Further research on memory has been producing seemingly contradictory results in recent years. For instance, a 2009 experiment indicated that memory formation depends on interplay between synaptic activity and DNA transcription in the neuron’s nucleus.70 A much-talked-about 2012 study, on the other hand, suggested that memories are encoded digitally in microtubules in the neuron’s cytoplasm; a completely different mechanism.71 Again in 2012, yet another study suggested that memories may be stored as patterns of synaptic connections in the hippocampus;72 this is an inter-neuron mechanism, in contrast to the intra-neuron mechanisms of the previous two studies. In conclusion, after more than a century, neuroscience seems to be still all over the map when it comes to explaining where memories are stored. Yet, if one were to go by the headlines, one would think we’ve validated the materialist hypothesis multiple times over: ‘Reducing memory to a molecule,’73 ‘Scientists claim brain memory code cracked,’74 and so on.
So where do I personally stand? To simply say that I consider the materialist hypothesis false would be as strictly correct as it would be misleading. My position is subtle and, to make sense of it, we first need some brief background. Bear with me for a moment.
As discussed in essay 2.1, I am a proponent of monistic idealism, which holds that the brain is in consciousness, not consciousness in the brain. As such, the brain is the image of a process of localization in a stream of transpersonal experiences, like a whirlpool is the image of a process of localization in a stream of water. The brain doesn’t generate consciousness for exactly the same reason that a whirlpool doesn’t generate water. Active neurons are what experiences look like from the outside, this being the reason why brain function correlates tightly with subjective states. Moreover, I believe that lucid awareness consists of reverberating – and therefore amplified – mental contents in the ‘center of the whirlpool,’ so to speak. Neuroscience itself has amassed evidence for this reverberation.75 Mental contents in the ‘periphery of the whirlpool’ do not reverberate and, therefore, become obfuscated like the stars at noon. This creates the illusion of unconscious mental processes, but there is no actual unconscious. Everything that happens in the brain is the outside image of either lucid or obfuscated experiences. Memories are nothing but ongoing obfuscated experiences in the periphery of the psyche.
Analytical psychology divides the psyche of an individual into two segments: the ego and the so-called ‘personal unconscious.’76 According to this division, the ego comprises everything that you are lucidly aware of at any given moment. The ‘personal unconscious,’ in turn, comprises everything that you can potentially remember, but of which you are currently not lucid. Since I deny the existence of a true unconscious, I prefer to call these two segments ‘lucid awareness’ and ‘obfuscated psyche,’ respectively. Lucid awareness includes the reverberating, amplified contents of the psyche. Its outside image is what neuroscience calls the Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCC).77 The obfuscated psyche, in turn, includes the obfuscated contents. Its outside image comprises all the other neural processes in the brain that aren’t NCCs.
According to this monistic idealist view, memory formation entails a movement of mental contents from lucid awareness to the obfuscated psyche. Recall, in turn, entails the reverse movement. To use the metaphor of the brain as a whirlpool of transpersonal experiences, lucid awareness comprises mental contents circulating in the central vortex of the whirlpool – which reverberates – while the obfuscated psyche comprises mental contents circulating in the periphery of the whirlpool. Contents of the obfuscated psyche remain thus localized; they don’t flow away and become lost in the broader stream of transpersonal consciousness. Precisely for this reason, they can potentially re-enter the center of the whirlpool. When that happens, we say that we ‘remembered’ something.
So far, I’ve been simply putting forward a different way to interpret memory and recall. You may have noticed that everything I’ve said above is operationally indistinguishable from the materialist hypothesis of memory. Nonetheless, if we push this alternative interpretation a little further, different predictions can be made.
As discussed above, monistic idealism entails that memories are ongoing but obfuscated experiences in the periphery of the psyche. If neurons were the cause of all experiences, we should be able to find all memories somewhere in the brain. But under monistic idealism, neurons are merely an outside image of experience, not its cause. It is thus entirely conceivable that this image be partial. After all, the image of a process is seldom complete; it seldom comprises all there is to know about the process. Flames don’t convey all there is to know about combustion. Lightning doesn’t convey all there is to know about atmospheric electric discharge. Therefore, not all mental contents of the obfuscated psyche need to be detectable – even in principle – as something in the brain, or anywhere in the body for that matter. In fact, it’s coherently conceivable that the vast majority isn’t. For instance, as discussed in essay 8.3, one relatively popular scenario among those involved in the healing arts, due to empirical reasons, is that memories of self-generated experiences – buried emotions, repressed thoughts and fantasies, hidden beliefs, etc. – can be seen in the body, but those of past external events not necessarily so.
That there can be memories – obfuscated experiences circulating in the periphery of the whirlpool – that aren’t correlated to information in the brain or body isn’t as counterintuitive as it may seem at first. Before the advent of microscopy, the entire realm of cellular and microbial activity integral to the body’s functioning was not only unseen, but unimagined. Before the advent of electromagnetic measurement techniques, the entire realm of electromagnetic activity essential to a working body was equally undetected and unimagined. So there is simply no reason why we should –even in principle – be able to find all memories in the body.
Having said all this, for the sake of keeping the discussion as close as possible to current scientific and cultural expectations, let us assume that at least most memories can be detected in principle. In other words, let us assume that most contents of the obfuscated psyche correlate with measurable information in the organism. What then are the operational differences between the materialist hypothesis and monistic idealism?
If the body is what a whirlpool in the stream of transpersonal experiences looks like, then the entire body – except, of course, for the NCCs –corresponds to the obfuscated psyche. It is the whole body that is the whirlpool, not just the brain. Indeed, unlike the materialist view of the body as an unconscious mechanism, under monistic idealism the entire organism is an image of experiences. And what are memories but obfuscated experiences? This is a crucial shift in the way we look upon the body. In the terminology of analytical psychology, we can thus say that the body is what the ‘personal unconscious’ looks like from the outside. Hence, one should expect to find memories anywhere in the organism – except, again, for the NCCs – not only in the brain. This gives theoretical grounding to the empirically motivated notion of cellular memory: the hypothesis that memories may be associated with the various organs and tissues of the body. For instance, studies on flatworms – creatures capable of regenerating even their whole brain in case of injury – revealed that they retain long-term memories even after their head has been severed.78 This suggests very strongly that their memories are associated with their whole body, not only their brain. There is also a significant amount of anecdotal evidence indicating that organ transplant recipients inherit some of the donors’ memories.79 This shouldn’t be possible under the materialist hypothesis, but is entirely expectable if the body is what localized, personal experience looks like from the outside. If a ‘part of a whirlpool’ is severed and implanted into another ‘whirlpool,’ it is indeed to be expected that the respective experiences should mix. Finally, psychological therapy has shown significant evidence for a connection between the body and memories.80
Summarizing:
• Neural Correlates of Consciou
sness (NCCs) = Reverberating center of the whirlpool = Lucid awareness = Amplified experiences.
• Other neural processes = Non-reverberating, nearby periphery of the whirlpool = Superficial contents of the obfuscated psyche = Superficial memories.
• Metabolism in other bodily tissues = Non-reverberating, remote periphery of the whirlpool = Deeper contents of the obfuscated psyche = Deeper memories.
One could argue that, if memories are indeed associated with the body as a whole, amputation of an organ or general tissue loss should noticeably impair recall, which doesn’t seem to be the case. The problem is: it isn’t the case with the brain either. Memory lapses in Alzheimer’s patients only become noticeable after 40% to 50% of brain cells are already dead.81 Removal of large and various parts of the brain of rats has been found to leave their memory largely unaffected.82 If anything, associating memory to the whole body makes these facts more intelligible: a large part of the brain represents a much smaller fraction of the body as a whole. The idea of holographic biological storage83 – originally envisioned to explain how the brain could maintain memories even after so much of it is lost – could conceivably be applicable, in some form, to the whole body. If this is the case, no noticeable difference in recall will occur until a huge amount of the body is removed; an amount incompatible with the preservation of life given the limitations of current transplant technology. This may sound highly speculative – and it is – but keep in mind that non-speculative alternatives for explaining memory do not exist at this point. Finally, to say that memory is associated with the body as a whole doesn’t imply that all parts of the body are equally involved in episodic memory – that is, memory of past events. Until we find out exactly what the correlates of obfuscated episodic experience are, it is entirely conceivable that different organs or types of tissue be involved to widely different degrees.
The precise opposite of the argument above could, ironically, also be used against my hypothesis: illnesses that affect only the brain, such as Alzheimer’s, as well as localized physical trauma to the brain alone, can significantly impair recall even when the rest of the body remains intact. Notice, however, that this doesn’t imply that memories are all in the brain. It suggests only that brain illness and trauma can impair our ability to amplify otherwise obfuscated experiences, wherever these experiences may reside. We know that the reverberation process that amplifies mental contents happens only in the brain, taking up relatively small amounts of neurons in specific areas. It’s thus no surprise that, if damage to key brain pathways prevents the flow of information into these specific areas, lucid awareness of the corresponding experiences becomes impossible. The memories will still be there in the body, but the patient will report an inability to remember – that is, to become lucidly aware of – certain things; an inability that will grow as more access paths to the ‘center of the whirlpool’ become compromised.
Whether memory is holographic or not, the core suggestion of monistic idealism is to look upon it as a robust global phenomenon of the body, entailing plenty of redundancy. Instead of simplistically reducing memory to discrete bits of information stored locally in the biological equivalents of computer latches, maybe we can find the corresponding information reflected holistically on the operation of the body as a whole; like a global interference pattern formed by interacting waves from various local sources. If this is how memory works, it is critical that we look beyond the brain, otherwise we will continue to miss essential pieces of the puzzle. We cannot find the information present in an interference pattern by considering only the individual wave sources in isolation.
Another way in which monistic idealism differs radically from the materialist hypothesis is this: according to materialism, memories are only experienced when recalled. Otherwise, they are merely unconscious information stored somewhere as material traces. According to monistic idealism, on the other hand, these material traces are the (partial) outside image of ongoing experiences. As such, memories never cease to be experienced. You are continuously experiencing all your memories at all times. It’s just that the vast majority of these experiences are obfuscated, only a small subset being amplified.84 Forgetting and recalling things mean simply that different ones among all ongoing experiences in the psyche become amplified at different points. Some of these ongoing experiences correspond to consensus facts. Others are simply personal fantasies or confabulations. Yet others, a conflation of the previous two cases. Whatever the case, ‘recall’ and ‘amnesia’ are simply the names we give to a swap of the mental contents reverberating in the psyche.
This difference between materialism and monistic idealism has huge implications when it comes to our understanding of death: since the body is the outside image of localization in the flow of transpersonal experiences, bodily death is simply a delocalization – a release – of those experiences; the dissolution of the whirlpool. This way, neither your consciousness nor your memories cease to exist upon death, for exactly the same reason that the water in a whirlpool doesn’t cease to exist when the whirlpool dissolves. The water is simply released into the larger flow of the stream. While materialism implies that death terminates any possibility that one’s memories can be re-experienced, monistic idealism implies that the ongoing experiences in memory are simply released into a larger context of consciousness.
Memory remains a profound scientific mystery. There is nothing wrong with there being mysteries in science but, in this case, science’s less-than-tacit adoption of materialism as a metaphysics – which I discuss further in essay 4.4 – is artificially restricting it. Indeed, memory may be one of the anomalies that will eventually compel science to reconsider its illegitimate and neurotic marriage to materialism. This is not to deny that powerful forces are at play to maintain the status quo, including a baffling willingness by the mainstream media to err on the side of materialist views. But, short of outright scientific and intellectual censorship, no human game can ultimately resist the truths of nature.
3.4. Misleading journalism and the notion of implanted memories
In the summer of 2013, several people sent me links to an article published on Scientific American. The title promised something extraordinary: ‘The Era of Memory Engineering Has Arrived: How neuroscientists can call up and change a memory.’85 That certainly sparked my curiosity. After having read it, however, I was indeed amused, but not for the reasons I thought I would be. Allow me to elaborate.
The article started with references to science fiction films in which the hero at some point realizes that his memories were implanted by evil scientists. None of the past he remembers actually happened, but was artificially synthesized and inserted into his head. I immediately thought of the movie Total Recall, where people could go to a shop called ‘Recall’ and order custom-made memories of holidays, adventures, heated romances and what not, without actually having to live through any of that. The article then went on to suggest that cutting edge work done at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was comparable to these amazing sci-fi scenarios:
Scientists have captured specific memories in mice, altered them, and shown that the mice behave in accord with these new, false, implanted memories. The era of memory engineering is upon us, and naturally, there are big implications for basic science and, perhaps someday, human health and society.86
Wow, really? Have we been able to synthesize and implant episodic memories like in Total Recall? I mean, no need for entire narratives…if even a simple episodic memory – say, of switching on the lights – could have been synthesized and implanted, it would be very significant not only for science, but for philosophy as well. If it were possible to synthesize and implant memories that way, it would imply that we knew exactly what memories were, as well as where and how they were encoded in the brain. However, things weren’t as they seemed…
When you read the original scientific report87 critically, here is what you discover:
• No episodic memories were synthesized
at all.
• What was actually done was this: they found a way to measure and record the pattern of brain activity in mice when the mice were placed in a first environment – say, environment A – and then they managed to ‘reactivate’ that same pattern of brain activity later on, after the mice had been relocated to another place – environment B.
• When they re-activated the original pattern of brain activity – the one corresponding to environment A – with the mice already located in environment B, they simultaneously gave the mice electric shocks.
• When they put the mice back in environment A, without the shocks, the mice still got paralyzed with fear.
That’s it. Now, let’s look at what this actually means.
Both the experiences of being in environment A and of the electric shocks weren’t ‘implanted’ memories. They actually happened. They actually shocked the mice. They actually placed the mice in environment A. All the experiment accomplished was to create an association between environment A and the electric shock without needing to actually make the two happen together, as in classical conditioning. So there is a sense in which one could perhaps say that the memory of the association was induced, but that’s totally different than the article suggests in the beginning. No episodic memory was synthesized at all; not even a very tiny simple one. All experiences involved were actual experiences of the mice. They just tricked the mice into linking one real experience to another real experience. This is rather a cognitive link than a memory. They induced association, conditioning; they didn’t implant episodic memories.
Brief Peeks Beyond Page 9