From: J. Daugherty (daugh@home.msen.com)
Date: Sat Feb 08 1997 - 22:21:10 MST
How about Rupert Sheldrake's idea that memories are not stored in the mind at all, but that the mind (cerebellum?) serves as antenna picking up the memories via "morphic resonance" from the space time continuum ...for the uninitiated, this assumes the space time continuum is a memory continuum like a memory surface except muli-dimensional.
James Daugherty
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From: Eliezer Yudkowsky[SMTP:sentience@pobox.com]
Sent: Monday, February 03, 1997 7:37 PM
To: extropians@extropy.org
Subject: Re: Free will, still more
[Eric Watt Forste wonders:]
> I thought the cerebellum was involved in fine-scale motor coordination,
> not in conceptual recall. Are you sure you aren't meaning to say
> "cerebral cortex" instead of cerebellum? That's a guess on my
> part... you've really lost me.
Welcome to one of the big surprises of cognitive science. We know the
hippocampus is involved in LTM (long-term memory) formation, because
people who lose the hippocampus can't form new memories - although, in
retrospect, they can retrieve the old LTM just fine.
So, with those newfangled PET scanners and other close-to-real-time
neuroimaging tools, they finally get a chance to see what happens when
people *retrieve* LTM. Guess what lights up?
Not the hippocampus.
Not the cerebral cortex.
The cerebellum.
And if anybody can even *begin* to explain this, I haven't heard about
it. My own guess is that the cerebellum does constraint propagation or
some other kind of constraint-to-visualization assembly, and that is
what motor skills, LTM retrieval, and (another guess) spatiotemporal
visualization have in common.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/singularity.html
http://tezcat.com/~eliezer/algernon.html
Disclaimer: Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I think I know.
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