How does Embodiment Science shift how we think about Memory? (with Guy Claxton & Emily Poel)

It follows from the way we've been talking, developing alternative ideas of intelligence and learning.

We need a biologized way of thinking about memory.

To have a theory or a model or an image of memory is to have a way of conceptualizing the effect that experience cumility is having on our ability to behave intelligently in the world.

You know, you have to remember, like anything else in science, the first attempt to understand, you know, what is memory, it usually comes from some kind of metaphor or some kind of analogy.

And the analogy that's been most in favor, certainly since the 1960s or before the 1960s, but strengthened by the arrival of the digital computer, is that memory is a store.

And there are still people on the planet who don't realize, who don't understand that memory as a store is a metaphor.

It's a way of looking at memory.

Memory is not a store.

Memory, for some purposes, might be conceived of usefully as a store, but it isn't.

The idea that memory is a warehouse, memory is a hard drive, memory is a library.

Those kinds of ideas which ran psychology from around about 1960 to around about mid-1990s, they've passed their sell-by date, as all metaphors do.

You know, we used to think that the atom was like a pebble.

Then someone said, "No, it's more like a current bun." And then someone said, "No, it's more like a mini solar system." And then somebody else said, "No, it's more like a kind of smear of something in space," and so on and so on.

It's like metaphors and analogies usually grounded in some kind of concrete experience back to the embodiment and embeddedness of thinking provide a way of bootstrapping our understanding.

But that understanding then always comes to that metaphor, always reveals its limitations.

And now we've got to the point where the limitations of memory as a store are becoming apparent because that store image does not connect, pays no attention to the development of our understanding of how intelligent our biology is.

So we need an image of memory now that is biologically plausible.

So in the book, we develop the idea that what we've been told, the memory, the sedimentation of experience is what we call the lifescape.

You can imagine it as a plane which is kind of hilly, and memory is the way in which that landscape has been sculpted, eroded by the weather, so that when it rains again, the effect of previous weather is to create runnels and rivers and channels, hills and valleys, which guide the flow of our neural energy as it trickles its way through the Mississippi delta of our brains.

So that gives us a different starting point.

And it's hilly because it's not binary.

It's not digital.

It's like everything is probabilistic.

You know, most cats have fur.

Most cats have four legs.