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.
The problem with consciousness is that it can never be understood. You can identify neurological correlates to experience, but you can never see how a neurological process can generate a conscious reaction in itself. Because conscious cannot be understood in material terms - even if it does in fact exist as a consequence of material processes. It may, ultimately, only be that the brain is a book that the "spirit" reads. Who knows.
You say "Who knows" as you close your comment. But at first, you make the claim that it will "Never" be understood. How many people have ever said the word Never and been wrong? Probably all of them. Even if it's true in this case, that is not a reason to give up. I think it's obvious we'll eventually understand what makes someone conscious at the level of the brain. Maybe not this year. But someday it will happen.
The problem with consciousness is that it can never be understood. You can identify neurological correlates to experience, but you can never see how a neurological process can generate a conscious reaction in itself. Because conscious cannot be understood in material terms - even if it does in fact exist as a consequence of material processes. It may, ultimately, only be that the brain is a book that the "spirit" reads. Who knows.
I'm shocked at how many unfunny inside jokes these guys say to each other during this talk. Get the middle guy out of there! Talk to the guy on the right. He smokes joints (plural) before deciding who's on his scientific team. He's cool. Let's talk about Memory. It's interesting and fundamentally important. Shut up with the stupid jokes with each other.
member. 
