ABSTRACT
Karl Spencer Lashley is famous for his attempts to localise the site of memory storage in the brain – a research endeavour that led him to conclude that the engram is stored throughout the cerebral cortex with all its regions playing an equal role in storage. Lashley showed that the anatomical site of the lesion was unimportant, although its size did have a bearing on the animal's performance or ability to re-learn the task. Lashley's last published article was entitled Cerebral Organization and Behavior in 1958, which dealt with "the problem of how the brain knows that it knows; what characteristics of neural activity constitute the mind". Lashley leaves the reader in no doubt he was an avowed materialist who strongly believed that the human mind will one day be fully accountable by the operations of the brain.
