Borges and Memory: Encounters with the Human Brain - Hardcover

Quian Quiroga, Rodrigo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262018217 ISBN 13: 9780262018210

Verlag: The MIT Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

A scientist's exploration of the working of memory begins with a story by Borges about a man who could not forget.

Imagine the astonishment felt by neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga when he found a fantastically precise interpretation of his research findings in a story written by the great Argentinian fabulist Jorge Luis Borges fifty years earlier. Quian Quiroga studies the workings of the brain—in particular how memory works—one of the most complex and elusive mysteries of science. He and his fellow neuroscientists have at their disposal sophisticated imaging equipment and access to information not available just twenty years ago. And yet Borges seemed to have imagined the gist of Quian Quiroga's discoveries decades before he made them.

The title character of Borges's "Funes the Memorious" remembers everything in excruciatingly particular detail but is unable to grasp abstract ideas. Quian Quiroga found neurons in the human brain that respond to abstract concepts but ignore particular details, and, spurred by the way Borges imagined the consequences of remembering every detail but being incapable of abstraction, he began a search for the origins of Funes. Borges's widow, María Kodama, gave him access to her husband's personal library, and Borges's books led Quian Quiroga to reread earlier thinkers in philosophy and psychology. He found that just as Borges had perhaps dreamed the results of Quian Quiroga's discoveries, other thinkers—William James, Gustav Spiller, John Stuart Mill—had perhaps also dreamed a story like "Funes."

With Borges and Memory, Quian Quiroga has given us a fascinating and accessible story about the workings of the brain that the great creator of Funes would appreciate.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, a native of Argentina, is Professor and Director of the Bioengineering Research Centre at the University of Leicester.

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BORGES AND MEMORY

Encounters with the Human BrainBy RODRIGO QUIAN QUIROGA

The MIT Press

Copyright © 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-262-01821-0

Contents

Foreword by María Kodama.................................................viiINTRODUCTION..................................................................11 FUNES AND OTHER CASES OF EXTRAORDINARY MEMORY...............................92 THE LIBRARY OF BABEL........................................................233 THE MAN WHO COULD NOT FORGET................................................374 LIVING IN THE PAST..........................................................515 SUBTLETIES OF MEMORY........................................................656 WHERE DO MEMORIES RESIDE?...................................................777 PRODIGIOUS MINDS............................................................1018 THE DELICATE BALANCE BETWEEN REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING.....................1179 PERCEPTION AND MEMORY.......................................................13110 NEUROPHYSIOLOGY OF VISION..................................................14511 THE JENNIFER ANISTON NEURON................................................15912 KEYS TO THOUGHT............................................................181Acknowledgments...............................................................203Index.........................................................................207

Introduction

Most people, I believe, would find it difficult to guess what a scientist does day to day. The first image that comes to mind is of an untidy, chaotic person, always lost in thought, absentminded; someone alien to the surrounding, mundane reality, who does not realize if it is raining, if it is Tuesday, if it is a national holiday, or if his bus has just passed by; someone who spends whole days filling blackboards with theories and formulas in the search of a "Eureka," a discovery that will add a bit, however tiny, to our knowledge. But this expression of Archimedes is very rare in the life of a scientist. In fact, in most cases, even after years and years of research, such a moment never arrives. Isaac Asimov, the extraordinary biochemist and science fiction writer, once said that the expression that accompanies a discovery is usually not "Eureka" but "This is funny ...". In other words, this moment of ecstasy that should get us running naked through the streets of Syracuse may end up being just a moment of doubt, an initial enigma that will be resolved only after years of research.

What is it, then, that makes scientists wander about in a universe of ideas and experimentation? It may be the search for knowledge or, in more mundane terms, simple curiosity. Nagging questions; the pressing need to figure something out and the inability to do anything else until the answer is found; the tingling feeling that a discovery may be just around the corner; the intuition that a puzzle is starting to take shape, until eventually one reaches the answer and feels the thrilling joy of understanding.

One can then ask whether scientists, embarked upon their personal quests—their quixotic endeavors—spend their time just thinking. Not really. The life of a scientist is generally more humdrum and may involve repeating an experiment for the nth time to check the validity of a result, or analyzing data in a computer to extract some additional information. A sociologist may spend a lot of time planning surveys and analyzing statistics, a biologist preparing samples and dealing with pipettes, a mathematician varying systematically the parameters of a model, and a neuroscientist recording the activity of hundreds of neurons and crunching terabytes of data. This may sound somewhat boring, but if there is a worthwhile question lurking behind it, the routine becomes fascinating, and from those quotidian tasks the scientist weaves an elaborate plot to get ever closer to the answer of the problem that has resulted in so much lost sleep.

In my own particular case, this plot has to do with the functioning of the brain (though not the whole brain, since it is impossible for a single person to encompass the knowledge gathered in even a single branch of science). And in my quest to understand different aspects of how the brain works—and more specifically of how memory, the topic of this book, works—it is rare, very rare, to come by a "Eureka." Problems are usually left open, answers usually lead to further questions, and the final solution is almost always elusive. But perhaps our obstinate perseverance may be nothing more than the knowledge that, at least subconsciously, the pleasure is not in finding the answer but in searching for it. And without blushing I dare say that my search, shared with many colleagues, may well be the most interesting of all. Thus, beyond the fact that the human brain is the most complex and elusive mystery of science, the truth is that the quest to understand the brain is ultimately the quest to understand ourselves. And although we know fairly little, most of what we do know has been discovered in the last few decades. This is the ideal time to study the brain, just as the era of Galileo and Newton was ideal to study the motion of bodies and Maxwell ' s to study electricity and magnetism.

Nowadays we have at our disposal sophisticated equipment and advanced methods to analyze massive amounts of complex data. We also have access to information that we could not have dreamed of just a couple of decades ago. What was science fiction a few years back is becoming fact at a vertiginous pace. However, in our mad dash to understand ever more about the behavior of the brain we tend to forget that this search is not exclusively ours, of researchers with sophisticated labs, but has also been undertaken by many great thinkers: from the ancient Greek philosophers to the Cartesian rationalists, the British empiricists, and the nineteenth-century pioneers of modern psychology, along with other brilliant intellectuals who defy any categorization, like Jorge Luis Borges, who reached astounding conclusions guided only by his reasoning and his prodigious imagination.

It is not uncommon for a scientist to be interested in Borges, especially if (like me) he had the good fortune to study at the Faculty of Exact Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). Deep and varied connections sprang out as we read about the aleph—the cardinality of infinity, studied in advanced calculus—about forking paths that lead to parallel universes—as in some interpretations of quantum mechanics—or about an infinite library that in the end turns out to have the same contents as a single "book of sand," whose number of pages is a continuum.

Like many others, I discovered Borges as a teenager and was fascinated by the mathematical precision with which he describes what defies every logic, with the way he starts from seemingly irrefutable premises—often reinforced by obscure or even blatantly apocryphal quotations—to lead us inexorably into unreal worlds as though we were hallucinating or dreaming, living in a fantastic realism where everything is possible and ideas rule above all else. Many years later I rediscovered a story of his, "Funes the Memorious," that had the perfect words to express the results of my research and which with astonishing clarity ended up sorting the pieces of the puzzle I had been working on. In brief, together with colleagues at Caltech and UCLA I was lucky enough to find...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: The MIT Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0262018217
• ISBN 13: 9780262018210
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar