This went by error only to Christoph, but meant for all ...
Very interesting ... particularly the focus on conscious/unconscious ...
if
we take memory-G to be mainly the unconscious aspect, continuous,
operating
on long as well as short timescales, and remembering-E to be the
"rising"
into consciousness, regardless of whether it is effortful (voluntary,
willed) or spontaneous, and which operates mainly on shorter timescales.
Hence some questions and issues. Yes, we should consider it UNUSUAL for
anything to be conscious, especially for the past to become conscious
'again'. Unfortunately we have not much to say about consciousness
itself
... perhaps only that it is as Edelman suggests, this 'remembered
present',
this is a sort of 'delayed cognitive feedback' or almost-instant replay
of
the unconscious (i.e. pre-conscious) experiencing which is (or allows us
to) reflect on (image, language it -- as verbs). When we remember, does
the
remembered experience overlay, or interrupt, the ongoing conscious
experiencing? both happen? Somehow I think we must appeal here to the
conditions set by some longer-term on-going activity or project, within
which the remembered experience is _selected_ as somehow relevant enough
to
bring to consciousness -- and I am speaking here still of spontaneous
remembering-E. (I agree that the effortful kind so favored by
experimentalists is a complex sort of second-order derivative
phenomenon,
not the right place to begin.)
The timescales. There is the scale of how-long-ago. There is the scale
of
how-much-time-remembered. There is the scale of how much time the
'replay'
seems to us to take as a part of present phenomenological time. I don't
think it's efficient for the brain to keep all experiences constantly
'circulating' in the unconscious. There must be a triggering, but this
triggering may be rather broad, triggering many possible memories at any
given time, with then some selection process filtering, or enhancing,
only
some or one to come to consciousness ... or a few may get up to
near-consciousness and then conscious attention makes the final
selection.
So I mean to inquire about a long timescale for memory-G in the sense
that
we have to ask whether memory is segmental or continuous. Do we just
record
continuously, with no timescale or unit? except maybe the sleep-wake
cycle?
Or do we record everything, but in chunks? and if in chunks, then surely
in
hierarchies of little chunks in big chunks, and probably with some
overlap
of bigger chunks .... segmented by what? what is the ground of our sense
of
the continuity of events? must be multi-dimensional, which would provide
a
basis for overlap, and also for the fact that while we can remember the
order of remembered events, we often get it wrong and have to work it
out
effortfully (since there are many dimensions, some events may be
remembered
as consecutive which were not, and if we activate only a few salient
criteria of relatedness, we may get chunks for which we don't have in
view
the right threads by which to reconstruct their serial ordering ... for
that we'd need other dimensions which were not relevant to the selection
criteria by which we got these chunks).
And then the related issue of timescale for remembering-E: how big a
chunk
do we remember? how long does it take to remember it? how long does it
seem
to be? I don't think we actually do usually re-play experience in
remembering, at least not usually, though it does feel like it happens
sometimes. Segments of remembered experience seem to be treated in
present
time as more point-like, i.e. as chunks with very little duree (sense of
experienced duration). We can inspect or interrogate them -- a change in
the selection conditions? -- so that they become a bit fractal ... we
can
remember little chunks within those chunks, and so on down to some short
timescale beneath which memory-G did not "record" ... certainly did not
record at the operational level, maybe not even at the minimal
action/event
level unless the little component events, or one or two of them, were
salient.
All of which definitely makes me wish that introspection had not been
ruled
out of scientific psychology! I would like to have the detailed accounts
from dozens of people of how remembering-E feels to them in such
respects
as I have been highlighting here.
I am guessing that remembering-E is largely illusory ... a sort of cheat
by
which we come to feel that we are remembering more than we really are
...
that only a bit of the remembered is "authentic" (i.e. the output of a
brain/body irreversible altered at some past time), and the rest is
plausibly filled in, or even fuzzily not-bothered-to-be-filled-in , by
present processes. I am thinking about the compression algorithms of
computing, very basic mathematical strategies for using the smallest
number
of bits to produce a low-resolution image that is then upgraded to a
high
resolution image by a procedure that assumes that this image was
'typical'
of a large class of images. I don't know all the memory literature, but
I
believe there is plenty of evidence that we recall, say, faces in this
way
... a few prominent features, and then a sort of "otherwise normal like
a
face" (or like a 'young/white/girl's face'). This would also fit with
the
older theories, like Pribram's, about holographic memory.
So I'd be happy to hear from all and sundry about how remembering feels,
especially the effortless or spontaneous part, including what happens
after
you voluntarily "start" remembering, and the remembering keeps on
coming.
Is there continuous replay? or a "something" that you can attend to a
get
more fine-grained detail? And do you remember all at once long stretches
of
experience, or only short ones? If you remember long stretches, do they
come in chunks? overlaps? Do you always know without thinking about it
what
order the memories are supposed to be in chronologically?
And when remembering is not an activity in itself, but a part of a
larger
activity, does it seem that the larger activity context is triggering?
filtering? spontaneous memory?
Why are there not books and books about all this?
Thanks, Christoph! JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
---------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 01 2001 - 01:02:04 PDT