Brain and Cognition 42, 2022 (2000) doi:10.1006/brcg.1999.1150, available online at http://www.idealibrary.

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Memory, Consciousness, and the Brain

Gianfranco Dalla Barba
U. 324 INSERM, Paris, France; and Hopital Henri Mondor, Creteil, France

The end of the second millennium has coincided with signicant progress in the understanding of human memory. Since the late 1950s, modern neuropsychological research has provided a considerable amount of data concerning the relation between mnesic phenomena and their neural correlates. Based on clinical and experimental observations, new concepts have been introduced and old concepts have been reformulated. Implicit expression of knowledge, or implicit memory (Milner, 1958; Warrington & Weiskrantz, 1968), short-term memory and working memory (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974), the distinction between semantic and episodic memory, among others, are now widely accepted notions. Indeed the very idea that memory is not a unitary system but one that reects rather the interaction of different memory systems or of different memory processes probably represents the greatest achievement of the past fty years of neuropsychological research on memory. However, the progress in the understanding of memory phenomena led to the ourishing of a number of theories and models of memory which almost invariably contain both an omission and a paradox. It is clear that any theory of memory must contain a presupposition concerning the past and its nature, since memory by denition is memory of the past. However, you can read paper after paper or book after book without nding any direct discussion or even assumption on what should be one of the very concerns in theories of memory, i.e. the nature of the past and how this is represented in our brains. The result of this omission is the paradox of the memory trace of which many theories of memory are victim. An assumption common to many old and new theories on memory is that of considering a memory as the result of the preservation of the past in the organism which remembers. Accordingly, if I now perceive an event or obAddress correspondence and reprint requests to Gianfranco Dalla Barba, M.D., Ph.D., U. 324 INSERM, Centre Paul Broca, 2 ter, rue dAlesia, 75014 Paris, France. E-mail: dallabarba@broca.inserm.fr. 20 0278-2626/00 $35.00
Copyright 2000 by Academic Press All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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ject, for example the keyboard on which I am typing, tomorrow I will be able to remember it because this image has, so to speak, been deposited in some part of my brain in the form of a memory trace. The activation of the trace, that is, its subsequent passage from a passive to an active state, will result in recollection of the event. It is easy to see that any theory which bases the possibility of recollection on the preservation of an event inside a trace contains a paradox, fruit of a misleading assumption. The misleading assumption on which these theories are based consists in believing that time can exist in things. But it should have been clear that things as such are not temporal. As such, the objects of the world are neither present, nor past, nor future, but they acquire a temporal dimension only in the presence of an agent who goes to the trouble of making them temporal. The erroneous assumption on which theories of memory are founded is directly reected in the paradox to which these theories fall victim. The paradox of the memory trace consists in seeing memory as originating in elements borrowed from the present. Let us see why. The event that I now perceive, for example, the keyboard on the table in front of me, is without doubt a present event. This event determines a modication in the equilibrium of a system, be it physical (the nervous system) or virtual (the computational level), which I call memory trace. What is the temporal nature of the modication which the event produces in the system, namely of the memory trace? Its nature is certainly present. The keyboard which I now perceive is present and if one accepts that this event produces a modication somewhere, one will have to accept that said modication will be present, and that the event represented by that modication will also be present. What happens when that event contained in the trace is recollected in memory? When the event is recollected it happens in the present, that is, as the result of the reactivation of the modication that the event caused on a physiological, biochemical, neuroanatomical, neurocibernetical, or functional level. And so it is not at all clear how memory, whose basic characteristic is memory of the past, can stem from a combination of present phenomena, perception, the conservation of the trace, and recollection. Activation of the memory trace should, if anything, coincide with a new perception of the event contained within the trace, not with its memory since the event contained in the trace was present as it ended up in the trace and continued to be so for as long as it remained enclosed in the trace. If, on the other hand, I recognize that particular event as past, this happens because I attribute a precise meaning to it, that of being past, a meaning which by denition cannot be contained in the trace since, in every moment of its existence, it has never ceased to be present. This does not mean that events do not cause modications in our brain or in our cognitive system, but these modications cannot be used to explain recollection. So, if the past, the very concrete essence of memory, can by no means be contained in a memory trace, how do we explain that memories are possi-

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ble and, more specically, how do we explain that episodic memories, i.e., the conscious recollection of an episode as past, are possible? It seems that at this point a new problem arises, the problem of consciousness. In fact, if consciousness of the past, i.e., episodic remembering, cannot be only the result of the activation of the memory trace itself, consciousness itself must contribute to generating the past. Indeed, consciousness of the past can be considered as a specic and original mode of consciousness, a mode in which consciousness addresses its object in a temporal, past framework (Dalla Barba, in press). Although some preliminary evidence in favor of this hypothesis is available (Dalla Barba, Cappelletti, Signorini, & Denes, 1997), future research will clarify the role of consciousness in mental life, its relation to memory and, possibly, its neural correlates. In order to achieve this goal we will need both a coherent and articulated concept of consciousness, and new paradigms which make possible the direct study of consciousness and of its relation to memory. One of such paradigms has already been proposed (Tulving, 1985). Based on what could be named experimental phenomenology, this paradigm has been successfully used in a considerable number of studies. Contingent to its development and, in general, to the development of experimental phenomenology in a near future, the relation between memory and consciousness will increasingly become a scientic problem and consciousness will be no longer the philosophers joy and the scientists nightmare (Tulving, 1993).
REFERENCES
Baddeley, A., & Hitch, G. J. 1974. Working memory. In G. Bower (Ed.), Recent advances in learning and motivation, (Vol. 8, pp. 4790). New York: Academic Press. Dalla Barba, G. (in press). Memory, consciousness and temporality: What is retrieved and who exactly is controlling the retrieval? In E. Tulving (Ed.), Memory, consciousness, and the brain: The Tallinn Conference. Philadelphia: The Psychology Press. Dalla Barba, G., Cappelletti, Y. J., Signorini, M., & Denes, G. 1997. Confabulation: Remembering another past, planning another future. Neurocase, 3, 425436. Milner, B. 1958. Psychological defects produced by temporal lobe excision. Research PublicationsAssociation for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease, 36, 244257. Tulving, E. 1985. Memory and consciousness. Canadian Psychology, 26, 112. Tulving, E. 1993. Varieties of consciousness and levels of awareness in memory. In A. Baddeley & L. Weiskrantz (Eds.), Attention: Selection, awareness and control (pp. 282299). New York: Oxford University Press. Warrington, E., & Weiskrantz, L. 1968. A new method of testing of long-term retention with special reference to amnesic patients. Nature, 217, 972974.