Memory: Recording experience in cells and circuits: Diversity in memory research

The study of memory, once the exclusive province of psychology, has come to include cellular mechanisms and neural circuitry as well as behavior. This psychologically and biomedically significant process was the subject of a National Academy of Sciences-sponsored conference, “Memory: Recording Experience in Cells and Circuits,” held in Irvine, CA, February, 17–20, 1996. The conference was organized by Alan Baddeley, Patricia Goldman-Rakic (Chair), Eric Kandel, Donald Price, and Larry Squire, with the goal of reviewing some of the major research accomplishments in this field. We are indebted to the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke and the National Institute of Aging for generous grants that supported the expenses of graduate students who attended the meeting and to Interneuron Pharmaceuticals for additional support of a social event.

One of the long-standing and challenging issues that memory research continues to confront is the dilemma of localizing a complex function in an exquisitely anatomically differentiated central nervous system. Is memory a mental function that can be identified with an isolated neural structure or specific groups of neurons? Traditionally, this question has been framed by psychological inquiry. The 19th century school of “faculty psychology” divided mental processes into separate and distinct human attributes such as “courage” and “ambition,” encouraging the anatomist, Gall (1), to impose the multiple attributes of human psychological make-up onto a physical map of the brain. Although this naive view of psychological process was widely repudiated, it nevertheless spawned the powerful and ultimately validated idea that specific functions can be relegated to particular brain structures or regions. Clinical observations in patients with focal lesions in the last century clearly established a correspondence between specific symptoms and localized regions of injury, most notably left hemisphere frontal sites with expression of speech (2) and left hemisphere posterior temporal lobe sites with speech …