Keen students of memory
will recognise that the title of this post is an homage to the seminal book of
the same title by the great memory researcher, Endel Tulving. To my mind, Tulving’s Elements is one of the
finest books that has been written about memory, along with William James’s Principles of Psychology and Dan Schacter’s Searching for Memory. (It’s quite possible
that Charles Fernyhough’s forthcoming Pieces of Light may soon join that
list).
In Tulving’s book, he describes
how episodic memories of experienced events are unlikely to be stored as fixed,
separate, discrete “memory traces”, but rather as “bundles” of features. It makes sense, given the enormous number of
events we may have to remember over a lifetime, that our brains would have
evolved a more efficient strategy than simply storing each event separately, as
a bound trace comprising all its different components. The redundancy would be huge. Instead, it appears that we store single representations
of features distributed around the brain which are then shared between different
event memories via associative networks. Tulving acknowledges that “we have no
idea about the number and identity of features that the human mind or its
memory system has at its disposal” (p. 161).
However, he speculates that “the features of the mind correspond to
discriminable differences in our perceptual environment and to the categories
and the concepts that the language we use imposes on the world.” (ibid)