ABSTRACT

The human brain is the only brain in the biosphere whose potential cannot be realized on its own. It needs to become part of a network before its design features can be expressed.

Merlin Donald

Memory and remembering have been the subject of considerable and broad interest for some two decades now, involving both the natural sciences and the humanities, and becoming a topic of everyday concern, for many reasons. The contingencies and pressure to perform adequately in a modern, highly industrialized society make it necessary to keep adapting one’s personal past to external exigencies. This is also the case when societies make constant reference to living up to the norms of the past. The systemic transformations at the end of the twentieth century particularly seem to have evoked a growing need for confirming our historical roots and at the same time finding orientation in the new world. The interest in memory and remembering has also increased due to substantial age-related changes in demographics in the majority of Western countries. There are increasing numbers of people who have more to look back upon than to look forward to, and disturbances in memory, correlating with greater age, as in cases of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, etc., are becoming a major concern for health and social programs. In addition, medical technology developed methods of cerebral imaging that made it possible to directly view brain activity, and this gave memory research a tremendous boost. Whereas before we could only rely on testing, animal experimentation and brain-damaged patients to distinguish various memory systems and functions, modern-day imaging techniques have made such progress in showing task-related activity patterns in the living brain that the last decade (1990-2000) was named the “decade of the brain”. The neurosciences at times seemed to succumb to the hubris of claiming to be the sole means to explain questions of consciousness, the will and memory.