ABSTRACT
How are memories made? How and where are they maintained? How are they retrieved and how do they initiate and control behavior? These questions have been asked for many centuries; the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all offered suggested answers, both fanciful and wrong. The emergence of empirical scientific physiological inquiry in the 18th and 19th centuries created the understanding and acceptance that memory is the province of the brain, rather than the heart or other bodily organs. Memory was then firmly placed in the tissues of the brain and not in the ventricles — a previously popular notion. That previous idea was guided then, as ours are now, by facts and metaphors created by current technology. After all, before the 18th century a great deal was known about the functioning of fluids, but cells had not yet been discovered and studies of electrophysiology had not even been imagined.
