Mind & Memory
Memory is key to how humans are very different animals.
The Canadian neuro-psychologist Merlin Donald interdisciplinary (neurological, anthropological and psychological) hypothesis is that homo sapiens developed gestural, linguistic, and written storage and thought structures via 3 stages: "mimetic," "mythic," and "theoretic".
“In my proposal all three stages introduced new memory features into the human cognitive system, and one important consequence has been greatly improved voluntary access to memory representations; in effect, humans have evolved the architecture needed to support what has been called ‘explicit’ memory retrieval.” Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1991.
Donald sums up: “The first transition introduced two fundamentally new cognitive features: a supramodal, motor-modelling capacity called mimesis, which created representations that had the critical property of voluntary retrievability. The second transition added two more features: a capacity for lexical invention, and a high-speed phonological apparatus, the latter being a specialised mimetic subsystem. The third transition introduced external memory storage and retrieval, and a new working memory architecture.”
The latter two transitions are types of external memory systems:
the mythic: before the Greeks, external formalisms were mythic or narrative; and
the theoretic: the key innovation was writing. The Greeks began to record jotting, speculation, evidence, before then whole histories and narratives were learnt. Donald says this was revolutionary, “much more than a symbolic invention, like the alphabet, or a specific external memory medium, such as improved paper or printing’ in ‘the process of externally encoded cognitive change and discovery.”
Memory is key to who who individual humans are.
In 1985, Clive Wearing, an English musicologist in his mid-40s, caught herpes encephalitis that destroyed parts of his brain that processed memory. He was abandoned to the present, with a short term memory of a few seconds, and his past had gone too. “It was as if every waking moment was the first waking moment. Clive was under the constant impression that he had just emerged from unconsciousness because he had no evidence in his own mind of ever being awake before... 'I haven't heard anything, seen anything, touched anything, smelled anything,' he would say."
Deborah Wearing, Forever Today: A Memoir Of Love And Amnesia, 2005.
"Desperate to hold on to something, Clive started to keep a journal. But the entries consisted, essentially, of the statements "I am awake" or "I am conscious", entered again and again every few minutes. He would write: "2.10pm: this time properly awake... 2.14pm: this time finally awake... 2.35pm: this time completely awake," along with negations of these statements: "At 9.40pm I awoke for the first time, despite my previous claims."" Oliver Sacks, ‘Forever now’, The Guardian, November 3, 2007