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Originally Posted by wolfgang  I kind of like the idea that memory doesn't reside in the brain per say.
However, it's also true that doctors have not found the exact spot of a brain that hold a memory. That it appears to be holographic in a way. Each bit of the brain stores content as much as all the other bits. I hope this is not misinformation.
Then, from here we can take the leap that the universe is a holographic form such that anything we take in our brain is also showing up everywhere else  ! now that's a theory, ha? |
Not each bit of brain, but many parts of the brain deal with memory. There is no one memory center of the brain. Also, it's been found that certain forgotten memories can be induced by electrical stimulation of various parts of the brain.
We definitely don't know what memory is or where it is stored, but the brain certainly plays a role.
We do know that short term memory in particular has a very strong relation to the hippocampus, which is like a half-inch-thick hollow sphere that envelops the inner parts of the brain.
Edit: The crucial point that I didn't mention is that we cannot prove that memory is stored anywhere. We can just find a correlation between memory and brain. Correlation != causation. So if the hippocampus is correlated with short term memory, we cannot actually conclude that the hippocampus
stores short term memory. To do so is to express faith in a reductionist universe for which there is equally weak evidence as there is for an emergent universe. Scientists should not make the correlation/causation fallacy, but when talking casually they do all the time. If you were to press them on the issue to make precise statements, they would agree that it is correlation they've discovered and not causation.
It is very possible that the actual memory is in the ether and the brain is simply a retrieval mechanism. Most scientists don't bother dealing with this hypothesis however, and instead
assume that the brain itself is a storage mechanism. This assumption is casually made and not precisely accurate.