The nature of life models make it difficult to engage with them. This is particularly true of the topic of memory. We are going to approach it through a series of five windows.
Window one; the small mammal.
The earliest mammals included a small warm blooded animal with hair and fur. They lived in burrows and came out at night to feed primarily on vegetation and insects. They are still with us in large numbers. How depended are they on movement memory, episodic memory and emotion?
A small mammal ‘decides’ to leave its burrow. It moves to the entrance of the burrow. After a while it moves out. It starts to go round a tree and hears a light rustling. Its poor sight captures a looming moving object as it approaches. It sniffs the air and recognises it. The animals nuzzle and go their separate ways.
A small mammal ‘decides’ to leave its burrow
It is likely that it is the biological registers of hunger, thirst, sex or nurture that energises it to leave the burrow. It would be apprehensive/ fearful about leaving it. Lets concentrate on hunger. It is possible that its overall high mood/energy level might take it out foraging even if it was not that hungry. Foraging might also be stimulated by sensory information about the time of day. In addition all animal muscles need to be used – feeling the desire to move. When in use the small tearing that always occurs as part of muscle use and the larger tearing of minor injury is covered over with rising endorphin levels. This is experienced as pleasurable. At the extreme, even the pain of significant injuries may not be felt until muscle activity and endorphin levels have dropped. This is common in human sport and physical fighting.
Fear would clearly prevent it from leaving if it heard, and felt through vibrations, physical changes in its burrow - being dug out by a fox for example.
It moves to the entrance of the burrow
Its actual physical movements depend on integrated movement models. These are themselves unrelated to any other biological register of the animal. They are a tool for movement: a ferociously complex task.
The animal would be very sensitive to outside conditions prior to any exit from the burrow. Its emotion of interest/excitement would be updating and helping to identify episodic models. The various episodic models for the burrow entrance - its experience of the burrow entrance - tells it that some things that have been present before are not present. The set of frightening sound elements (owl hoots) is not present; the smell of the thing that jumped on it once and raised its fear level sky high (fox) is not there. What is present is the smell and touch of damp together with its own hunger. When hunger and damp are re-cognised there are many movement models and episodes with them in and many of these include the physicality and chemistry/taste of a particular food source – neatly prominent in both episodic and movement models. We call them slugs and snails. The animal has movement models for the immediate area around its burrow. It also has a movement model where the food source appears as ‘objects’. Object points in movement memory are the links to episodic memory. The episodic memory details what happened ‘here’ - at this object point.
After a while it moves out
The next movement model that it uses takes it through grass and it updates and alters the model to include new objects and object changes. A fallen piece of bark and the current position of an intruding bramble. Why the detail? If in the next moment, or at some point when it is away, it gets jumped on again, its ability to anticipate these objects, rather than take an extra fraction of a second updating as it moves, might make the difference between life and death as it races back to its burrow.
An example of an object spot in a movement model might be ‘this is the place where I found a large insect to eat’. Within the episodic memory are the emotions felt at the time and weakly present now. In this case these are interest at the excitement level and the emotion of satisfied/happy. Another example might be ‘this is the place where I fought another animal over an earwig’. Fighting being yet another range of movement models. The emotions here would be apprehensive/fear and irritation/anger.
It starts to go round a tree and hears a light rustling
It next has a movement model for going round the big object (foot of the oak tree) that lies in its path. It knows the tree to be a different movement model through changes in its sense of touch (bark) and kinaesthesis (gravity) - it has to climb. Episodic ‘objects spots ‘ on the tree itself link to episodic memories of food and probably fear and fight.
It is an expert on rustling and can detect patterns and variations in ‘rustles’ adjusted for damp and dry conditions. The group of episodes that are triggered by this particular rustle are those made by its own species but an encounter with its own kind can go in a number of directions.
Interest /excitement and apprehension/fear begin the rustling episode. Irritation/anger may come in next if episodic memories of confrontations with other animals are re-cognised. This possibly increases when the senses point to members of the same species. On the other hand the quality of the rustling may point to a favourite insect meal. Again though, it is irritation/anger that energises the difficult encounter of catching it.
Its poor sight captures a looming moving object as it approaches. It sniffs the air and recognises it
The approaching objects smell (including pheromones) triggers numerous episodes all about its own species, and; we suspect; episodes about its own offspring. This would be a ‘smell’ that is me/us/similar-DNA or whatever re-cognised register of biological commonality is at work.
The animals nuzzle and go their separate ways
The only alternative to intimacy is to fight or threaten to fight. Humans, and indeed some other advanced animals, have the option of pretending no one is there.
….……
When we see animals, in life or on film, we see their actions. We cannot see how each action, each movement, comes about. Life modeling cannot be accounted for, captured or described. We can however try to understand something of how the ‘life within’ is organised.
Given the considerable variation in all aspects of all animals and the interaction with this and a changing physical and social world, the actual experience of the small animal leaving its den on this occasion is unique in absolute terms. Experiences are never repeatable. They cannot in reality, or theoretically, ever exist again, but something like them can exist again. Attempting to repeat experiences that brought benefits or attempting similar experiences, is a commonality of animal life. That is because the strategy more often than not leads to benefits. Like every other life model that we deploy its inexactness mops up much of the variation.
It is clear from the story above that for the simplest of mammals it is biological registers working with life models that define every encounter. Everywhere we can find two major memories and emotions.
What does this story about a small mammal say about ourselves?
This is nearly, but not quite, a story about the nature of our ‘life within’. We have a much bigger brain. We also have a different profile of senses. Our focussed attention is dominated by speech and language. As we will see this is a game changer for memory. Our next strongest biological register is vision. The eyes provide patterns of light to the brain. It is vision that sees and vision takes place in the brain. Nearly half our brain is involved in vision. Much of this activity is about episodic memory content. For us the ‘object spots’ have a huge nature. Moment by moment we have an infinite ability to access visual scenes, images and sequences from our life within. Some of these come from object spots in our own movements, from places that we have moved through (experienced), while others come from media. The meaning clusters (meaning and grammar) that lie behind the speech sounds of words, are full of these scenes, images and short films. In the the topic episodic memory we try and make more some sense of this.
Window two; did I lock the door?
As you leave your home shortly after your partner has left, you lock the door. You catch up your partner just as you are turning the corner of your street on the way to get the bus. Your partner asks you, ‘did you lock the door’? If there was nothing unusual in your leaving of the house then, given what we know about the workings of the human brain, it is highly unlikely that you will know whether you locked the door or not. You try and remember if you did but nothing comes back to you. You might say ‘yes’ on the basis that you always lock the door. However, you are aware as you say this that you do not know whether you did or not. In an attempt to be honest you say ‘I cannot remember’. Despite the fact that the true answer to the question is, ‘I do not know’, you are most likely to say ‘I cannot remember’. What is going on here? Firstly, as we have seen, it is a necessary (implicit) belief of the mind that it knows what the body has physically done. This is enforced by the belief that it is fully responsible to the human group for all the body’s actions. It has to know. To forget what has been known preserves the illusion on which this belief is founded.
The truth is your mind does not know and has never known. Only traces in your muscles and recent brain activity around the running of an integrated movement model (that made no call on focussed attention) register if you have locked the door or not. Your thinking (inner dialogue) cannot access these. How close can it get?
It can refer to the act of inserting a key into a lock and with the help of episodic memory it can refer to/picture, inserting a specific key into a specific lock but it cannot find out if you have just actually inserted a specific key into a specific lock unless it has an episodic memory of the event - unless the specific movement in that specific moment has got an object link to episodic memory.
It does not know the answer to the question ‘did you lock the door’. Locking the door was a bodily act that did not involve either focussed attention or thought. You did it without thinking and without focussed attention. Indeed your focussed attention was most likely grabbed by inner dialogue so you were thinking of something else totally unrelated to locking the door.
The proviso we made at the start of locking the door was ‘if there was nothing unusual in you’re leaving the house’. If you kicked a bottle over while doing it, or got the key stuck in the door, then your focussed attention would have shifted and would have spent some time in your integrated movement model (visualisation and physical movement) as you tried to get the key to work or pick up the bottle.
Whole body and brain priorities dominate both focussed attention and episodic memory. This means that episodic memory has a high content of focussed attention movements. It is episodic memory that you consult when you try and remember what happened. Now, when you are asked the question ‘did you lock the door’, you run over focussed attention records and confidently say ‘yes I did’. You were too hasty. Fiddling with the key or bending from the locking task to pick up a bottle will create an episode around locking the door but this does not mean that you did lock the door. Unless your focussed attention memory actually contains things like film of you looking as you turned the key or a register of a twinge in the arm as you turned the key while looking away at nothing in particular then you still do not know whether you locked the door or not.
Window three; the dictionary.
A simple dictionary definition/description of how to use the word ‘memory’, talks of the ‘faculty of remembering’ and then refers to recollection and ‘bringing to mind’. This covers your ability to go from a blank mind and inert focussed attention - the pause we looked at in the life modeling topic - into inner dialogues, visual images and films (real and media) and aspects of episodic memory. This is a mind perspective take on memory. We know of other memories and can happily hum tunes, pick small stones out of the rice by touch and use smell to check if what we are about to drink is coffee or hot mud.
Further search enquiry will talk of short term and long term memory. Very soon information processing ideas interlinked with computer science will emerge. The stark limitations of this approach we have brought out in a number of topics specifically variation, unpredictability and mathematics and life modeling. It captures something of the phoneme memories (speech and language).
Window four; more examples of what is hidden from the mind?
You need boxes for an Easter activity with children.
You suddenly remember that many years ago you could make boxes by cutting and folding paper (remembering by using semantic memory/meaning cluster navigation and episodic memory). However, how to make a box from paper is a blank. You leave it to your brain to see if it can come up with something and think no more about it. Over the next few days moving images, taken from looking directly through your eyes, capture you folding the paper. The first one of these is the final movements to complete the box when the last two folds are bent over. Half a day later, you recall the first step of making a square by folding the corner of a rectangular piece of paper so that it sits on the top line of the paper. Further hours reveal moving images for other stages. At this point you take a piece of paper and try and put the full integrated movement model together. An easy-access account of human memory leaves all this to one side.
A close friend was visiting a special school.
The school had a small group of sheep in a field and she arrived to found a number of staff members trying to round up the sheep and drive them through a gate hole. She started to help, gave guidance to staff and soon found that she had been instrumental in moving the sheep successfully through the gate hole.
She (her mind) was surprised at how she acted and what her body and brain remembered about rounding up sheep. She thought that she had forgotten skills learned while being brought up on a farm and certainly could not easily have given a verbal account of how to round up sheep. Even if she could have composed such a treatise it would not be able to capture the learned skill of ‘reading’ sheep actions.
Much of what we know cannot be immediately remembered unless we are presented with a state of the physical and related social world within which we need to act. How to make paper boxes took time to remember. How to round up sheep required a real world situation. Indeed is it possible to even talk about such abilities as knowledge? Influenced by Wittgenstein philosophers came up with the idea of calling abilities such as rounding up sheep, by terms such as ‘knowing how’ – they referred to remaining knowledge by the phrase ‘knowing what’. ‘Knowing how’ is made sensible by the phrase ‘how to do something’ but ‘knowing what’ does not get past initial label sticking. As this practise has not caught on with the general public, we are left with yet another aspect of our body and brain nature that is hidden by the mind and its ways.
The difficulty of using the words knowledge and memory is easily shown when we try and apply them to animal nature, other animals or our own. Does the dog know where the bone is or does it remember where it is? Do you know where you sleep or do you remember where you sleep? Clearly questions not worth asking. It does however leave us with a real difficulty in studying our own remembering and our memory processes. As far as our body/brain is concerned knowing and remembering melt into each other.
Window five; re-cognition and recall.
In our attempt to picture memory, there is some value in the distinction between re-cognition and recall.
Re-cognition is the point of encounter between any body/brain process and the physical world. This includes all physical aspects of the social world such as face recognition and the perception that someone is driving aggressively.
Recall is the active attempt to find in the brain/mind ‘something’. Some people can recall some smells in that they can go from the words to the trace pattern for that smell in the brain and thus have the sensation of smelling what they are trying to recall. This is not surprising as the meaning clusters behind words and word combinations collect sensations from across nearly all bodily registers though many of these would only be triggered on recognition.
I, personally, can go from the smell of ‘ferret’ to the thought/word ferret without seeing a ferret or knowing it was present, but I cannot recall the smell of a ferret. I can, however, recognise it by its smell. I can recognise music that I cannot recall.
iThe nature of reading and spelling
A socially fraught area for recognition and recall is the distinction between reading and spelling. The adult education movement at the end of the nineteenth century found that most people needing help with literacy could read but not write.
On innumerable occasions I was told by teachers and parents that if children read more their spelling would improve.
Reading is more about recognition while spelling is loaded towards recall. Learning how spoken words reference experience is a major part of the development of mind. Here, we refer to this as the binding together of biological register content to form the meaning clusters behind the unique sound patterns of each word. Experience sticks to spoken words readily.
It is easier to ‘recognise’ a written group of letters as a particular spoken word than it is to start with the spoken word and try and recall the visual appearance of the letter sequence that makes up its written form. In fact you would only bother to learn to do this if you wanted to write. It is made even harder when you then have to handwrite the sequence rather than tap it out on a key board.
When learning to read episodes and stories are used to keep children engaged. These are read in sentences and grammatical and semantic processes will be narrowing down the possibilities as you progress through the text. Spelling only rarely benefits from grammar and semantics. Think of writing ‘he is well bread’.
At one time the natural guessing skills of grammar and semantics were actually taught as a full reading method; with support from other contextual information such as episode and story forms; but we now know that the exact sequence of letters has to be confirmed either by a direct link with the conjectured spoken word or by the phoneme processor ‘checking for fit’ (phonically).
Learning to spell often requires that the sound of the word is excessively ‘focussed on’ in order to enhance awareness of (bring into focussed attention) the syllable boundaries and the individual phonemes. Those struggling with reading also find this helpful. This gradually builds a new processing system (a phonic one) but the presence of phoneme alternatives and the irregularity of English spelling mean that many ‘visual letter sequence oddities’ need simply to be remembered.
‘Good’ spellers of English spell by learning the visual sequences for all words and syllables and minimise excessive focusing on phoneme processing beyond the first letter of a word. Strangely, in order to be a good speller you have to have an excellent phoneme computer because this gives high retention of all the visual sequence of letters for each whole world. No ‘decoding’ is needed.