Terry McDermott and Dr. Gary Lynch present How Memories Get Made.
The world-renowned neuroscientist Gary Lynch, subject of McDermott's new book, discusses his decades-long obsessive pursuit to uncover the mechanism by which the brain makes memories. This discussion is moderated by Dr. Larry Swanson, Milo Don and Lucille Appleman Professor of Biological Sciences, USC.
Bio
Gary Lynch
Dr. Gary Lynch is one of the most cited neuroscientists in the world and author of more than 550 scientific articles. He is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California at Irvine. He is the co-author of Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence.
Terry McDermott
Terry McDermott, a reporter for The Los Angeles Times, was skeptical of the way the Sept. 11 hijackers were portrayed. So he traveled to 22 countries to research their identities, motives and life circumstances.
He found that they weren't deeply disturbed. They came from intact families, most were middle-class, few were deeply religious, and none were abused or estranged. His new book is Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It.
Louise Steinman
Louise Steinman is a writer and literary curator. Her work frequently deals with memory, history and reconciliation.
Her book, The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father's War was cited as "A graceful, understated memoir that draws its strength from the complexities it explores." (New York Times Book Review).
The book won the 2002 Gold Medal in Autobiography/Memoir from ForeWord Magazine and has been the selection of several all-city and all-freshman reading programs. The book chronicles her quest to return a war souvenir to its owner and -- in the process -- illuminates how war changed one generation and shaped another.
Her first book, The Knowing Body: The Artist As Storyteller in Contemporary Performance was hailed by the L.A. Times as a "dazzling study of the performing arts." It is based on two decades of Steinman's experience as a performer/director with So&So&So&So interdisciplinary theater troupe, and as a dance/theater critic for publications ranging from Willamette Week to High Performance, Oakland Tribune and others.
She is currently completing a book titled Through the Crooked Mirror: My Conversation with Poland.
Her essays and feature articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, New York Times Syndicate, L.A. Weekly, Los Angeles Magazine, Salon.com, Washington Post and other publications. Her features include profiles of Zen rabbis, elevator operators, artists, memoirists, combat veterans, translators, filmmakers, and an innovator in deaf education.
She has curated the award-winning ALOUD at Central Library series for the Los Angeles Public Library for the past fifteen years and is also co-director of the Los Angeles Institute of the Humanities at USC. She was Senior Creative Advisor for the Sundance Institute Arts Writing Program and she is an active member of PEN Center USA West.
Larry Swanson
Dr. Larry Swanson is Appleman Professor of Biological Sciences and a member of the Neuroscience Research Institute at USC, where he directs a laboratory investigating brain systems that control motivation and emotion. His recent book, Brain Architecture: Understanding the Basic Plan, presents a new theory of nervous system organization, and his atlas Brain Maps is in its third edition. He and his wife, Neely, have translated three classic works of Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852-1934), the Nobel Prize-winning founder of modern neuroscience, including his 2,000-page masterpiece Histology of the Nervous System and Advice to a Young Investigator.
Dr. Swanson is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Interdisciplinary study that attempts to explain the cognitive processes of humans and some higher animals in terms of the manipulation of symbols using computational rules. The field draws particularly on the disciplines of artificial intelligence, psychology (seecognitive psychology), linguistics, neuroscience, and philosophy. Some chief areas of research in cognitive science have been vision, thinking and reasoning, memory, attention, learning, and language processing. Early theories of cognitive function attempted to explain the evident compositionality of human thought (thoughts are built up of smaller units put together in a certain way), as well as its productivity (the process of putting together a thought from smaller units can be repeated indefinitely to produce an infinite number of new thoughts), by assuming the existence of discrete mental representations that can be put together or taken apart according to rules that are sensitive to the representations' syntactic, or structural, properties. This “language of thought” hypothesis was later challenged by an approach, variously referred to as connectionism, parallel-distributed processing, or neural-network modeling, according to which cognitive processes (such as pattern recognition) consist of adjustments in the activation strengths of neuronlike processing units arranged in a network.
Power or process of recalling or reproducing what has been learned or experienced. Research indicates that the ability to retain information is fairly uniform among normal individuals; what differs is the degree to which persons learn or take account of something to begin with and the kind and amount of detail that is retained. Attention, motivation, and especially association facilitate this process. Visual images are generally better remembered than are other forms of sense-data. Memory prodigies, or people with “photographic” or “eidetic” memories, often draw heavily on visual associations, including mnemonics. Many psychologists distinguish between short- and long-term memory. The former (variously said to last 10 seconds to 3 minutes) is less subject to interference and distortion than the latter. Long-term memory is sometimes divided into episodic (i.e., event-centred) and semantic (i.e., knowledge-centred) memory. Various models of memory have been proposed, from the Enlightenment notion of impressions made on brain tissues (restyled as “memory molecules” or coded “engrams” in the 20th century) to B.F. Skinner's “black box” to more recent ideas concerning information processing or the formation of neuronal groups. Disorders of or involving memory include Alzheimer disease, amnesia, Korsakoff syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder, and senile dementia. See alsohypnosis.
And have you noticed how for all our analysis into the brain we are not one single step closer to understanding how it experiences itself - on any level. All we can see is "the machine".
It is absolutely inconceivable how a calculator can experience itself - always will be. You need to visualise the simple reality of it. The is no way that we can look at an object processing information, and find ourselves saying to..."Aha! I see...if you connect that link to this link then of course it will lead to a conscious experience".
With consciousness you are dealing with something that is completely incomprehensible to us on any level. Again - the best (and only) thing we can do is identify the neurological correlations to subjective experience. And the only thing that will be proven is the correlation.
At base, understanding consciousness has nothing to do with maths. And highly abstract theories will only create the fantasy of understanding (for some). This is just the way it is - because of what it is.
The argument is circular: conciousness cannot be understood because conciousness cannot be understood. Also, "never" suggests the logical fallacy of personal incredulity. You have not proven your premises; your claim of "fact" is uncompelling.
It is a difficult problem. The solution may not be wholly intuitive, but more like quantum theory, where understanding comes from mathematics. Quantum theory provides highly precise predictive tools which allow deep and practical manipulations and engineering solutions. And yet the engineers claim that intuitively it is still baffling.
A strong theory of conciousness will allow the building of conscious machines and possibly the analysis of consciousness in living creatures. Regardless of intuition, at that point I would regard it as practically understood.
@ aliens being dangerous to us (or not): When this man countered Hawkins' proposition to avoid the contact arguing that "all intelligence will be similar" and so he thinks aliens are safe, my jaw dropped.
Is this level of disconnect from reality displayed by presumably wise people even possible?
Was not Hitler's Germans' intelligence similar to "ours" or to "Jewish" intelligence?
Let's not reach for the archetypal devil. Let's look at what good people do.
Was not our intelligence similar to the intelligence of the native Americans? Did our similarity mean anything whatsoever to us, good natured Americans, to stop us from practically exterminating all of the local nations with their languages and culture because we wanted their land?
We don't know what other intelligence forms will do when they need our resources. But examples from our own history provide some insight into what can happen, what life does, mutual similarities aside.
@Greg
I kind of agree with you, though this talk was about his book and the time he spent in the lab with these people.
I would also like them to go more in depth of the subject of memory and the brain.
Do you know of any other talks about this subject, more in depth and or about new discoveries in the field of neuroscience?
I think it's obvious we'll eventually understand what makes someone conscious at the level of the brain.
Thanks for you reply, but I have to say "Good luck!" relating to the quote.
For sure, consciousness can be ever closer correlated to neurological processes (and I agree we should continue to penetrate as far as we can), but the existence of an [ultimately] purely mechanistic process that can understandably (to our cognition) generate a conscious reaction does not exist - that is, it's something that we can never understand because, for us, it is simply inherently incomprehensible.
It's hard for me to prove my point beyond that statement, but this is one thing that I am confident we can truly say 'never' to. To say; the other great 'never' is the question of how and why anything could exist at all - we'll never understand that one too.
member. 
