feasible. But on this level is where the problems start multiplying.

 

            In the model described above the image literally reaches the visual cortex in its entirety and is then analyzed by different neuronal systems for recognition. This is definitely a radical inversion of what one would normally expect, which is that the data from the retina is previously analyzed and then recognized as an image of a tiny section of the world. One technical problem is that recognition is so immediate that there is no existing imaging means that can actually catch the act itself. But let us suppose that the breakdown posited in the model does occur and that it occurs before the image appears. The image that we get in the brain is recognizable from the myriad types we store in the mind, as in instantly recognizing a particular building from the concept we have of “building” in general. But before this occurs the construction of the image or representation must take place simultaneously in the visual cortex and not in a sequential manner. It is virtually unthinkable that each individual input could subsist independently of the others. To affirm the contrary has to be merely, and wildly, speculative. Let us again assume that there is a process of image-building in the brain from the inputs of vision and that this involves a distinction between, at least, color and form in a very general sense. This would require multiple acts of specific or partial recognitions of a shade of color, degrees of brightness, infinitely different shapes, varying depths, and so on indefinitely, and all of these partial acts require logic, which will prevent us from taking blue for green, and particularly memory, which is a sine qua non for partial or total recognition. Yet we know that recognition is instantaneous and this means that, somehow, each act of specific recognition must be related to the act of over-all recognition, which is to say that the moment we recognize color and form separately we already have the combination of both elements, plus all of the others which constitute perception.

 

            And then there is continuity. As we look around us the images “overlap” with some parts gradually exiting the field of vision and others entering it. Are we here processing different images or are we carrying images already processed with some variations in brightness, perspective, location, etc.? If it is the latter case, then the case for dedicated areas in the visual cortex would be fraught, for what would be involved in continuity—as in all the other processes—would be extremely so-called short-term memory, and memory is what, in the final instance, must suffuse any cognitive process, even if in a perceptual tour d’horizon each instant involves a re-processing of the objects of vision. Memory, as well as logic, are the arch-enemies of brain-specialization. Either each neuron carries in itself the contents of a specific self’s memory, which is not likely, or the neurons involved in perception from square one are not functioning independently of the rest of the brain, whatever detailed scans of the brain, at this stage in time, reveal. The functioning of the brain, in sum, will be unreachable to human probing until our instruments are much more sophisticated, by which time artificial intelligence will probably have been attained. For the continuity of perception, we have to rely not only on the process of perception by itself but also on memory. Our belief in this scene is founded on memory, but memory is not as reliable as perception. We cannot claim, as we could about the instant of perception, that cognition makes belief inevitable. Memory covers the lag between the instant of perception and the “belief” in the continuity of perception. The specificity of perception is minimal. All normal-sighted human beings will have the same process of visual recognition. But memory is very specific. We can easily assume the continuity of perception from memory but we cannot claim that our belief about the continuity of perception is such that memory and memory alone as a cognitive process can induce belief. What does induce belief is our specific knowledge of how memory functions specifically in us. We trust our memory not because memory is reliable—we know it isn't—but because of the specific knowledge that we have about the reliability of our specific mnemonic abilities.

 

            The search for the “person in the brain”, as Benedict Carey, a science writer for the New York Times, put it, has taken many twists and turns. Over all, these can be classified as theories that have arisen from the accumulation of brain-scanning experiments and those that have resulted from specific tests of sets of people with certain common features. Among the latter are scans carried out with London cabbies and with Tibetan monks. In the first of these experiments, it was found that the taxi drivers’ posterior hippocampus was more developed than in the average human being. To the hippocampus is attributed by neuroscientists an active role in the formation of memories and in turn a part of it is presumed to accumulate spatial recall, which is what was examined in the cabbies on the assumption that they have in their brain a detailed map of London. In the monks what was sought was the source of joy and contentment in the left prefrontal cortex, and in effect it was found that activity in that part of the brain easily superseded that in the right prefrontal cortex, the assumed seat of anxiety. Other studies locate the source of the joy associated with reward in the anterior cingulate or in the caudate nucleus. What matters is not so much where in the brain these areas are located as that they can be identified as parts of the brain. Likewise, the word “joy” is used advisedly because in neuropsychological experiments it is often applied indistinctly to sexual gratification and to feelings of kindness towards humanity in general. There are various areas of the brain which neuroscientists now commonly associate to certain functions. The amygdala is where fear and fearful memories originate and are stored. The left hemisphere of the brain is generally believed to be where the speech faculty lies, but with the proviso that if it fails it can be substituted by other areas of the brain. Often too it is assumed that as the brain ages it becomes less specialized. One prefrontal cortex, it has been argued, is good at IQ tests, although in some cases it does not appear to be so, and it is not efficient at other types of intellectual tasks. “Simple locomotion” can be carried out from the spinal cord without the participation of the rest of the brain. The hippocampus we have mentioned, but we have to add that in a monograph it was observed that one single cell in that region seemed to suffice for recognition of a friendly face.

 

            Closer to our subject in this essay is what has by now become the received or consensual belief that there are various types of memory. According to a lucid synthesis of the topic, short-term memory is transient and consists in the momentary modification of existing proteins. Once these changes have served their purpose, they are dispensed with and the brain functions as if nothing had happened. Intermediate memory adds proteins from existing genes. And long-term memory switches on inactive genes, thus producing new proteins and new connections between existing genes. This, in fact, is a more sophisticated model than the usual one which basically only distinguishes between short-term and long-term memories and does not involve such subtleties as genes and proteins but only neurons and their assumed or theorized interconnections. Thus, from a purely neuronal perspective, besides the short-term/long-term duality, memory is also classified as explicit and implicit and as retrospective and prospective. (The list is actually longer, but the general principles is that memory can be divided into many different functions.)  Implicit memory is not conscious but automatic, especially in motor skills. Prospective memory is remembering to remember. Most of these distinctions are bogus and have a bias towards a tabula rasa view of mind. It is of course true that it is easier to recall what happened one minute ago than what happened yesterday and most likely what happened yesterday than what happened one year ago, but this is not sufficient grounds for the short-term/long-term distinction in memory, if only because it is possible to remember with more precision something that happened a decade ago than most of what happened during the entire last year. The interactiveness of cognitive processes means that there is no conceivable way that the memory of an instant ago can not have been affected by all that happened in all the previous years of one life. Short-term/long-term is a superficial ungrounded distinction that presupposes that cognition is subject-less and that its processes are encapsulated. If short-term is sustaining as in perception, then short-term becomes inextricably entangled with long-term in instances of long-term recognition. Short-term memory sustains the perception of a face which we recognize as having seen many years ago. But let us first refer to the attempts at brain-localization of mental functions.

 

            The idea that remembering addresses involve a mental map is disproved in ordinary life by the fact that even experienced drivers in any city are not necessarily good at reading maps, and this does not require experimentation but a superficial question-and-answer test. If I am told to go from my house to a place nearby which I know well, I do not require a map and can rely on the sense of orientation—do I turn right or left?—and certain habitual visual markers. If I am told to go to a place at the other end of the city which I do not know well, I will most certainly need the instrumentality of a map, and the ability to read it besides. If my memory in general is good I should be able to make a fairly reliable estimate of distances and of the route which I have to take. Like most humans, once in the neighborhood of my destination, I will probably have to consult the map again until I pinpoint the address. But I will be doing this not with the map in my head but with my ability to remember things which I have recently learned. This would be called “short-term memory”. But if I am planning to go to that place on future occasions I will be paying more attention and creating a “long-term memory”. But it will not be of a map but of certain visual features, such as where an avenue intersects another and the surroundings of the place where I am going. London taxi-drivers are not only renown for their detailed knowledge of streets but also for their years of training by riding bicycles all over the city. It is a not an uncommon occurrence to give a cabbie a difficult address, say, a dead-end, L-shaped mews, and see them head towards the general area and then search within it for the exact street, to which they would go directly without searching if they were following a map in their heads. In fact, the map of London that a taxi-driver requires for this feat would be so large that he could hardly consult it without countless sequential moments of awareness. Perhaps there is a sequence of propositions in his mind to get to his destination, but these as likely as not involve visual recall rather than a map, or as a neuroscientist would put it, the area of the brain specialized in “spatial” memories. Already here the short-term/long-term distinction breaks down. In my case, for instance, it could be that the address at the other end of the city is so easy to find that I will keep it in my mind as a long-term memory without my deliberately wanting to. And in the case of the taxi driver, even though he seems to be orientated by long-term memory exclusively, this knowledge would avail him little if he did not have the short-term memory needed to wend his way through traffic or to distinguish between, perhaps, a similar looking mews entrance from the one he is looking for. The experiment with the Tibetan monks is futile to the extent that any one, and not just monks, would not experience anxiety if the person was engaging in something that was genuinely pleasurable or in accordance with desire. That such a trivial proposition should be used to site the source of spiritual joy is nothing short of an experimental aberration.

 

            The amygdala is where neurologists believe that fear and fearful memories originate and are stored. At its most basic, fear is a threat to the specific self and its desire for survival. If we were not individuals but part of a bee-hive-like structure we would not experience fear. But we are individuals and wish to continue being in existence. Everything specific is by definition intent on self-preservation. For a human being, fear is a palpable threat to what would demolish or diminish its self-specificity. But the amygdala is a circumscribed section of the brain. It is not the self, for the self would have to encompass the whole of the brain. According to neuroscience, however, it would seem as if fear were the result of some external stimulus directed at one part of the brain. But why would just a part of a whole, and not the whole itself, react to a threat to the whole? Fear must have to do with all the hierarchized propositions that constitute the self. Suppose that I was keen on a particular task to which I was devoting much effort, say, writing this book, and I receive a rejection letter from a publisher who had initially shown interest in my work. This would certainly constitute a threat to my specific self insofar as I entertain hopes and desires, which are basically the propositions at the uppermost of my mind endowed with satisfaction over the way my task is being carried out or of how they harmonize with other propositions I entertain and with the entirety of my propositional self. The rejection of my efforts would provoke fear: about the worth of my work, about the soundness of carefully built arguments, about the purpose of my life, and so on. It would not be exactly the sort of fear that I would experience if I was caught in an undertow and could not get a firm grip on the sand, itself being sucked in by the power of the sea. In this situation I would be fighting for immediate survival and I would experience fear close to panic. Whether it is true or not that a man about to die has the impression that his entire life is being relived in his mind—really not very likely—I would at least know in such a situation that it was my entire life that was about to disappear in an accidental drowning. The fear of failure is not as imminent as this but it is fear nonetheless. Both sorts of emotions are accompanied by anxiety, only in one I would not have time to think about the implications of my death but about the implications of my life. Notwithstanding they are more alike than they are different in the sense at least that I am undergoing an extreme form of propositional clash.

 

            So what role does the amygdala play in these similar yet different conditions? Is it the source of self-love that pervades self-specificity? But since we are specific in our selfhood in general, there is no reason not to suppose that the entire brain and not just one part of it is alarmed by the prospect of death or of a failure leading to strong disappointment about life. Or is it that perception and logic and memory communicate to the amygdala the general dread that overtakes us? But then the amygdala would have to be the instrument of the brain that copes with fear signals and with danger, and this would mean that the rest of the brain would be inactive when one would expect it to be extremely and generally excited and active. Perhaps, and this is about the most that we can grant it, the amygdala is the coordinator of the mind in a life-threatening situation, in which case for the time that the fear lasts memory and logic give way to the amygdala precisely when they are most needed, unless we accept the highly unlike hypothesis that the amygdala is where all of logic and memory are transferred when fear rears its head. The alternative possibility: that the amygdala replaces normal memory and logic with its own versions of these faculties, is so absurd a denial of the unity of self that it is not worth the bother considering it. There can be no fear without logic. Even the relatively uncontroversial assumption that “simple locomotion” can be carried out from the spinal cord without the participation of the rest of the brain can be contested from the undeniable fact that when we walk we are using memory and logic. If I were absorbed in reading and suddenly decided to get up and write down something that I considered crucial to the development of my task, I could not do so without logic and memory. Logic would tell me why I need to stop reading and make notes and memory would reassure me that in getting up I would be stepping onto a floor and not into an abyss. And would this be short-term or long-term memory? Since the last sentence I wrote before I started to read would be technically short-term memory, although in writing I would have been using long-term memory, the memory of where I am and what I am doing could be short-term, if I was doing all this in, say, a hotel room I just occupied, or long-term if it was my study and I knew where everything was, which would not be the case of the hotel room where I would have to remember very quickly where I had placed my computer. The hotel room I will soon forget, which is the definition of short-term memory, but while I am in it long-term memory and logic, which is also long-term, would be active there telling me what sort of events I can expect and how I should go about doing what I want to, and not jumping from a couch into a deep well.

 

            The source of the short-term/long-term memories distinction was a patient, known as “H.M.”, whose hippocampus was removed in the course of surgery to prevent epileptic fits. Afterwards, it was observed that, although he could remember the past before surgery, he could not retain the memory of events that transpired before his eyes just moments before. The surgical removal of certain specific areas of the brain produces a pronounced form of forgetfulness. A patient will, for instance, forget an object that the patient saw shortly before. This implies that memory resides in the affected part of the brain. This claim flies in the face of what we have claimed about the interactiveness of cognition. Since memory "suffuses" mind, analogically it is operative in the entire brain rather than restricted to specific parts of the brain. If memory were to be excised in a patient by the removal of a part of the brain, then it would not only be "the laying down of new memories" that would be affected but the entire cognitive system. The person afflicted by the "neurological" loss of the memory function would not be able to reason properly. If the ability to "lay down new memories" were impaired, the person would not even be able to move in any physical surrounding to which that person was not previously accustomed.Yet let us assume the impairment of so-called short-term memory from the accidental or the surgical removal of a part of the brain. Does holism have an explanation that obviates the need to locate memory in a specific part of the brain? The function of storing and recalling propositions applies equally and simultaneously to all basic cognitive operations and to their derivations. The principles of intuitive logic apply to perception and to the function of storing and recalling. Brain damage entails damage to the cognitive system as a whole. Assuming again a certain type of forgetfulness, we have to infer that the impairment is not necessarily restricted to the capacity for storage and recall but also affects the capacity to perceive and to reason. The cases that Ramachandran cites—a man who forgot a red pencil he recently saw, another who could not subtract seven from one hundred, yet both subjects retained basic cognitive skills—must be interpreted as that a specific damage to the brain did not result in a specific but in a general impairment of cognition and the effect on the function of store and recall has to be explained from the impairment of the interactiveness of cognition itself and its source must be much more complex than the damage to a specific area of the brain.

 

            Consider the implications of the concept of long-term memory. What exactly is long-term anyway? If we go back to its origins, then long-term would be all of memory before the hours that it took to operate on H.M. Aside from this, you could define it any arbitrary manner: a week ago, a month, various months, even years could be involved in its definition. A more precise, if more absurd, definition is that long-term memory consists of short-term memories shorn of all irrelevancies. But we know that memory is constantly dragging up trivia from the past, and not a past that we remember well but a past that goes even to before the time when we remember that we started remembering. With the trivia that long-term memory recovers there is an even larger problem than the one that duration poses. Why does long-term memory bring up some trivia and not other trivia? Obviously there is a process here that we cannot elucidate, but we know that it probably has to do with short-term memory, in the sense that in the process of recalling, say, what happened yesterday, some memory from the remote past could enter without any apparent reason or explanation. We cannot say when long-term begins and when it ends and this because we know that, through associative processes that neuroscientists know nothing about, memory keeps bringing into mind all sorts of material that we thought we had forgotten. Writing about the past, whether creatively or historiographically, would be impossible without the constant collaboration of long-term memory, short-term memory, and logic.

 

            Short-term and long-term specializations are based on a “blank slate” theory of mind. Memory in general is what we have and it is always specific memory. But we have no memories from babyhood, not to speak of the fetal stage of life. Long-term memory does not go that far. Therefore, we must infer that logic and memory itself are not innate but acquired. Yet we know that this is not so because at an early age children are memorizing and reasoning, if at a very rudimentary level. Could it then be that we already have memory at birth, but in this case we must have logic and if we do not remember how we acquired the ability to reason, then the absurd conclusion has to be that we set it aside as trivia! We reason all of the time. We could not survive without logic. Self-evidently, this is long-term memory, but since we are not aware of the logical operations in our minds, then we would have to conclude that reason, not being long-term, has to be short-term. The paradoxes and antinomies keep cropping up when we try to make of memory a specialized neurological function. Since short-term memory is laid down by the part of the brain called the hippocampus, as neuroscientists claim, then long-term memory, which has to have started as short-term memory, had to go through the hippocampus. As in Alzheimer’s, the first to go is short-term memory, then the hippocampus is the place to go for a cure, yet no one seems to be looking there, and it is not likely that they would find anything if they did because senility is a generalized failure of memory. This observation raises anew the question of duration because Alzheimer’s patients, such as ex-President Ronald Reagan, do not recognize their own wives, even when, as in the case of Nancy Reagan, they are married for fifty years, which certainly has to qualify as time enough for long-term memory. On the other hand, such patients sometimes have left their hospital rooms and navigated corridors to the street, and this conversely suggests short-term memory.

 

            The self is defined by its specificity, but each specific instant of awareness is like a compendium of all previous awareness and experience, including short-term and long-term, so that the concept of memory specialization either shatters the reality of the self or the self shatters the barrier between short-term and long-term, which anyway, since it is impossible to establish with precision, entails a double negation: the barrier cannot be found and if it were found it would be uselessly dilemmatic. Love, which has to be specific or every one would be falling for everyone else, would have go through the hippocampus, which “lays down” the memory of the beloved, before it starts a fire in the caudate nucleus. Love would be reduced to mere transitory sexual attraction. Since memory is central to mind, every neural pathway would have to go through the hippocampus and, as it is the hippocampus which ultimately makes the short-term/long-term distinction possible, we could not undertake any cognitive operation without a previous consultation of where memories are made and to where they are sent. There are even greater objection to the category of short-term memory per se. H.M., the classic case of the loss of short-term memory, was, from all appearances, able to remember most of the things about him. He could move in a room without stumbling into things. If he talked for a few minutes with a physician he could retain his image for as long as the conversation lasted. This means that continuity, a necessary feature of memory, was there. The characteristic that made him singular was his truly amazing forgetfulness, like a particularly absent-minded professor, and such individuals are not considered clinical cases. The point is that if you do not lose touch with reality and can use logic for ordinary tasks, then memory has to be integral. Every individual knows that memory constantly weeds out parts of perception, for the simple reason that recognition is in itself multiple and it is necessary to exclude or to refrain from exploring every part of it. A new wide view of a cityscape involves multiple acts of recognition, all of them inferences, but if I am looking for something in particular, perhaps the building where I live, then I must discriminate among the objects I recognize and home in to an area and then within that area to further fine-tune inference and recognition. As I had not had that perspective before, it has to qualify as short-term memory but my search for where I live has to consist of acts of long-term memory.

 

            If I am walking a path that has hedges on both sides and I concentrate on the right hedge, even though vision allows me to recognize the left hedge, it will the right hedge that I will remember better if I recall my walk. So if some one asks me: “were there stones or gaps on the left hedge”, even though my recollection of the left hedge is there, I will not be able to answer the question. But was this a failure of short-term memory or more likely a result of selective concentration? That logic will be there all the time is proven by my recognition of noises behind me, such as steps crunching gravel or a branch falling where I only see static trees before me. Logic being long-term memory, the interaction between the short-term and the long-term is obliterated. If my short-term memory is recognition-specific, like my choosing to concentrate on the right hedge, then I can presume that long-term memory had some involvement in my choice, perhaps because I had a vague recollection that it was by going to the right that I would get to where I wanted to go faster. The idea that memory can be duration-specific is so outlandish that it entails that when the hippocampus lays down memories it already knows which impressions are going to be short-term and which long-term, and this, apart from unrealistic to absurd, flies in the face of the trivia-principle. [6] In theory, short-term memory can recall a lot of insignificant details—although since the brain acts in concert, the idea of insignificance itself pales into insignificance—whereas long-term memory retains the important things, those I will most be using in the future. But how in the dickens do we know beforehand what sort of now insignificant details might be useful to me in the future? Deciphering a previously un-understood script could not be achieved if we were not constantly recalling from short-term memory non-meaningful signs, but conversely we need to have a powerful long-term memory in order to relate those short-memory signals to long-term knowledge. Inside a maze, short-term memory alone would condemn us to useless wandering inside it, if, for example, we had permanently discarded a path that looked unpromising. Long-term logic would have to tell us that perhaps I was mistaken in neglecting a path that could turn into the precise way to the exit. If we knew beforehand how to distinguish between the trivial and the non-trivial, the hippocampus would then be not only the place in the brain which separates short-term from long-term memories. It would have to be not just the instrument of a cognitive function, but also a crystal ball telling me about what the future will be like for me. It seems therefore more likely that the hippocampus is not specialized but quite the contrary: a transit point for all sorts of memories: short, intermediate, and long-term. It should then be the case that the hippocampus is involved in every cognitive operation and the place where the rest of my brain would go and ask: “Hey, where did you put the word ‘Arbela’, which rings a bell, but I simply cannot find its precise location?”    

 

            Memory undoubtedly resides in the brain and the nervous system, its physiology and its biochemistry. The physical events associated with mind and its functions are ultimately what constitute memory. These events in themselves are meaningless unless we relate them to the recall of other mental events and functions. Once we establish these relations, we can actually say that memory does what it does because the brain is in such-and-such a condition or reacts in such-and-such a way. What we can say even before relating mental events and brain events is that, just as memory is pervasive and non-specific, the events in the brain and the nervous system are never isolated from all other events not only in the brain and nervous system but also perhaps in the rest of human physiology. To understand memory we must, therefore, examine not just one but all areas of the brain. Since perception and logic are totally and absolutely dependent on memory, the above entails that perception and logic too can only be approached explanatorily as functions of the totality of the brain, its long stem, and all the other parts of the nervous system.

 

            Despite his commitment to brain-specialization, Ramachandran willy-nilly allows plenty of space for a holistic approach. He writes at the beginning of his book the following: “A piece of brain the size of a grain of sand would contain one hundred thousand neurons, two million axons, and one billion synapses, all ‘talking’ to each other. Given these figures, it has been calculated that all the number of possible brain states—the number of permutations and combinations of activity that are theoretically possible—exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.” From these figures it would appear that the thesis of brain-specialization is absurd. The areas of the brain that neuroscientists have scanned to discover the source of love, automatic locomotion, memory-laying, and so forth, such as the hippocampus, the amygdala, the caudate nucleus, and the brain stem (to mention some of the most famous ones), are only small portions of the brain, in all, at a guess, one hundredth the area of the brain. This means that the explanations and theories given for all these complex phenomena are leaving out 99 percent of the brain. Analogically, it is as if astrophysicists were discounting in their explorations everything outside the solar system and the Milky Way. Big bang theory would be out of the question and black holes mere inventions of hyperactive minds. Put another way, and going back to our oft-cited view of a city, it would be as if the mind were incapable of recognizing the details that compose it. To invert an expression, neuroscience would be neglecting the trees for the forest or furthermore that the city existed but the buildings and the mountains and the streets and all the rest of it did not exist. There is no way in the world that brain specialization can be affirmed without in some manner involving the rest of the brain for each alleged case of specialization. Our subject, memory, has to be a function of the entire brain and not of a part of it. Common sense requires that we build every mental occurrence upon the fact of memory and if such is the case for mind, which is forcibly identical with the brain, then the latter cannot be restricted or specialized in such a way that it would undercut the amplitude that is entailed in awareness and in the subconscious processes that underlie it. If the brain is so vast that it supersedes quantities that we attribute to the universe, then mind, whose capabilities are way beyond what neuroscience contemplates, is so ineffably complex that no instrument available today can do justice to it.

 

              But there is the other fact, which is that visibly, and without the aid of scanning instruments of any kind, the brain is not of one piece but does have different parts. So the question naturally arises: why is the brain anatomy so diverse instead of being just a homogenous mass? This makes specialization a property that we cannot ignore. There must be found some way to explain why memory, logic, and perception are inseparable yet at the same time, for some inscrutable reason, separable in principle. One hypothesis would be to substitute neuron-specialization for brain-specialization, for this would leave ample room for the production of proteins in larger numbers and combinations than all the possible states of the brain. But this still would not solve the problem of why there are two hemispheres in the brain with ostensibly the same features but in reality with big or great differences between their constituent neurons. Why would speech-neurons be concentrated in the left hemisphere when we know that every existent in the universe can be expressed in some form of communication and every form of communication can ultimately be verbalized? When some neuroscientists claim that one neuron suffices for or is specialized in face recognition, they are taking a huge leap with the implication that each and every neuron in the brain contains all of intuitive logic and the entire storehouse of memories of a specific self. This rather than an argument for specialization is a demolition of its foundations. The state of affairs seems to be that neuroscience hasn’t the foggiest notion of where it is or where it is going, at least in connection with the brain/mind. Since so far its approach has been from the bottom-up, perhaps it should consider proceeding from the top-down.

 

            Top-down might not be the most appropriate description of a new neurological approach to mind/brain. It might be more correct to say that instead of brain-to-function, research should be oriented towards function-to-brain. The unit of all neurological research is the neuron and the neuron has in general not been found conclusively to be specialized. Yet for brain-specialization it must be, or the edifice of most on-going research would come tumbling down. There is an unacknowledged, comparison-shy race today between neuroscientists and the computation specialists who work in the area of artificial intelligence (AI), which neuroscientists call, with a hint of disdain, “connectionism”. Ironically, connectionism is a functionalist or computational theory that was based on the then accepted neurological belief that the brain rather than specialized is extremely inter-connected. If computation science managed a breakthrough towards operative means with neuron-size dimensions, it could put together a cognitive replica of the human brain. Once it irons out its multiple wrinkles, particularly that of probabilistic results, quantum-computing involving atoms, would be a formidable step in that direction, for if a smidge of brain matter has comparative universal dimensions, then the infinitely large number of atoms that constitute neurons, if harnessed for cognitive or deductive processes, could explain at least the trifecta of mind (memory, logic, perception). Affects could then appear as a matter of course. But while this happens (if it does indeed happen), neuroscience could shift its view from brain-specialization to the recognizable parts of the brain that indicate integration, and there is here much material with which to work. The corpus callosum, the part of the brain that links the two hemispheres, and which neuroscientists admit is particularly dense with neurons, should be a prime target of neurological research, together with the transmission-related glial and spindle neurons, which neuroscientists can identify but are only vague about their specific functions, even though glial cells constitute half the weight of the brain. In sum, instead of specializations, neuroscience should perhaps be building a “connectionist” model which integrates memory, logic, and perception rather than disgregating functions, such as memory, a general intentional program which poses more problems than it solves

 

            So what has philosophy got to do with all this? And what is implicit here about my friend’s concern about losing his memory? Philosophers are not necessarily also neuroscientists nor are they solely concerned with computational issues. Philosophers as such can only deal with holistic abstractions, such as the trimurthi of cognition, and they have continually to be on guard against the intromission of subjectivity, as, for instance, that because of received notions consciousness is greater than mere awareness. Consequently, some philosophers appeal to areas of research with some relation to mind—the brain obviously and computers because they simulate thinking—that doesn’t commit them to contestable assertions about awareness, such as that an aware state occupies more than an instant in time-space. Also, philosophers understand, or at least they should, that thinking is not done in awareness, and both neuroscience and computation assume “sub-awareness stances”. But philosophers cannot, or again should not, accept inferences that would fraction the process of thought, which they themselves do not understand but are pretty certain that it has to be holistic and are understandably suspicious of theories put forth on the basis of only partial and controversial evidence. This commits philosophy to a wait-and-see attitude, which unfortunately also makes it somewhat irrelevant to the formulation of specific theories on mind. Philosophy therefore is reduced, on the concrete question of memory, to the Socratic role of destroyer rather than the dubious Platonic role of metaphysical builder. But this modest station should not inhibit philosophy from suggesting to my disconcerted friend that he should not worry about not remembering the pre-Socratics but to be prepared to worry if he starts reconstructing bit by bit what he remembers of Parmenides and Heraclitus.

 

[1] Prince, let no week pass save you ask

  where they are; and throughout the present year

  until it be that you too come up with this refrain: