“I know what it’s like to be dead.”
– Clive Wearing, a man who suffers from devastating memory dysfunction.
Photo: Hmong woman by Mimi_K, flickr.com
Clive Wearing’s terrible words illustrate the link between the first area of study and the second in Unit 3 Psychology.
It is our ability to create and retrieve memories that allows us to experience what William James called the “stream of consciousness”. This awareness of our ongoing identity, which connects our personal past with our present, despite the physical changes of our existence, despite our moments of forgetfulness, despite altered states of consciousness including dreaming and sleeping, is central to the experience of being both human and alive. Clive Wearing knows that he has lost something crucial to human life, because he can no longer form new memories. His horrifying loss is one of the case studies referred to by Eric Kandel in the lectures described below. Wearing’s consciousness is purely in the present. Even though he can play the piano with phenomenal skill, he cannot recall having done so a minute or two later. He can no longer connect his past with his present.
Kandel closes this series of lectures by referring to five principles that his lifework allows him to enunciate with the authority of a great scientist:
1. Mind and brain are inseparable.
2. Each mental function of the brain is carried out by separate neural circuits in different regions of the brain.
3. All neural circuits are made up of the same class of signalling units: nerve cells and their synapses.
4. The synapse serves a double function: it is the point of communication between nerve cells, and the site of memory storage.
5. The synapse is also a target for disease in both neurological and psychiatric disorders.
At the website link below, you can find links to all four lectures in the series, as presented by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The website link is:
http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/neuroscience/lectures.html
